It may be objected that it is far-fetched to assign sixteenth century Protestantism (with its English development of Puritanism) as the cause of twentieth century industrial strife. Why then did not the industrial strife develop sooner, more particularly why did it not develop in the times when the Protestant philosophy (or, if the reader prefer, the Protestant “dogma”) was far more lucidly and more intensely held? In any case, how can a system set up largely by merchants and traders be held to have caused the envy and sloth which cause and accompany our industrial strife? The answer is that Protestantism happened to appear just at the beginning of the modern increased command over nature which for three hundred years has gone on opening up new lands for colonization and at the same time has improved the technique of agriculture and increased the quantity of the products of industry. All this has resulted in three centuries of increasing expansion unparalleled in history. At the beginning of this period the Protestant dogma had been established, to the effect that a man’s private judgment in matters of religion was superior to corporate religious authority. Inevitably, such teaching bred loneliness in the soul. But, for the most part, men still felt themselves to be members one of another, because the continuous expansion had lightened the pressure of competition between classes and individuals. Any man in the more thickly settled regions who might be dissatisfied with his lot saw the frontier beckoning. Expansion, as in the twelfth century, made for a buoyant temper in the mind, but, unlike that of the twelfth century, this temper was too contemptuous of the past (because of the sixteenth century break with tradition and also because the expansion was without precedent); whereas the twelfth and thirteenth centuries felt that they were only partly reconquering the Roman order. Hence the naive faith in “progress” as such, which culminated in the late nineteenth century, and the equally naive illusion that physical science of itself would somehow make for happiness.