d." Almsgiving also as a "work"
disappeared and with it a whole series of inducements that from the
standpoint of the pecuniary and material supply of relief had long
been active. It was no wonder that the preachers advocated it in vain,
and reproached their hearers with their diminished bounty to the poor;
the old personal incentive had gone, and could only gradually be
superseded by the spontaneous activity of personal religion very
slowly wedding itself to true views of social duty and purpose.
Penance, once so closely related to almsgiving, passed out of sight.
Charity, the love of God and our neighbour, had two offices, it was
said, "to cherish good and harmless men" and "to correct and punish
vice without regard to persons." Correction as a means of discipline
takes the place of penance, and it becomes judicial, regulating and
controlling church membership by the authority of the church, a
congregation, minister or elder; or dealing with laziness or ill-doing
through the municipality or state, in connexion with what now first
appear, not prisons, but houses of correction.

The religious life was to be democratic--not in religious bodies, but in
the whole people; and in a new sense--in relation to family and social
life--it was to be moral. That was the significance of the Reformation
for charity.

The organization of municipal relief.

Consistently with this movement of religious activity towards a complete
fulfilment of the duties of civic life, the older classical social
theory, fostered by the Renaissance, assumed a new influence--the great
conception of the state as a community bound together by charity and
friendship, "We be not born to ourselves," it was said, "but partly to
the use of our country, of our parents, of our kinsfolk, and partly of
our friends and neighbours; and therefore all good virtues are grafted
on us naturally, whose effects be to do good to others, when it showeth
forth the image of God in man, whose property is ever to do good to
others" (Lamond, p. 14). Economic theory also changed. Instead of the
medieval opinion of the "theologian or social preacher," that "trade
could only be defended on the ground that honestly conducted it made no
profit" (Green, ii. 71), we have a recognition of the advantages
resulting from exchange, and individual interests, it is argued, are not
necessarily inconsistent with those of the state, but are, on the
contrary, a