without which the intricate credit relationships of modern commerce would have been impossible. It encouraged a diligence which was the driving force in establishing the commercial classes in power over a moribund aristocracy. Its religiously inspired habits of continence and temperance gave the lower classes a sense of moral dignity and a natural self-respect which they needed in challenging the pride and complacency of the aristocratic world. These puritan virtues have moreover given the whole north European world and America (which is more puritan than any nation, because here the puritan life flourished on virgin soil and remained unqualified by the vestiges of medievalism which remain firmly imbedded in the culture of even the most modern European nations) a robust vitality and moral urge which have had no small part in developing their political hegemony in the modern world. The conflict of puritan religion with the world has however resulted in the inevitable compromise between the religious ideal and the world’s primitive urges and desires. Its moral weakness lies in its naïve confidence of victory over the world and its inability to discover the relativities and qualifications which history has wrought upon its absolute. If the spiritual idealism of Jesus is the norm for Christians, the Calvinists and puritans diverged from it more seriously than they knew in the very conception of their ideal. The love and reverence for personality which is the basis of the ethics of Jesus is totally lacking in Calvinism. It knows how to create self-respect but lacks the imagination to inculcate a religious respect for others, except possibly for the respectable. Its confidence in the obvious rewards of virtue tempted it to abhor poverty and hold the poor in contempt, though they might become the helpful occasion for the exercise of that philanthropy without which the idea of Christian stewardship could not be realized. While early Calvinism had an heroic mood which would have scorned to make a concession to the selfishness of man through the sanctification of prudential ethics, its ethical theories did nevertheless lend themselves to easy appropriation by moralists who were intent upon identifying the social good with a decent selfishness. The uncompromising spirituality of the ethics of Jesus is totally lacking in Calvinism. Its moral theories were in fact derived from the Old rather than the New Testament; and there is hardly a scintilla of evidence in Calvinistic thought that the Sermon on the Mount is recorded in the scripture which it accepted as revealed finality. Its very bibliolatry was partly responsible for its non-Christian type of ethics, for through it the casual moral theories of the early Hebrews achieved the dignity of absolute truth. Lack of historical perspective in the use of the Old Testament further aggravated this error, for the real worth of the prophets was never