Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R.H. Tawney

"If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth and in the body of the Church. " Laud, "Sermon before His Majesty," June 19, 1621

The ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which were motived by changes in the texture of society and the relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their result without significance for the future. In England, as on the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages. The result was a reassertion of the traditional doctrines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their gradual retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both of economic organization and of the province of religion, and their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the storm blew and they flickered out.