English puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work was the will of God and its performance the test of grace.

The greater the energy of its performance, the greater the likelihood of prosperity; and thence it is but a step to argue that the free development of a man's industrial worth is the law of God.

Success in business, indeed, became for many a test of religious grace, and poverty the proof of God's disfavor.

Books like Steele's _Religious Tradesman_ (1684) show clearly how close is the connection.

The hostility of the English landowners to the commercial classes in the eighteenth century is at bottom the inheritance of religious antagonism.