Working Hard.

Industrialization created amazing disparities between rich and poor in the United States, and the rapid pace of change concerned many American Protestants. One early, but prominent, stream of Protestant reaction emphasized acquiescence to the social consequences of industrialization. Many regarded this tendency as an unexpected result of the growing liberal practice of loosening the doctrinal restrictions that had bound preceding generations. Prominent liberal Protestant clergymen followed the lead of Henry Ward Beecher in blessing the new industrial order. Protestantism carried over from the eighteenth century the Calvinistic belief that God created the world with an intrinsic system of rewards and punishments. Under the divine scheme, those who worked and lived ethically prospered, while the lazy or irresponsible poor suffered deservedly from poverty. Beecher insisted that "even in the most compact and closely-populated portions of the East, he that will be...