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The role of providence in the social order : an essay in intellectual history
The role of providence in the social order : an essay in intellectual history
Jacob Viner
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The essays in this book were originally presented by Professor Viner as the 1966 Jayne Lectures of the American Philosophical Society. The relationship between religious doctrines and economic theory and behavior had long interested Professor Viner, and the conclusions he discussed represented years of thoughtful study. They focus in particular on the way in which providence was used to justify existing economic and social conditions.
The author points out that providence favors trade among peoples in order to promote universal brotherhood; providence also creates social inequality because it is part of the divine plan. Providence designed a world in which commerce was necessary, in which good business benefited not only the individual, but all mankind, in which inequality in rank and income was part of the scheme of things. Why, then, the evils of over-rigid mercantilism, or selfish profiteering, of undeserved and hopeless poverty? Professor Viner shows that in discussing such questions the Fathers of the Church, the scholastics, the theologians of the seventeenth century, and the philosophers of the eighteenth laid the foundations for modern economic thought.
The author points out that providence favors trade among peoples in order to promote universal brotherhood; providence also creates social inequality because it is part of the divine plan. Providence designed a world in which commerce was necessary, in which good business benefited not only the individual, but all mankind, in which inequality in rank and income was part of the scheme of things. Why, then, the evils of over-rigid mercantilism, or selfish profiteering, of undeserved and hopeless poverty? Professor Viner shows that in discussing such questions the Fathers of the Church, the scholastics, the theologians of the seventeenth century, and the philosophers of the eighteenth laid the foundations for modern economic thought.
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1972
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Princeton University Press
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english
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123
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0691644020
ISBN 13:
9780691644028
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Princeton Legacy Library
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THE ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/26/18 11:46 AM Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/26/18 11:46 AM THE ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER AN ESSAY IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY JACOB YINER Jayne Lectures for 1966 The American Philosophical Society PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/26/18 11:46 AM Copyright © 1972 by The American Philosophical Society ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey LCC 72-184168 ISBN 0-691-01990-8 Printed in the United States of America First PRINCETON PAPERBACK Printing, 1976 The essays in this book were originally presented as the 1966 Jayne Lectures of The American Philosophical Society. They were subsequently published as Volume 90 of the Memoirs of the Society. A clothbound edition is available from The American Philosophical Society, 104 South Fifth Street, Philadelphia, Pa., 19106. Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/26/18 11:46 AM Contents PAGE Foreword by Joseph R. Strayer vii I. The Cosmic Order in the Service of Man 1 II. The Providential Elements in the Commerce of Nations. . . 27 III. The Invisible Hand and Economic Man 55 IV. The Providential Origin of Social Inequality 86 Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/14/18 10:36 PM Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/14/18 10:36 PM Foreword In 1966 Professor Viner was invited to give the Jayne Lectures of the American Philosophical Society. He had long been interested in the relationship between religious doctrines and economic theory and behavior, and in these lectures he presented some of the conclusions that he had reached after years of thoughtful study. He concerned himself especially with the way in which the idea of provi dence was used to justify existing economic and social con ditions. Providence favors trade among peoples in order to promote universal brotherhood; providence also creates social in; equality because it is part of the divine plan. These and other ideas he discussed with his usual wit and learn ing. But lectures are subject to time limitations and Pro fessor Viner could cite only small fragments of the vast body of material that he had accumulated to support his conclusions. He therefore planned to expand the lectures into a longer book and to add the footnotes that would have illustrated the peculiar and unexpected combinations of religious and economic doctrine that appear during the centuries. He spent a great deal of time on this work, but increasing ill-health forced him to slow down his activities. He died in 1970 with the book still incomplete. We are all the losers by this incompleteness. Everyone who knew Jacob Viner remembers his extraordinary knowl edge of books, his ability to find striking ideas in the most unlikely places, his mastery of many fields besides his own. He knew more history than many historians and he de lighted in giving new twists to the history of economic thought. The complete book would have touched off a long series of articles and doctoral dissertations. But we would be equally the losers if the lectures were not published at all. They do distill the results of long and Brought to you by | University of Texas at El Paso Authenticated Download Date | 10/18/18 12:21 AM viii FOREWORD thorough research; they do present ideas that Viner wanted us to discuss. They are incomplete only in the sense of being less inclusive and less well documented than the author wanted them to be. In themselves they are a finished and a polished piece of writing. A master has stated his conclusions; it will be profitable for us to seek his sources and to try to retrace his reasoning. JOSEPH R. STRAYER Princeton University Brought to you by | University of Texas at El Paso Authenticated Download Date | 10/18/18 12:21 AM THE ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER Brought to you by | University of Texas at El Paso Authenticated Download Date | 10/18/18 12:21 AM Brought to you by | University of Texas at El Paso Authenticated Download Date | 10/18/18 12:21 AM I. The Cosmic Order in the Service of Man I AM PRESENTING these lectures to you as merely an exer cise in the history of ideas. The particular set of ideas which I will examine relates to the role of providence in the social order as seen, primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by intellectuals in general, and by theologians, philosophers of various species, and economists in particu lar. Some of these ideas no doubt had a substantial influ ence on the course of history in these centuries, but as to this I venture no claims. It has been said of the ideas of political philosophers and economists that almost on their own they have ruled the world. Perhaps so. In any case, I have a professional vested interest in believing it to be so. But most of the thinkers I will be dealing with in these lectures would have regarded as impious the idea that the ideas of men, even of men as important as themselves, ruled the world as a final cause. They would have insisted, instead, that it was providence that ruled the world. For the moment, I will defer paying my respects to the role of providence and look only at secondary causes. There is a theory, which is a quasi-religion for some men and is regarded by perhaps a majority of modern intel lectuals as having a large measure of validity, which holds that it is the material circumstances in which men live, and especially the social structure and economic institutions of society which govern the behavior of men, and via practice, shape their thought, including even their thoughts about providence. Karl Marx, in 1843, applied this thesis to reli gion in his most dogmatic manner: "religious misery is, on one hand, the expression of actual misery, and, on the other, a protest against actual misery. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the kindliness of a heartless world, the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the people's opium." Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 2 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER A rival theory is that it is the great men who determine the course of history, the men of action in the material world, the great thinkers in the world of ideas. It is, I suppose, the responsibility of social historians to decide between the competing theories as to the causes and con sequences of the ideas which men hold. In any case, as I am not a social historian, I do not accept it as an immediate responsibility of mine, and I will endeavor to remain strictly within the narrow and modest sphere of the history of ideas. This, as I understand it, accepts no responsibilities except those imposed by the standards of scholarly objectivity, whose essence can be summarized in two precepts: first, be as neutral as you can in reporting other men's ideas, yielding neither to favorable nor to unfavorable bias, nor to unmotivated carelessness; second, bear in mind that this, even an approach to accuracy in reporting, is an arduous and difficult art, calling for unintermitting self-discipline. Objectivity is not an all-purpose virtue. One can, I sup pose, pay a higher price for it in surrendered values than it is worth in some circumstances. As it operates in the history of ideas it can result in a lifeless, bloodless, anaemic aca demic discipline, one which isolates ideas from human minds and passions and treats them as a species of intel lectual atoms, as particles of thought which emerged from nothingness and will return to it, causeless and devoid of consequences. It may have no function except that of pro viding the historian with a vacation from true history of man's thought or providing him with a vocation which furnishes him with subsistence and occasional fun, but leaves him free from the need of making moral or religious or political or economic judgments as part of his profes sional task. It would be libelous to assert that this is a fair account of how in fact most historians of ideas operate. With minor qualifications, however, I confess that it comes reasonably close to how I have tried to operate when I have Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 3 practiced the art of Ideengeschichte. In the past I have for the most part been otherwise engaged, in trying to generate ideas of my own, or to improve the morals of others, or either to help rescue contemporary society from the sad cultural predicament I am told it is in, or to protect society from its would-be rescuers, or to solve technical economic problems. The only assistance I was then conscious of deriving from such knowledge as I had of the history of ideas was a lesson it taught me with a very close approach to certainty. Outside the quite extensive area where tautol ogy rightly rules, certainty is beyond the reach of man, but for effectiveness in the life of action the false assurance that one has attained certainty is easy to achieve and is a great help and a great comfort. It is possible however, to make more of the history of ideas than the mechanical compilation of annals or chron icles of autonomous ideas, all free, equal, and of no visible interest except to those perhaps mythical scholars, the oldfashioned antiquarians. In relation to the outside world, including the spheres of thought which use as raw ma terial particular ideas, there are many kinds of ideas and, with effort, the kinds can in practice be distinguished more or less precisely from each other. Depending upon time and place, also, the same idea may be performing in differ ent roles. Given the appropriate knowledge, the observer may be able in any particular set of circumstances to identify the role which is dominant for a particular idea, and thus relate the idea to the thought, the doctrines, the passions and hopes, the material circumstances, of man kind in that time and place. The idea may be operating functionally, that is, it may be influencing