The Work Ethic

The Puritan work ethic was a revival of something that had died before the Reformation, and was now revived by the Puritans self-consciously. It was a revival of that which scripture taught, which the early church practiced, and which the medieval era; at least to the thirteenth century, very strongly stressed. Work in terms of God’s calling, and in the words of Saint Basil the great, “with its goal the good pleasure of God.”