"The 18th Century English cleric and theologian John Wesley was troubled by a paradox that emerged as his teaching spread.   He, like other Protestant thinkers stretching back to Calvin, taught that one could honor God through hard work and thrift.   The subsequent burst of industry and frugality generated by Wesley's message improved the lot of many of his working-class followers and helped advance capitalism in England.   But, "wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion," Wesley observed, and subsequently pride and greed are growing more common, he complained. "The Protestant reformers preached that the faithful should reinvest the profits of hard work in new ventures rather than squander them because it seemed unlikely that people who were profligate were saved.  

Over time this view of work became so widespread that many of the West's institutions accepted it, especially in America, a land settled by dissident religious sects that embraced the Protestant ethic.   By the middle of the 18th Century Ben Franklin could publish a bestseller with the title "The Way to Wealth," a secularized guide to work values filled with observations like "A penny saved is a penny earned," and "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."   By the early 19th century de Tocqueville could marvel that America's preachers seemed as interested in promoting prosperity in this world through industriousness as "eternal felicity" in the next.   Our public schools reinforced this message, not because it was religious but because it became the American way. "