the behavior of those who are possessed of or by it, and thus may have practical consequences. The idea may find use only as a part of traditional rote, not related logically to its intel lectual context, and now playing only a ceremonial role as Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 4 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER a residue of the functional thought of a distant past. The idea may have an aesthetic role, as decoration or orna mentation for an argument or thesis, or as raw material for the poet or dramatist. The idea may be an implement of play, the tennis-ball, so to speak, of an intellectual game which can have strict rules designed to provide standards of skill for players and spectators. Finally, the idea, though dead and functionless, may be an object of innocent curios ity, like uncommon pebbles or ancient artifacts which offer scope for the acquisition of connoisseurship. It is on the basis of some blend of these roles that I accept the history of ideas as a legitimate avocation for myself, but I hope that my audience, with its wider range of skills and interests, and no doubt its more profound convictions, will find in these lectures more solid justification for listening to them than I have the presumption to claim on their behalf. Providence, as an intelligent being, external to nature but governing nature, is an idea common to most religions. The term, or its equivalent in various languages, is often used also to signify the pattern in which that supernatural being conducts his operations. I will use it in both senses. In the Christian tradition, especially perhaps in the period I am in these lectures specially concerned with, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a distinction is made on the one hand between "general providence," or God operating through secondary causes, or through the "laws of nature," and on the other hand, "particular" or "peculiar" or "special" or "extraordinary" providence, or God operat ing directly, either in a special manipulation of the laws of nature, or without reference to the laws of nature, or in direct suppression of them. Somewhere within the range of "particular providence," but not as a rule regarded as em bracing its whole range, come "miracles." "Secondary causes" signify the operation of the laws of nature. "Final causes" signify the operations of providence, whether diBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 5 rect, without the mediation of the laws of nature, or in direct, with the mediation of these laws. All causation is thus immediately or ultimately final, except where there is recognized to be a field of operations for the devil, for demons, for false gods, and for witches, sorcerers, evil spirits, and magicians, all these last regarded as agents of the devil. My particular concern in these lectures is with ideas con cerning the role of providence in the temporal social order of mankind. Expressly or by implication in the JudeoChristian Scriptures, as also in the religious thought of ancient Greece and Rome, there is a special relationship be tween providence and this earth, and between providence and the human inhabitants of this earth, or of a portion of them, a chosen people, or the portion of mankind which a special revelation has reached, or the faithful among the latter. A good deal of early theological doctrine, Christian and non-Christian, however, was not expressly anthropocentric, or not exclusively so, and was concerned with the relations of providence to the universe as a whole, to this earth as a whole, and to all of its organic life. It was in this area where, by virtue of new observations and dis coveries, apparent discrepancies between Biblical texts and observed or reasonably inferrable facts first became impor tant. The first stages of providential doctrine, therefore, gave extensive attention to the relations of providence to the cosmic order, to the physical order. Social thought was primitive and scanty, and while Christianity continued to be a minority and a persecuted cult, without a share in government, it concentrated its thought about humanity on the relations of the indivdual to God and on the City of God which was in prospect, rather than on the problems of com munal life in the earthly cities of sinful men. The general framework of providentialist doctrine thus was set initially largely in terms of the relation of God to the Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 6 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER physical order of the cosmos he had created, and on the path to immortal life he had established for mankind. Ad miration of the beauties, the regularities, and the mag nificence of the cosmic order was primarily a religious act, an act of veneration of God's majesty, and not, as it later sometimes became, an expression of gratitude for temporal benefits which mankind in general derived from the cosmic order. In the state of knowledge of nature of the early Chris tians, the account of the cosmic order derivable from Gene sis did not conflict with what their naked and untrained eyes could perceive, and presumably left most of them untroubled by doubts as to the reliability of that account. St. Augustine, however, warned the Christians of his time not to make themselves laughable to sophisticated Greeks by presenting their naive notions about matters of fact relating to natural science as resting on the sacred writings when to the Greeks such notions were in direct conflict with propositions which they regarded as demonstrably true on the basis of reason and experience. St. Augustine's primary concern was apparently not to improve the understanding of nature by rank-and-file Christians. Nor is it at all clear that he was conceding that Genesis, properly interpreted, could not be reconciled with the latest findings of Greek science. He did, however, make it reasonably clear that he believed that Genesis was not to be read literally as a reliable treatise on scientific matters. Christians, he said, should be prudent, restrained, and if possible well-informed in using the Scriptures for exposition of matters on which scientific testimony was relevant and available; if they acted otherwise, it would impair their efficacy as expounders of the Christian faith to the unconverted. I have failed to find that this advice of St. Augustine had any direct in fluence on later theologians or ecclesiastics. In any case, it seems to be the fact that it was those branches of the ChrisBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC OBDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 7 tian faith which departed most widely from the Augustinian tradition who were most receptive to innovations in science and went furthest in accommodating their theology to the findings of scientists. The early Christians were largely recruited from among the poorer classes. There was little occasion for them to be grateful to a kind providence which showered them with temporal blessings. In any case, it was not worldly ease and prosperity which they were taught to expect from Chris tianity, but hope for happiness in a future life. The doc trines of the Fall of Man and of the Flood, and of their adverse consequences for the material state of mankind on this earth and even for the physical state of the earth itself, called for a pessimistic and not an optimistic view of the relations of the physical cosmos to man's temporal welfare. What has been called the "Christian optimism" of early Christianity was in any normal sense of the term "optimism" only such with respect to the prospects for an idyllic afterlife, and even these prospects were often held to be dim for many, perhaps for most, of the believers. The new optimism of the seventeenth century and later, which was to have an important impact on social thought, was in part a turning away from the Augustinian tradition in Christianity and from the doctrine of original sin. It was in part even a turning away, in the guise of "deism," from revealed religion. In the Old Testament there are occasional references to the benefits man derives from the firmament, the "heavens"; they provide mankind with rain, with the suc cession of the seasons, with the alteration of cold and warmth, and with favorable winds. St. Paul (Romans, 1.20) cited the understanding that man gets of the nature of God from what is visible of the universe that he created, and St. Augustine later relied heavily on this text to justify inferences as to the nature of God from what we know of Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 8 ROLE OF PROVTOENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER the universe he created. The appeal to the order that reigns throughout the universe as evidence of design and there fore of the existence of the gods had been made in Greece, at least as early as the seventh century H.C. as an argument against the doctrine that the universe was the product of chance. The use of the argument from design for demonstrating the existence of God does not appear to have become wide spread until the seventeenth century. It, of course, consti tuted the Via Quinta of the famous effort of St. Thomas Aquinas to prove the existence of God philosophically; that is, without appeal to revelation. Until, however, there existed widespread skepticism or doubt about the authority of the Scriptures, there was not much occasion for seeking support for belief in God's existence from philosophy or science or human reason. The first of the great threats to the credibility of the Biblical account of the origin and mode of operation of the physical universe emanating from scientific discovery was, of course, the Copernican revolution in astronomy in the sixteenth century. The establishment of the theory that the earth rotated daily on its axis and that the planets, in cluding the earth, revolved in orbits around the sun, seemed to some to constitute a major rejection of the geocentric in terpretation of the universe which the Scriptures ex pounded; the heliocentric doctrine threatened the authority of a theology based on a historical account of miraculous events occurring in a small corner of a small planet in an infinite universe. Development of the argument from de sign as a support of belief in the existence of an all-powerful supernatural being became for the first time since the estab lishment of the Christian faith an urgent necessity for those believers who were acquainted with the progress of sci entific thought. The Copernican shock to traditional theology was of Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 9 course only the first of a continuing series. Geological dis coveries which tended to cast doubt on the credibility of the world, and still more of the universe, being created in six days and on the age of the world being limited to something under 6,000 years; the beginnings of scrutiny of the inner harmony and the historical authenticity of the Biblical texts in the form in which they had been handed down; much later, the appearance of evolutionary theories and the gradual accumulation of scientific evidence which seemed to support them, all of these were additional landmarks of the growth of speculation and evidence threatening the authority of Scriptures with respect to the physical nature of the universe, and even casting a measure of doubt on its over-all authority. Except for express evolutionary doctrine, whose day was still to come, it was the formidable task of the orthodox theology of the seventeenth century to meet these various challenges to its validity. