The emancipation of economic relations from all ethical restraint was more or less concomitant with the Reformation movements, but it is a question how much it was causally and how much coincidentally related. Tawney[7] thinks that the growing complexity of commercial transactions invalidated the old canonical laws designed to enforce ethical standards in business, and thus made the secularization of economics inevitable even before the Reformation. Luther and Calvin were as anxious as the fathers of the medieval church to preserve moral standards in business. But they were no more ingenious than these in devising new and more flexible methods of control when the prohibition of usury and the fixation of a just price were swept away by a growing commerce which made money-lending an incident of commercial enterprise rather than a philanthropic device, and which engulfed the standards by which a just price was determined in a sea of economic relativities. Luther was completely baffled by the intricacies of the new world and could do little more than try vehemently but futilely to maintain the old prohibition against usury and insinuate meanwhile that the recently developed system of international banking was in some mysterious way related to the evil conspiracies of the papacy. Calvinism, true to its genius, was more ambitious in dealing with the problems of commerce; so much so in fact that Beza’s thunderous denunciations of covetousness prompted the Geneva Council to declare that he stirred up class hatred against the wealthy. Yet it was Calvin who finally destroyed the last vestige of medievalism in economics by justifying interest. Though his action prompted the charge that “usury was the brat of heresy,” he probably did no more than to recognize the logic inherent in the facts of a new economic development. There was no more conscious desire to emancipate commercial life from the sanctions of morality and religion in Protestantism than in the ancient church; but the preoccupation of the leaders of the Reformation with the problem of the inner life and the general temper of individualism which characterized the Protestant churches undeniably accelerated the processes of secularization. In time Adam Smith rather than Thomas Aquinas became the moral authority of the commercial world, and, whatever may have been the futile fury of the early reformers, Protestantism did finally accept the economics of laissez faire and habituated itself to a world in which vast areas or life were withdrawn not only from the influence of religiously inspired ethical ideals, but from every ethical sanction whatsoever. Thus was the present world created in which “business is business” and “politics is politics,” i.e., in which the non-moral character of two of the most important social relationships of mankind is taken for granted.