R. H. Tawney - Order Quotes

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Those who have hitherto governed the nation, believing, and believing with justice, that ignorance and docility go hand in hand, have taken care to ration the education of the workers in doses small enough to be innocuous to the established order.

R. H. Tawney

Laborare est orare. [To work is to pray.] By the Puritan moralist the ancient maxim is repeated with a new and intenser significance. The labor which he idealizes is not simply a requirement imposed by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that demanded of any order of mendicants—a discipline imposed by the will of God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in the punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an economic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have been satisfied. It is a spiritual end, for in it alone can the soul find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty long after it has ceased to be a material necessity.

R. H. Tawney

Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, [the Puritan] has made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.

R. H. Tawney

Those who dread a dead-level of income or wealth…do not dread, it seems, a dead-level of law and order, and of security for life and property.

R. H. Tawney