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries met these chal lenges to traditional beliefs in a variety of ways. The easiest way was to ignore them, or perhaps more precisely, to remain ignorant of them; this was in fact the path taken by many, automatically by the unlearned, more deliberately by others. It would be interesting to know, for instance, how extensive and how protracted was the failure on the part of men of some intellectual status to show in their references to astronomical matters any awareness of what Copernicus, or later Galileo, had said on these matters. I am sure that the experts could readily find instances of such lags exceeding a century. Another way was for ecclesiastics, in the interest of protecting their flocks from disturbance of their traditional beliefs, to coerce or frighten scientists into deferment of publication of their findings, or to extort public retraction of their findings, or even to burn a scientist or two at the stake "pour encourager Ies autres." I have encountered the opinion expressed by a historian Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 10 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER of science that persecution of the scientists did not in fact retard significantly the progress of "science," that is, of sci entific propositions which present-day scientists accept as established. That may be so. To make it plausible to me, however, I would have to be persuaded either that "true" science began only yesterday, or that many scientists had a subconscious craving for martyrdom so that the risk of persecution operated as a stimulus instead of a deterrent to dangerous inquiry, or that we possess some scientific technique for discovering the quantity and quality of the scientific inquiries whose results were never disclosed or of inquiries which were abandoned before completion be cause of fear of persecution. On the law of chances, I should think that the constraints on scientific investigation and publication must have operated to retard the dissemina tion both of some measure of scientific nonsense and error and some measure of valuable knowledge. Another way of meeting the new challenges to traditional beliefs arising from new scientific discoveries was to fight the innovators with their own weapons; that is, to expose their scientific error, and to find new scientific supports for old doctrines. This was an important activity in seven teenth- and eighteenth-century England for men of preten sions to scientific expertise. Much nonsense written in the language of science resulted therefrom. But it seems also that some genuine contributions to knowledge also resulted, per accidentem, from these investigations. In any case, there seems to be no law of nature which guarantees that the outcome of investigation or experiment carried on with pious bias will not be new and valuable knowledge. The most important way, however, in which theologians adjusted themselves to scientific innovations was to adapt, or to use the technical term, to "accommodate," their theol ogy to the new information. The most orthodox way of Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 11 doing so was to apply the traditionally highly elastic and traditionally respectable art of exegesis to the Biblical texts so as to blunt or eliminate any contradiction by these texts, when taken literally, of new information whose claims to validity it was difficult or even for good theological reasons undesirable to impugn. In England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, moreover, there was being expounded a doctrine of so-called "progressive revelation," a term which was used in several different senses. In one sense, it merely liberalized the scope of orthodox exegesis; it treated revelation as immutable, but held that there could be pro gressive understanding of it. In another sense, the most common one, progressive revelation signified the historical progress from the Old Testament to the New, with a later text canceling in effect an earlier one with which it was in actual or seeming conflict. This was a new formulation of what had been orthodox doctrine from the Christian Fathers. A third meaning of the term, however, involved a more-or-less general license to reject particular Biblical texts instead of merely reinterpreting them, for it postulated the possibility and even probability that new revelation had occurred since the age of the Apostles, that there may indeed have been a continuing revelation, which went be yond the textual contents of the Bible, however interpreted. For Roman Catholicism, the Church was the exclusive authoritative custodian of the truth, which had when needed infallible access to new light and exclusive authority to validate it, and had never committed itself to the text of the Scriptures and to reason as its sole resource. For it, therefore, the doctrine of progressive revelation in any of its meanings would not have been revolutionary or dangerous doctrine. In the nineteenth century, in fact, something very close to it was formally expounded within the Church, first by Jean-Adam Moehler in Germany, and later by Cardinal Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 12 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER Newman in England, under the label of "development," and seems to have received wide acceptance in Catholic circles. In Protestantism the situation was different. It had no central church authority as the custodian of doctrine. It made no claims to continuing ecclesiastical access to direct inspiration. It put great emphasis on the rights of indi vidual judgment as to what was true doctrine. Enthusiasti cally followed, the doctrine of progressive revelation in the third sense I have distinguished—license to reject particular Biblical text instead of merely reinterpreting them—would have opened the way to undisciplined acceptance of inno vations in theology. Incidentally, it could in effect have operated to remove all barriers to accommodation of doc trine to new discoveries in science, or to new insights in ethics. It obtained some measure of explicit acceptance in both Anglicanism and Dissent. It is implied in much of English eighteenth-century theological writing. But it never seems to have become "orthodox" in any Protestant religious body with old institutional antecedents. What was probably the most important factor in facilitat ing accommodation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England between theology and science was a marked shift of emphasis in the theology of both Anglicanism and Dis sent from Biblical texts to "natural theology" or to deism, with reason and sentiment in both cases offered as the bases for belief. This shift had many roots: the influence of the Enlightenment in general; disillusionment on humanitarian grounds with much of the Augustinian tradition; the de velopment of a secular ethics resting on human experience instead of traditional dogma, and so forth. "Natural theology" was not an innovation. It had been freely accepted in Catholicism from at least the late Middle Ages as a supplement to and reinforcement of revealed doctrine. It found early acceptance in Anglicanism. From Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 13 1660 on it was the major substance of sermons and treatises in English non-Calvinist Dissent. Although in English theology also, natural theology was in principle only a sup plement to and not a corrective of revealed doctrine, in much of eighteenth-century English theological writing the "natural" theology is much more prominent than the "re vealed" theology. "Deism" is difficult to define. The word was more often used as an epithet by those hostile to it than as an acceptable label by those friendly to it. Two species of deists can be distinguished: first, those who in their writings systematically abstracted from revelation, or made only token appeals to it, but never explicitly rejected it as un authentic or of little weight; second, those, sometimes called "critical deists," who more or less openly rejected revealed doctrine, and were suspected, sometimes rightly, as not regarding themselves as Christians. As between moral theologians, non-critical deists, and critical deists, it is rarely easy to be sure of proper classification of any par ticular individual. Deists were, in fact, often suspected not only of being non-Christians but of being atheists. But if there were any authentic atheists of any consequence in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century England, or Scotland, they were so secretly, and their secret has been kept. I shall for the time being disregard the Calvinists, as well as Augustinians who did not accept the Calvinist label, for they represent a special case with respect both to their providential doctrines and their attitudes towards science, and therefore can be most conveniently treated separately. As for the others, what basis existed for tension between their religious beliefs and the findings of scientists? As I see it, there were only two that were of major importance, not only for thinking about the physical order of the universe but also for thinking about its moral and social order. Believers in the full authority of Biblical texts, as literally interpreted, even when these texts expressly or by implicaBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 14 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER tion involved propositions about the physical nature of the universe or of any part of it, would be profoundly disturbed by reports of observations by scientists which were in obvi ous contradiction of such propositions. In practice, as far as intellectuals were concerned, this affected chiefly a mi nority, and apparently a steadily shrinking one, of conserva tive Anglicans; other Anglicans could "accommodate" without embarrassment to most new scientific knowledge by resort to established methods of exegesis of Biblical texts. All believers, even if critical deists are included un der this designation, would object to propositions express ing or implying the non-existence of a ruling providence which was in some significant sense sovereign over the uni verse. To many believers, including deists, any account of the universe, or of any portion of it, which pictured it both as not having had a definite time of origin and as being selfoperating would seem a denial of any role to providence, and therefore as being offensive on religious grounds. If this is accepted, and if we continue to defer considera tion of Calvinist thought, it is misleading to speak of ten sions between religious beliefs and scientific beliefs as to the physical nature of the universe as if they were clear-cut tensions between, on the one hand, the thinking of profes sional theologians and, on the other hand, the thinking of men addicted to speculation about and investigation of natural phenomena. In the first place, these were often the same men, so that whatever tension was present was in ternal. In the second place, the Genesis account of the crea tion of the world and of its subsequent mode of operation was defended, and was rejected, by both professional theologians and professional scientists. The burden of de fense, in fact, was too difficult technically to be prudently undertaken by theologians who were merely theologians. It was predominantly persons with pretensions at least to professional competence as scientists, both clerics and layBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 15 men, who assumed that burden. In the third place, there was dispute about the manner in which scientific findings should be presented, in which professional theologians and scientists were participants together on both sides of the controversy. Such dispute did not necessarily involve dif ference either in religious beliefs or in the religious implica tions of the findings of scientists. It could be primarily a dispute about professional manners. Many scientists protested that their investigations would be hampered if in their scientific work and in the form in which they presented their findings they would be under obligations at every step to trace the sequence of causes from the secondary or immediate causes they were dealing with all the way back to the ultimate or final cause. Many other scientists, on the other hand, after saying what they found to say about the mode of operation of secondary causes indulged freely in dicta or in speculation about the links between the secondary causes and the final cause, or causes. Many pious persons, including scientists, were fearful lest concentration on secondary causes without reference to final causes would give the impression that God was an absent God, who perhaps had once created the universe but, if so, thereafter left it to its own devices as a self-operating machine. Some of them, moreover, saw in the concentration of many scientists on the "order" and regularity of natural phenomena, on the search for "laws of nature," the regrettable result that the general public would interpret their findings in such a manner as to im pugn the sovereignty of God, and to leave no room for intermittent or continuous interventions of providence, in cluding both interventions to support the regularity of operation of the laws of nature and interventions by way of miracles to bring about their temporary and partial suspen sion. But once more, these were concerns of some scientists as well as of some theologians. Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 16 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER Some of the turns which discussion of the relations of theology with science took can be conveniently illustrated by the history of the metaphor of God as a watchmaker, or earlier, as a clockmaker. Its first use has been attributed to a number of writers: among them, Paley, Bolingbroke, Boyle, Sir Walter Raleigh, in England; Fontenelle, Des cartes, on the Continent. It goes much further back, how ever. I can vouch for two fourteenth-century uses of it. It has been attributed to Epictetus. It is to be found in Cicero, not an anachronism, I hasten to say, if any time-measuring device is covered by the term "clock." Its main function has been to illustrate the doctrine that the world, or the uni verse, by the regularity and order of its operations, demon strates that it is, like a clock, the product of an intelligent designer, with the clockmaker representing God. It can thus be used as support for an argument for the existence or the skill of God. It can also be used to illustrate the man ner of operation of providence with respect to the world, but here it can give rise to serious questions. Isaac Newton gave a picture of a natural order working with great regularity and efficiency. It had one flaw, how ever; it needed an occasional special intervention of God to keep it in order. For his friend, Richard Bentley, as for others, this concession that the world once created was not completely self-operating thereafter, but remained de pendent upon God, was a necessary and convincing barrier to mechanistic explanations of the universe which left no further role for God once he had created it. To Leibnitz the Newtonian concession of the necessity for intermittent or periodic intervention by God to support the maintenance of order and regularity in the cosmos was an affront to the workmanship of God in his original design of it. God, he conceded, did make particular interventions, that is perform miracles. This he did, however, not to meet the needs of the physical order but from considerations of Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC OBDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 17 grace. In a letter commenting on the system of Newton and his followers, Leibnitz remarked: "According to this doc trine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time. Otherwise it would cease to go. God had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion." Most of the English Newtonians of the eighteenth cen tury quietly omitted from their systems any express pro vision, such as Newton had made, for occasional provi dential interventions to keep the cosmos in order. Like Leibnitz they preferred a perpetual motion account of the order of nature. But unanimity on this issue has never prevailed, unless our modern scientists have reached it among themselves. Until at least the end of the eighteenth century, in any case, men were not agreed as to whether providence was an abstaining or an intervening one, whether nature did or did not need help from outside itself in order to maintain its order and regularity, and even whether, with or without the aid of providence, nature was in fact completely orderly and regular. It is interesting that of two contributors to the Jesuit Journal de Trevoux, one in 1703 and the other in 1728, both of them using the clock metaphor, one of them professed a preference for the Leibnitzian system of a non-intervening providence, while the other argued that even more irregularity in the opera tion of the universe than Newton conceded would be required if God were to have adequate scope for free exercise of his sovereignty and expression of his tempera ment. Religious thought seems always to have had a natural tendency to find a special place for man in the universe as designed and ruled by providence, that is, to be anthropo morphic. Less universally, but often, it has throughout the ages attributed to man a favored place in the thought of God, not only in the provision of a blissful heaven for the afterlife of such men as receive God's saving grace, but also Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 18 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER in the blessings flowing to man from providence in his life on this earth. This I shall label the "optimistic" strain in religious thought. There was also a pessimistic strain, to which I have already had occasion to refer, and to which I shall return later in this lecture. At this point I shall deal with the optimistic strain, as evidenced by the citation of special benefits flowing to man from a physical universe providentially designed, although not necessarily exclu sively designed, to serve mankind in his life on this earth. It seems somewhat paradoxical that the optimistic strain in the Christian tradition grew in strength and reached its greatest dimensions after rather than before the heliocentric system replaced in the minds of at least intellectually sophisticated men the geocentric system which had uni versally been accepted from ancient times, and which is dominant in the Scriptures. "The heliocentric system," Cassirer has written, "deprived man of his privileged condi tion. He became, as it were, an exile in the infinite uni verse." "Man," another author has recently written, "has now lost the illusion that the earth [i.e., man's temporal home] occupies a central and privileged place in the cos mos." This may be true of sophisticated and secularized scientists. I see few traces of evidence that it represents accurately the feelings and beliefs of the mass of mankind in the post-Copernican ages of belief, or even that it would be confirmed today by an objectively designed question naire answered by that substantial proportion of mankind in the western world which still maintains affiliations with religious institutions. These two writers, and the many others who have made similar generalizations, underesti mate, I believe, the tough shell with which nature, or per haps providence, has endowed the mind of man so that it resists stubbornly the undermining of its inherited beliefs by the progressive accumulation of scientific knowledge which rebuts ancient notions of the physical nature of the Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 19 cosmos. Hobbes was once rebuked for thinking that he could make and break monarchies by geometry. If we are prudent, we should perhaps guard against overestimating the power of astronomical knowledge over men's minds and behavior. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in any case, it was for many men psychologically impossible to believe that God did not constantly have man in his providential care, and that the physical order of the cosmos was not one of the tools he had designed to serve that purpose. The period in fact abounded, as never before, and perhaps never since, in attempts to demonstrate the manner in which the cosmos served man, much of it written by men with as good claims to be regarded as scientists as any men of their time. Many of these writings today engender chiefly smiles on the part even of laymen ignorant with regard to science, and I suppose that, if today's accredited scientists were to read them, which I am sure they rarely do, they would in the main respond with boisterous laughter. But I am engaged in a venture in objective history, not in an exercise in value judgments, and I know that this literature, while it did arouse some covert ridicule from a few contemporaries, was on the whole warmly received, often ran into many editions, was translated into the leading languages of the western world, and was still being re printed in the nineteenth century. The demonstration of the benefits to mankind flowing from the physical structure and mode of operation of the universe external to our sphere was perhaps the most diffi cult of the tasks undertaken by those who expounded in anthropocentric terms the skill of God's workmanship. Some points could be made easily. It was from the heavens that the nourishing rains came, the rotation of day and night, warmth and coolness when needed by pastures and crops, and so forth. The beauty of the skies brought pleaBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 20 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER sure to the observant human beings. Even the occasional disturbances of the normal regularity of the outer spheres were often considered particular providences to serve man kind's needs. Philo of Alexandria had already in the first century A.D. shown one way to interpret irregular occur rences, whether on earth or above. Storms, earthquakes, pestilences, served as needed purges of the wickedness of men, and incidentally benefited in various ways those who were not their victims. Some of the early Christian Fathers provided the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers on the beneficence of providence with much usable ma terial. Increase Mather in New England expounded the serviceability to mankind of the signs in the heavens. These gave man awareness of the passage of time and upon occa sion acted as special warnings that important events were imminent. He interpreted the eclipse in Boston in August, 1672, as evidence that nature shared with Harvard the grief at the death of President Chauncey. Bishop William King, a pioneer contributor to the systematic literature of theodicy, or the optimistic justification to man of the ways of providence, had argued, late in the seventeenth century, that without "peculiar providences" there would be no use in prayer. Edmund Law, his editor, pointed out that this could be used against the preestablished-harmony doctrine of Leibnitz, which denied the need for particular provi dences to support the normal course of nature. By this time Leibnitz was no longer there to reply, but his answer could have been that he could adhere to his doctrine without con ceding the uselessness of prayer by regarding prayer as a method for inducing God to exercise special graces outside of and with no influence on the regular order of nature. One should not expect to find much in the literature of the period on what service to mankind could be rendered by such spheres as were so distant from this earth that even with the aid of the telescope they could only be dimly perBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 21 ceived. In any case, after some search, my failure to find such material has been practically complete. One imagina tive writer, Robert Jenkin, writing in 1700, did speculate that if it were to be found that some planets were habitable but not actually inhabited, this should not be taken as evi dence that in the design of providence they were not in tended to serve mankind. For they might be designed, if mankind had continued in innocency, as places for colonies to remove men to as the world should be increased, either in reward to those that had excelled in virtue and piety, to entertain them with the prospect of new and better worlds, and so by degrees, to advance them in proportion to their deserts, to the height of bliss and glory in heaven; or as a necessary reception for men (who would then [that is, before the Fall of Man] have been immortal) after the earth had been full of inhabitants. . . . And in the meantime, being placed at their respective distances, they do by their several motions contribute to keep the world at a poise, and the several parts of it at an equilibrium in their gravitation upon each other, by Sir Isaac Newtons principles. Isaac Watts, the hymn writer, incidentally seeking a pur pose that could be served by all the misery in the world resulting from original sin, suggested that such misery might be acting as a useful lesson to populations of other planets. This is the only instance I know of a writer dis cussing possible flows of benefits from this earth outwards. The exponents of an optimistic providentialism pos sessed, or could acquire, a much greater stock of factual data, of hypotheses, and of plausible conjectures in their search for evidence of design favorable to man, when they studied man's immediate physical environment than when they studied the stars. They did exploit the resources of knowledge then available to them in the disciplines of geol ogy, botany, zoology, anatomy, physical geography, and so on, and they worked systematically to acquire new knowledge, for both its own sake and to serve their pious Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 22 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER purposes. Some used their findings to defend, usually selec tively, the account of the physical universe given in