Sublime

The moral conduct of the average man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic character and subjected to a consistent method for conduct as a whole.

The treatment of labour as a calling became as characteristic of the modern worker as the corresponding attitude toward acquisition of the business man.

In fact, though, Weaver was not so much antiliberal as antimodern. This shows itself, for example, in his discussion of private property. He praises private property as “the last metaphysical right.” But although he clearly appreciates the place of private property in fostering liberty and forestalling the tyranny of the state, his defense is

The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system.

Government, he explains, has a “threefold right and duty”: first, to adjudicate disputes between spheres, “compel[ling] mutual regard for the boundary-lines of each”; second, to defend the weak against the strong within each sphere; third, to exercise the coercive power necessary to guarantee that citizens “bear personal and financial burdens for

But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume.