invoked. The only connection that current commercial ethics has with the Christian is, as we said above, a purely formal one. The mystical individualist ethics of Christianity, which had for its supreme end another world and spiritual salvation therein, has been transformed into an individualist ethic 11 having for its supreme end (tacitly, if not avowedly), the material salvation of the individual in the commercial battle of this world. This is illustrated by a predominance amongst the commercial classes of a debased Calvinistic theology, termed Evangelicalism1, which is the only form of religion these classes can understand—the poetico-mystical element in the earlier Christianity being eliminated therefrom, and the “natural laws” of profit and loss, and the devil take the hindmost, which dominate this carnal world, being as nearly as possible reproduced into the spiritual world of its conception.
It may surprise some to be told that politics share this unreality to the full, since it is generally supposed that democracy has at last really triumphed and is now entering into its kingdom. Doubtless the political events of this century have convinced every one that change in the relations of men to each other is at hand; but before that change can come, it