Gene sis. All inquirers claimed to have discovered new evidence of God's skill as a designer of the universe, and of the eminent fitness of this design to serve the needs of man. For those who accepted Genesis with some approach to literal interpretation, looking at man's physical environ ment through rose-tinted spectacles would not have been appropriate. According to Genesis, man because of his sin fulness was to live on this earth subject to various penalties impairing not only his social relations but also his physical environment. Most of the providential writers, however, managed either to interpret the effects of the fall of man in mitigated fashion or largely or wholly to disregard the doctrine of the fall and all or most of the traditional elabora tion of the consequences of original sin. The scientific writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, with the exception of those of a small group of authors, mostly English, who were largely treated by their contemporaries as morbid pessimists and "enthusiasts," were overwhelm ingly optimistic in intent and in the character of their find ings. They found evidences of design wherever they looked, and to a large extent they presented these evidences as demonstrating that the design was such as to be beneficial to mankind in its life on earth. If in particular instances they experienced failure to find such evidence, they rarely reported it. The kinds of evidence of design the scientists most ear nestly searched for and were most successful in finding were the fitness of physical environment to the vegetable and animal life existing there, the fitness of organic struc ture to its function, and finally the serviceability of all this to the needs of mankind. Only rarely did they encounter skeptical questions, sometimes coming from rival scientists who had their own collections of evidence of design. Were, Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 23 for instance, particular physical environments designed for the convenience of particular plant or animal life, or did the plants and animals wander in search of environments fit for their needs? One type of objection was common; what was the virtue of the fitness of a forest to the needs of an animal dangerous to man, or what the vktue of topographi cal or climatic conditions fit for the propagation of insects pernicious to animals or to man? One pattern of answer ap pealed to the chain-of-beings doctrine, which pointed to the virtues of variety—that is, no missing links in the chain —and plenitude—that is full quantitative representation of each link. With the aid of the chain-of-beings doctrine the existence of pernicious insects could be reconciled with the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds; after all, these insects also had claims on providence. Or their existence could be justified on the ground of their consti tuting the food of other animals, or of their beauty. F. C. Lesser, author of a book on insects with the interesting title of lnsecto-Theologia, first published in 1738, with many subsequent editions and translations, in one chapter heralded even "the devastations made by insects" as "so many marks of the power, the justice, the wisdom, and even of the goodness of God." But without any explanation of his change of approach, his immediately following chapter was an essay on "The Proper Means of Exterminating In sects." Anyone who examines this type of literature, how ever, will be forced to acknowledge that its authors when challenged to reconcile what were on their face apparently extreme contradictions, would rarely be at a loss for in genious solutions adequate to satisfy a vast reading public determined to accept the doctrine of a wise, omnipotent, and benevolent providence. As I shall have occasion in a subsequent lecture to argue, optimistic providentialism played a major role in the fash ioning of the social thought of the eighteenth century. The Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 24 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER theological foundations of the doctrine, however, were mainly such as to lead to a static instead of a dynamic or an evolutionary theory of the nature of the universe. This applied also to the "scientific" evidence in support of opti mistic providentialism accumulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The special association, in the minds of modern scholars, of eighteenth-century thought with the idea of progress can be supported only by concentrating on writers of the period who either failed to construct a harmonious system or were a minority of outsiders, heretics of one species or another, who accepted little of the pre vailing providential doctrine of the period except the one proposition that the order and regularity perceivable in the universe could be explained only as the product of design by an intelligent being. I should point out that, while there is no difficulty in dis covering instances in the scientific literature of the period of what now seems extraordinarily naive credulity in find ing providential fitnesses of natural phenomena to human needs, some modern accounts of the extent of such naivete should be treated with caution. It was the practice of some anonymous wits of the period, especially in France, to in vent fantastic examples of such fitnesses and attribute them falsely to particular providentialists. I am doubtful, for instance, that there can be traced back to a genuine text of a scientific adherent of providentialism any of the following examples which have been widely used to indicate the ab surd lengths to which the doctrine was then carried by men of stature: that the variety of shades of green in the land scape had been designed to rest the eyes of observers; that the seacoasts had been so arranged as to facilitate the en trance of ships into ports; that great rivers had been so located as to pass by and thus serve the great cities that were in time to arise; that the melon had been given many sides so as to facilitate its being eaten en famille. It is safe, Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN 25 I think, to take these examples as the fabrications of ir reverent cynics who had no pious scruples as to where to seek their fun. Finally, I must now say something to support my belief that the optimistic providentialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not shared by those in the Augustinian tradition whether Protestant or Catholic. For them the doctrines of the Fall of Man, the curse of Adam, the second Fall of Man and the Flood, were insurmountable barriers to acceptance of optimistic pictures of the destiny of man while on this earth. I know of no evidence that any of the strict Augustinians in English or Scottish or Dutch or Genevese Calvinism, or any of the Jansenists, participated in the search for evidences of the activity of a benevolent providence in the physical nature of the earth. Their stress was on the majesty, the omnipotence, the sovereignty of God, not on his benevolence to man while he Uved in sin on this earth. There is recent literature of some dimensions purporting to show that there was a special affinity, at least in England, between Calvinism, or Puritanism, and science in the second half of the seventeenth century and later. What skepticism I have found as to the validity of this thesis turns chiefly on whether scientific achievement was exclusively Protestant or Calvinist. I would concede that if any edu cated Englishman in the seventeenth century was austere and sober in his mode of life, believed that salvation was to be sought through activity serviceable to mankind on this earth rather than by monastic contemplation or perform ance of ecclesiastical ceremonies, he was more likely to engage in the disciplined toils of scientific inquiry than if he were a Cavalier rake or roisterer. That is about all I am willing to concede after some investigation of both primary and secondary sources. Instead, however, of finding a multitude of instances of scientists who were authentic beBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM 26 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER lievers in the full rigor of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, the only instances I have found to date in England, in Scotland, in Holland, in Geneva, or among the Jansenists, were Pascal in France and in England possibly Wallis and Graunt, who were by repute "Calvinists," but about whose theological views I have failed to find sub stantial information. It can be shown that many of the original members of the Royal Society who have been cited as examples of the special affinity between Calvinism and science had no institutional or family associations with orthodox Calvinism and that some of those who did un questionably have a Calvinist background or ancestry were at least by 1660 rebels against Calvinist orthodoxy, and were in later terminology "moderates" if on the criteria of orthodoxy they were not even worse. At the least, the evidence is overwhelming that optimistic providentialism had its roots in the Enlightenment, and in the "seculariza tion" of even religious thought, more than in traditional Christian orthodoxy when that is understood in the Augustinian sense. In fact, I think I have some evidence for the thesis that in England, in Scotland, and in Geneva scientific interest and achievement were associated with "lapsed Calvinism," and with rebellion against Calvinism, instead of with adherence to orthodox Calvinist theology. I have in this lecture said virtually nothing specific about what is supposed to be the topic of these lectures, the role of providence in the social order. It seemed to me neces sary, however, to sketch the historical background of providentialist thought in general before I could venture with any chance of success to make clear the religious and the intellectual foundations of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury social providentialism. Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:20 PM II. The Providential Elements in the Commerce of Nations IN THIS LECTURE I deal with the history of two providen- tialist ideas relating to the economic status of man living in society which have played roles in the evolution of eco nomic thought although mostly without having caught the notice of historians of that evolution. These ideas have ancient origins. The earliest in time of these two ideas expounds a provi dential relative abundance of necessaries as compared with luxuries. Plato, early in the fourth century, B.C., stated that only what is rare commands a high price and that water, which is the best of all things, is also the cheapest. He offered no explanation, however, and did not expressly attribute the fact, if such it is, to providential design. Epi curus, several decades later, was in effect to repeat this proposition, and add to it an express attribution of the phe nomenon to providence. "Gratitude," he wrote, "is due to blessed nature because she has made life's necessities easy of acquisition and those things difficult of acquisition unnecessary." Pufendorf, in about the 1670's, discovered the idea in a book by Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the first century B.C., and embraced it with some enthusiasm. It is probable that it was through Pufendorf that eighteenth-century writers became acquainted with the idea. In his De Archi tecture, Vitruvius, as reported by Pufendorf, after citing water as an example of things essential to the maintenance of human life which exist in abundance, proceeded as follows: The divine mind has not made those things which are specially necessary to mankind as inaccessible and expensive as are pearls, gold, silver, and the like, which neither our body nor our nature Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 28 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER requires, but has poured forth ready to hand throughout all the world what is necessary for the safety of our mortal life. I have not found the idea expressed or implied in the Old Testament. It thus seems to have had a pagan origin. The first statement of it in the Christian era that I have found is by Clement of Alexandria (150P-220 A.D. ) in his Paidagogos (The Teacher): "God supplies us, first of all, with the necessities such as water and the open air, but other things that are not necessary [such as gold and pearls] He has hidden in the earth and sea." I have found a fair number of statements of this idea thereafter, continuing into at least the middle of the eighteenth century. Among