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The more general realization of the role of Capitalism in history has been accompanied by a second change, which, if equally commonplace, has also, perhaps, its significance. "Trade is one thing, religion is another": once advanced as an audacious novelty, the doctrine that religion and economic interests form two separate and co-ordinate kingdoms, of which neither, without presumption, can encroach on the other, was commonly accepted by the England of the nineteenth century with an unquestioning assurance at which its-earliest exponents would have felt some embarrassment. An historian is concerned less to appraise the validity of an idea than to understand its development. The effects for good or evil of that convenient demarcation, and the forces which, in our own day, have caused the boundary to shift, need not here be discussed. Whatever its merits, its victory, it is now realized, was long in being won. The economic theories propounded by Schoolmen; the fulminations by the left wing of the Reformers against usury, landgrabbing, and extortionate prices; the appeal of hard-headed Tudor statesmen to traditional religious sanctions; the attempt of Calvin and his followers to establish an economic discipline more rigorous than that which they had overthrown, are bad evidence for practice, but good evidence for thought. All rest on the assumption that the institution of property, the transactions of the marketplace, the whole fabric of society and the whole range of its activities, stand by no absolute title, but must justify themselves at the bar of religion. All insist that Christianity has no more deadly foe than the appetitus divitiarum infinitus, the unbridled indulgence of the aquisitive appetite. Hence the claim that religion should keep its hands off business encountered, when first formulated, a great body of antithetic doctrine, embodied not only in literature and teaching, but in custom and law. It was only gradually, and after a warfare not confined to paper, that it affected the transition from the status of an odious paradox to that of an unquestioned truth.
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Tawney. R.H.