the writers who expounded it, in addition to Pufendorf, were Moise Amyraut, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Christian von Wolff. The last in time of the statements of it that I have encountered were by Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith's teacher at Glasgow, who was steeped in Pufendorfs writings. One of Hutcheson's statements of the idea runs as follows: "By the wisdom and goodness of Providence really important things are more abundant and cheaper than those which a'wise man would regard of little use." No writer developed the idea with any degree of elabora tion. Amyraut, a Huguenot of Arminian, that is, in my terminology, of optimistic, tendencies, recognized that even so-called "necessaries" might have substitutes, and carried the idea of providential abundance a step further by claim ing that where what was ordinarily an essential commodity or natural circumstance was lacking, providence would have seen to it that a favorable offsetting circumstance would exist nearby to make up for the deficiency. Where the weather is cold, forests to supply wood for fuel are likely to abound. Where wood is lacking, there will be available either burnable earth (he had turf in mind, I presume) or burnable stones (coal, I presume, is meant). Where the supply of water for beasts of burden is scarce, Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE 29 there will be suitable animals available (camels, I suppose) which can go without water for several days. Where the soil is not suitable for growing wheat it provides roots which men can use for food. Charles Rollin, an eighteenth-century professor of litera ture at the College de France, whose writings my learned colleague at Princeton, Professor Samuel Howell, tells me were well known in England and influenced the teaching of criticism in the English and Scottish universities, in cluded, in the eighteenth-century pattern, some optimistic theologizing in his teaching of his special discipline. As one instance, he pointed out that sea fish of species useless to man stay in waters remote from places of human habita tion, while the most edible kinds of sea fish are guided by the hand of providence even to enter the mouths of rivers and to run up them to their sources so as to bring the ad vantages of the sea to such peoples as live at a distance from it. In my first lecture, I ventured the generalization that it was mainly the followers of what I have labeled as the opti mistic strain in theology who sought evidence in nature of the benevolence of providence with respect to man's life on this earth, and that those who emphasized the adverse effects of the Fall on the temporal life of man either paid no attention to such doctrine or rejected it as heretical. I find confirmation of this generalization in the history of the idea of the providential abundance of necessaries as compared to the scarcity of luxuries. Except for an isolated "Pensee" of Pascal of doubtful relevance, I have found the idea only in the writings of men who clearly belong in the optimistic strain of theological thinking with respect to man's status in his earthy life. A seventeenth-century English scientist, John Woodward, who still finds occasional mention in histories of science for both his genuine scientific discoveries and his fantastic Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 30 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER scientific errors, strove to find in geological and botani cal facts evidences of the historical validity of the account in Genesis of the adverse physical consequences for man of his fall. He used as his text the verses in Genesis 3: 17-19: "cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." Woodward, taking what he could see of the relative state of prosperity of thistles and wheat in his own time as data for the purpose of verification of Genesis, found not only that thistles were thriving, but that they were in their character apparently "more mis chievous, troublesome, and molesting" to man than they once had been, although he conceded that he had not as yet found geological evidence as to what their character had been before the Fall of Man. As for wheat, he at tributed to post-Fall developments the severity of the con temporary obstacles to its successful cultivation in the shape of impoverished soil, poor seed, and adverse climatic conditions. These changes favorable to thistles and un favorable to wheat he attributed to God's decision to make the earth better suited for the moral disciplining which man needed in his lapsed state. This belief in the abundance of nuisance conditions and the scarcity of conditions favor able to the temporal life of man was of course an exact op posite to the idea of a contrast between the providential abundance of things important for man's temporal life and the scarcity of unimportant things. It is a reasonable sur mise that had later expounders of the idea of the provi dential abundance of necessaries known of John Wood ward's contradictory thesis and thought it was being widely accepted, they would have sought for evidence that thistles were in fact scarce, or were at least only a minor pest, or were in some subtle way really a blessing. Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE 31 Economists interested in the history of their own disci pline should not brush aside the idea of the providential abundance of necessaries as merely pious folklore involving a type of mishandling of economic phenomena from which training in economics would have provided effective pro tection. It is true that the idea probably involves a perverse transposing of causes and effects such as is common in providentialist thought, as, for instance by explaining the scarcity of particular commodities by their "luxury" status, instead of vice versa. But John Locke and Francis Hutcheson, and, except for the absence in this particular instance of express recognition of a providential role, Adam Smith himself, a trio of no mean standing in the history of eco nomics, were among the expounders of the idea of the abundance of necessaries. It is true also that almost by definition commodities properly regarded as "necessaries" had to be abundant and cheap if men were also to be abun dant and destined to survive. But economists found it a tough problem to resolve the so-called "diamond-water paradox," that is, the apparently inverse correlation be tween market values of particular commodities and their use-values, or religious values, or ethical or aesthetic values, or functional or technological values. There are still econo mists who believe that such resolution awaited the new light brought by the marginal utility analysis of the Austrian School in the 1870's. There may even today be economists who do not have full assurance that it has yet been satis factorily resolved. But the "diamond-water paradox" is but another term for the impression of strangeness and of indi cation of a questionable state of human morality which St. Augustine, and a long line of succeeding theologians probably extending to the present day, drew from the low value in the market of living creatures like mice, or horses, as compared to pearls, or of water as compared to diamonds. There is a once standard, and perhaps still standard, docBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 32 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER trine in moral philosophy, stemming from Aristotle, of the "scale of values." This doctrine ranks the values of things according to their kinds without reference to quantities. Its expounders, I think, would have been helpless in dealing with the diamond-water paradox if some unkind person had brought it to their attention. The field of general value theory offers perhaps the best available illustration of the general proposition that when two disciplines are at all interrelated in subject matter and share somewhat promiscuously a common vocabulary with out having uniform meanings for its terms, each discipline will inevitably lose something in intelligibility to members of the other discipline and is liable also to lose some of its own coherence. The most obvious danger is that members of the different disciplines will be persuaded that they are saying the same things because their statements have simi lar sounds whereas these statements may have nothing in common except vocabulary and may even be in sharp if invisible conflict with each other. As long, however, as each such discipline fails to adopt or is prevented from adopting a unique jargon for itself, there will not be any remedy for this difficulty except extra care on the part of the scholar to attain precision of definition and to avoid ambiguity. The second idea whose history I will trace in this lecture is somewhat complicated and can perhaps be most clearly formulated by presenting it as consisting of the combina tion of two sub-ideas:(1) providence favors trade between peoples as a means of promoting the universal brotherhood of man; (2) to give economic incentives to peoples to trade with each other providence has given to their respective territories different products. The first full statement of these propositions in combination was, as far as is known, made in the fourth century A.D. It emerged, however, from Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE 33 a complex set of historical and intellectual antecedents, which I will try to sketch before giving an account of the later fortunes of the doctrine. In ancient times in the eastern Mediterranean region transport by water was much more feasible and much less expensive than overland transport because of the difficul ties of the terrain and the absence of good roads, as well as because of the normal advantages of water transport over land transport at all times and in all places where the two are practically available alternatives. In that region, water transport meant as a rule sea transport, since navigable rivers were few and usually not located conveniently to densely populated regions. Interregional commerce and overseas commerce were therefore substantially synony mous. There was prevalent throughout the area an am bivalent set of attitudes towards the sea and another ambivalent set of attitudes towards commerce, reflecting religious, ethical, aesthetic, and political considerations, as well as more strictly economic ones. In principle, attitudes towards commerce and attitudes towards the sea could be at opposite poles; in practice the association between the sea and commerce was so close that it was difficult to be simultaneously enthusiastic for commerce and a hater of the sea, or a lover of the sea and a despiser of commerce. This held true in pre-Christian times for both Greek and Roman intellectuals, and I think I could show that it was also true for the writers of the Old Testament. The attitudes towards the sea and towards commerce were determined only in part by strictly economic con siderations, but these were treated as important. Economic arguments in favor of the sea, aside from its providing a source of fish, were largely confined to its serviceability as a channel for transportation of goods for commercial pur poses. Economic arguments for commerce were that it Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 34 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER provided a means of mutual exchange of goods in surplus, or mutual provision of goods in short supply, and that it gave remunerative employment to sailors and merchants. The objections to commerce on economic grounds some times rested on an outright denial that interregional com merce and even local commerce conferred any net eco nomic benefits as compared to the self-sufficiency of regions or even of private estates. More usually, however, the objectors on economic grounds to commerce specified par ticular drawbacks. Commerce, it was claimed, generated temptations to cheating and to exploitation where the in nocent and the unsophisticated would be the victims. Overseas commerce led to dependence for essential goods on distant sources of supply, which could be costly in times of war or other emergency. Foreign commerce tended to foster tastes for exotic commodities and for luxuries, and the import of luxuries tended to impoverish a country. Overseas commerce involved great hazards to sailors, to ships, and to cargoes, from shipwreck and other casualties of the sea. The objections raised against commerce on non-eco nomic grounds were many. It was held to be degrading for the persons directly participating in it, to foster avarice, to bring undesirable contact with foreign persons, customs, manners, and ideas, and thus to corrupt the native culture, to give rise to strategic risks, and to breed wars. Objections were also made to commerce on religious grounds. Contact with other countries led to the intrusion into the country of the cults of foreign gods. Commerce by ships was in itself an impious activity, since braving the winds and the seas and the construction of large vessels was an affront to providence, which intended the seas to be barriers to the contact of peoples instead of a means of bringing them into communication with each other. Especially objectionable to some, as flagrant encroachBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE 35 ments on providence, were projects to build canals in order to promote commerce. Herodotus relates that when the Cnidians were digging a trench across an isthmus near Rhodes to make an island of their peninsula many of the diggers suffered injuries, and the project made slow prog ress. To envoys sent to Delphi to find out what was wrong, the priestess at Delphi warned that the digging should stop; if Zeus had wished the Cnidian land to be an island he would have long ago made it so. Pliny the elder, in his Natural History, relates that successive attempts of Demetrius, Caesar, Caligula, and Nero to build a ship canal across the Peloponnesian peninsula to join the Aegean and Ionian seas had all ended in failure. To Pliny this was proof that to build such a canal was an act of sacrilege. The canal was in fact finally completed—in 1893! Most modern commentators seem to find that the pre ponderant attitude of the pagan Greeks and Romans to wards commerce was hostile. It seems, however, that as far as Rome was concerned there has been undue reliance on the texts of a few poets who were expressing personal views often reflecting individual idiosyncracies or situa tions and out of rapport with the prevailing opinion of the time. I have often run across, in writings from the eigh teenth century to the present day, generalizations as to the hostility of the Romans to commerce, where the sole or principal evidence specifically cited to support the generali zation is a verse in one of Horace's odes in which he asserts: "in vain has God in his providence parted land from land by the estranging ocean (Oceanus disassociabilis), if never theless impious barks bound across the waters that should not be touched." I have read, however, that Horace's personality, including his susceptibility to seasickness as well as his aesthetic allergy to the sea, points, in fact, to his utter unreliability as a reporter of Roman attitudes in gen eral towards the sea and commerce. Poets have often been Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 36 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER acute and penetrating critics of their age, but that is not quite the same as being a reliable reporter of its prevailing opinions, which alone is relevant here. Similarly another Roman poet, Propertius, occasionally is used by modern commentators for documentation to show that, at what incidentally happened to be the height of Roman commer cial enterprise and naval adventure, the Romans generally abominated the sea and despised commerce. Propertius, I am told, was an uplander, with an agrarian bias, and, like Horace, susceptible to seasickness. Basically he disliked the sea, the seashore, cities, and the bustle of trade. He had a lady-love, however, who enjoyed sea travel, liked to play on the beach at the seaside resorts of the time, and loved to swim. So Propertius blew hot and cold about the sea, speaking with some warmth of its charms when Cynthia was being kind and venting hostile reflections about the sea, apt for quotation by modern commentators, when Cynthia was being cold to him. There is much to be said for the effusions of poets. As primary sources for the his torian, however, they are, like all other kinds of effusions, I suppose, to be treated with caution and discrimination. In any case, there is an abundance of Greek and Latin source material, some of it written by poets, which ex presses admiration of the sea and treats commerce as a respectable and even honorable activity. It was not, how ever, until the fourth century A.D. that the first explicit formulation I know of the idea of a favorable interest of providence in international trade was written. The author was Libanius, a teacher in Antioch; the work in which it appeared, when translated from its Greek original, was given the title, Orationes; the formulation was as follows: God did not bestow all products upon all parts of the earth, but distributed His gifts over different regions, to the end that men might cultivate a social relationship because one would have need of the help of another. And so he called commerce into being, that Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE 37 all men might be able to have common enjoyment of the fruits of earth, no matter where produced. Libanius was a pagan, but among his students were two young men who were destined to be Church Fathers, St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom. Both directly and through these Fathers of the Church the idea was to enter what for the purposes of these lectures I call the optimistic strain in Christian theology. The emphasis on the universal brother hood of man reveals a late Stoic influence on Libanius's thought. On the other hand, a modern scholar has inter preted Libanius's emphasis throughout his writings on the providential concern for the temporal welfare of man kind as showing his desire to strengthen the old pagan religion's ability to withstand the rising competition of Christianity by borrowing from the latter its humanitarian warmth and its sensitivity to human needs and aspirations. This seems plausible to me. If it is correct, then Libanius is to be interpreted both as influenced by Christianity and as having through his writings and his students contributed to Christian theology an idea which was later to be ac cepted by many Christians as one of that theology's most admirable elements, namely, the idea that God intended commerce to operate as a unifying factor for all mankind. I have found in the writings of four early Christian theologians statements of the doctrine of the providential function of commerce, all following closely Libanius's formulation. Of these four, two are St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom, who, as I have said, were students of Libanius at Antioch, a third is Theodoretus, Bishop of Cyrus and a theologian of the school of Antioch, and the fourth is St. Ambrose, whose Hexameron (or the Six Days) was a free adaptation in Latin of St. Basil's work of the same title written in Greek. It is of course highly probable that thorough search of the writings of the Fathers of the church by a qualified scholar would disclose additional Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 38 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER formulations of the idea. On the evidence I have found, however, it seems to me practically certain that at least one way by which the idea entered into the Christian tradition was via Libanius both directly and through his Christian students. The comments on commerce of other Fathers are, as far as I know, never as favorable as is the Libanius doctrine. Many of them are in fact distinctly hostile, partly on the basis of the association of trade of any kind with fraud and exploitation, partly because of the association of trade with avarice and luxury, and partly because of lack of recognition of or indifference to its potential material benefits to mankind. I have found in secondary sources citations of a moderate number of explicit statements of the providential interest in commerce from theological treatises of the high Middle Ages, several of them by influential and otherwise impor tant writers, for instance, Henri de Langenstein in the fourteenth century, St. Antoninus of Florence in the fif teenth century, Giovanni Botero in the early sixteenth century. These all correspond more or less closely to Libanius's formulation, which had already apparently be come somewhat of a standard one. It was common at least by the fourteenth century for international fairs to be blessed by priests at their opening. In one such fourteenthcentury instance the presiding cleric used a formula which, translated from the Latin, runs as follows: God has wished that no country should be able to be completely self-sufficing by itself, and that each country should have need of seeking supplies from other countries, in order that they should all become united by friendly ties. The modern writer who reports this, adds the comment: "one can see that the thought which presides over our present-day international fairs is not of yesterday." He apparently was not aware that it stemmed, without signifi cant change, from Libanius in the fourth century A.D. In Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE 39 modern times, when the idea that international trade is highly beneficial to mankind has been widely and even enthusiastically accepted, sympathetic students of the eco nomic writings of the scholastics have occasionally claimed to have found the idea that such trade has a providential blessing quite widespread among them. I am somewhat skeptical of this, as they all seem to give very much the same limited set of references to the scholastic literature, while they tend to neglect the abundance of instances where scholastics repeat the old objections to foreign trade on religious and moral grounds. It would be interesting to know, in this connection, just where St. Thomas Aquinas stood. One modern authority on scholastic economics has referred to a passage in St. Thomas's works which apparently in effect echoes Libanius's formulation. Elsewhere in his writings, however, St. Thomas follows faithfully enough the old objections to foreign trade on the grounds of the economic merits of selfsufficiency, the threat to internal political peace which results from the presence of many foreigners, the liability to corruption of morals and manners which much contact with foreigners entails, and so forth. He introduces, moreover, what seems to me a novel note in the treatment of this topic; he invokes the Aristotelian "scale of values" doctrine to support the merit of economic self-sufficiency: . . . the higher a thing is the more self-sufficient it is; since what ever needs another's help is by that fact proven inferior. A city which has an abundance of food from its own territory is more dignified than one which is provisioned by merchants. St. Thomas does not insist, however, at this point or else where, on complete autarchy even as an ideal. There are few instances, he says, where a city can provide all its necessaries by its own productive services, and if a city has surpluses of some commodities, loss to many of the citizens would result if it was not permitted to professional merBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 40 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER chants to export such surpluses abroad. "Consequently," said St. Thomas, "[even] the perfect city will make a moderate use of merchants." By the end of the sixteenth century the idea was appear ing with some frequency in lay literature both in Protestant and in Catholic countries. In the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries it had become a commonplace, a familiar maxim, but increasingly it was being converted from a merely fashionable or edifying formula to a functional idea, an argument by which to influence national policy. To the limited extent to which it continued to remain in circulation in the nineteenth century, this use provided the main excuse for stating it. The most recent statement of the idea in England that I have found, however, was in 1887, in an almost purely theological treatise. In the United States, the latest exposition of the idea that I have encountered was by a Congressman from Missouri in the House of Representatives in 1894 speaking in sup port of the low-tariff Wilson Tariff Bill. The relevant passage is somewhat long, but I will quote it nevertheless because to my ear the first half is Libanius translated into Congressional rhetoric and the second half is Adam Smith expounded in even purer Americanese: God could have made this world, if He had wanted to, with exactly the same climate and soil all over it, so that each nation would have been entirely independent of any other nation. But He didn't do that. He made this world so that every nation in it has got to depend for something upon some other nations. He did that to promote kinship among the different people. Let us drop this unnatural business. There is no end to the ingenuity of man. You can fix up a scheme, if you want, for raising oranges in Maine, but a barrel of those oranges would make William Waldorf Astor's pocketbook sick. . . . You can raise polar bears on the Equator if you spend money enough, but it would take a king's ransom to do it. Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE 41 The illustration used by Adam Smith to make the same point was raising grapes in Scotland: By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland . . . but at about thirty times the expence for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. I have not made an extensive search for additional formu lations of the idea by American writers, and I know of only a handful. One of these I will have occasion to quote later. Another one I will quote at once, as it comes from a founding member of the Society that is sponsoring these lectures. In 1729, in his first work dealing with economic matters, Benjamin Franklin wrote: As Providence has so ordered it, that not only different countries, but even different parts of the same country, have their peculiar most suitable productions, and likewise that different men have geniuses adapted to variety of different arts and manufactures, therefore commerce, or the exchange of one commodity or manu facture for another, is highly convenient and beneficial to mankind. As compared with Libanius's formula, this omits mention of the promotion of fraternity between peoples as the objec tive of providence. But from the economist's point of view it has the merit of adding differences in the skills of differ ent peoples as a factor in making commerce beneficial. I have the impression that there are few ideas of com parable age, subtlety, and prevalence with the idea whose history I have been commenting on, which have so often been expressed with no indication of awareness of their past, and which have so often been received by modern scholars who encounter them in a text as being both im portant and novel. The origin of the idea of the interest of providence in commerce has been attributed by scholars to Bodin, to Calvin, to an English scholastic of the four teenth century, Richard of Middleton, to an Italian RenaisBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 42 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER sance writer, L. B. Alberti, to Grotius, and to any number of others. In April, 1914, a French Catholic priest, in a contribution to a religious periodical, stated the idea, in the form of a prayer, with no significant departure from or addi tion to Libanius's formula, as part of a plea, a very timely plea, for friendly relations between countries. This con stitutes the very latest statement of the idea not presented explicitly as a quotation from an earlier writer which I have encountered anywhere. This statement was quoted in 1932 at the annual congress of an important French Catholic organization specializing in social ethics where it was characterized as "a beautiful prayer" of "profoundly Catholic inspiration." I suspect that both speaker and audience at the 1932 meeting were totally unaware that the idea had been in fairly constant circulation in substantially the same formulation for at least 1,500 years. I have already pointed out that in the sixteenth to eigh teenth centuries the idea was frequently used in a func tional way, that is, to influence national economic policy. This was the age of mercantilism, and, given my biases, I find it hard to think of any idea whose acceptance as a ruling idea by those then in power would under the circum stances of the time have had a greater potential for benefit to mankind. We can be sure that no one who then ex pounded it was using it to support objectives equivalent to what we now call free trade. In France and in England it was being used domestically to support the liberalization or moderation of existing restrictions on foreign trade. By the Protestant jurists like Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel, it was used against outright prohibitions of trade and against national monopolies of fisheries and trade routes. I am unable to judge whether the idea then had any ma terial consequences, but it may at least have troubled the consciences of those who were as rulers and legislators extending and intensifying restrictions on trade. Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE 43 In late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, there was much internal complaint against the severity of the mercantilist restrictions on foreign trade which were then in force. The objectors had in mind not only the effects of the restrictions on themselves and on the French economy, but also the almost continuous warfare with which the restrictions were associated and for which they may have been in part responsible. Time and again these objectors used as a religious and moral argument against existing policy the doctrine of the providential interest in commerce as generating friendly relations between peoples. They succeeded at times in putting the government on the de fensive and in forcing it to reformulate the case for its policies and practices in less aggressive and less amoral terms. This was not a contest, I repeat, between free trade and mercantilism, for practically everyone with ideas about national economic policy was then a mercantilist, but be tween moderate and extreme mercantilism. At the least, it forced the government to restate its objectives in terms which were less obviously in conflict with some widely accepted religious and ethical views. In France, however, and to some degree in England also, ingenious polemicists succeeded somewhat in turning the flank of those who used the providentialist argument by giving it a twist which enabled the most extreme mer cantilists to adopt it as their own. French extremist mer cantilists took to saying that since it was providence which had chosen France as the sole country which had sufficient range and extent of resources to do without any imports of necessaries; severe restraints on importation, no matter how far they went, could not therefore for her be action in violation of providential intent. Belief in complete or nearly complete self-sufficiency as a practicable and desirable national objective was pecu liar to France. In England the doctrine of a providential Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 44 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER interest in commerce was twisted to serve extreme mercan tilist programs by applying it to particular commodities or trades. Providence had assigned to England the production of certain commodities or the monopoly of certain particu lar trades. It was therefore following the guidance of providence, not opposing it, to promote these industries or trades. Also, when providence assigned to England the production of a particular raw material, like wool, it must also have assigned to England its processing into woolens. This reasoning was extended to the acquisition of colonies. Providence had staked out for English acquisition and settlement certain overseas areas of the world; the rival claims of other imperialist countries or of the native inhabi tants therefore had no standing. As an illustration of the application of this type of rea soning to the wool-woolens issue I cite from Martin Bucer, one of the leading Protestant reformers, who in 1549 to 1551 was in England as a professor of theology at Cambridge University, an adviser of government, and an expounder of the new Reformed religion. England, he advised, should process its own wool: For one should not express doubt that the Lord who had so abundantly endowed the English with wool had not also wished that they should employ themselves in the working-up of the wool into cloth and applying it to the uses of this human life, and not to transport it abroad to be processed there, while they themselves lived in idleness. How do such writers discover in advance, when the interests of rival nations conflict, which nation providence will choose to prefer, and how is it that they almost invari ably find that it is their own nation? I suppose the answer is that pious patriotism is a natural product of the psycho logical propensity to find affinity between cherished ideas. John Milton, in the course of an exposition of progressive revelation, claims that England is usually the first bene ficiary Brought of newtorevelation: you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE 45 God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself: what then does He do but reveal Himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen; I say as His manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of his counsels, and are unworthy. Charles Dickens, in his characterization in Our Mutual Friend, of the London merchant, Mr. Podsnap, pictures him as complacent both about England, which is to him in no respect "unworthy," and about the superiority of his own personal qualities: "Mr. Podsnap was sensible of its being required of him to take Providence under his protection. . . . And it was very remarkable (and must have been very comfortable) that what Providence meant, was invariably what Mr. Podsnap meant." Dickens has Mr. Podsnap say that in its constitution England was favored by providence over all other countries. When the Frenchman with whom he was conversing was on the point of asking how it happened that providence selected England for favors above all other countries, Podsnap interrupted him to say: "This island was blest, sir, to the direct exclusion of such other countries as . . . there may happen to be." There was little direct criticism of the idea of a providen tial interest in commerce by either clerics or laymen. Ex ponents of it in general put no heavy reliance on Biblical texts to support it, in part, no doubt, because they are not easy to find. The idea was treated by its supporters sub stantially as an element in natural rather than in revealed theology, and searchers of the Scriptures found in them more hostility to than welcoming of commerce. Luther, for example, claimed that God did not like commerce and let his people of Israel live by the sea and yet not engage in commerce. It was much more godly, said Luther, "to till the land than to engage in commerce, and those do better who follow the Scriptures in exploiting the soil and seeking their nourishment fromMedical it." Center A modern Lutheran Brought to you by | UT Southwestern Library Dallas Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/18 11:22 PM 46 ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER theologian, Karl Holl, explains this attitude of Luther as a reaction to the moral teaching of the scholastics who, he says, at all points preferred the city dweller to the peasant. Lay writers sometimes expounded doctrine inconsistent with the usual version of the providential interest in com merce. Daniel Defoe, early in the eighteenth century, while insisting that "there is a kind of divinity in the origin of trade" found this divine origin of trade not, or perhaps not only, in a providential desire to promote universal brotherhood, but in the regional dispersion of natural re sources designed by providence to force mankind to get its subsistence by hard work. If all the productions of the world should have been found in every part, getting com modities would have been too easy. But wise providence having resolved man to eat his bread with the sweat of his brow, . . . has, to this purpose, placed the several blessings he has bestowed on the world for the use and convenience of man, at the remotest distance from one another, in the most secret, reserv'd and inaccessible parts, and shared to all parts of the earth something essential to the other, so as to make a universal correspondence absolutely necessary. Defoe, however, explains that he is not here rejecting what I earlier in this lecture called the idea of the providen tial abundance of necessaries: It is true, the common mercies of life, and such as mankind can least want [i.e., do without] our bountiful creator has made most universal; such as water for drink, corn and cattle for food. Voltaire, on the other hand, less disposed than Defoe to find his guidance in the Scriptures, could see only mystery in the pattern of world distribution of the earth's fruits: providence ripens in