Actually, come to think of it, I am not at all sure that early Calvinists had a great deal to add or subtract from the existing ethics of daily life. It seems that the Reformation, as the Calvinists advanced it, was more about relaxing the iron grip of the priests upon the minds and hearts of the common folk, about changing the ecclesiastical government. I don’t think that they got church-state relations right, though there may have been some advance over the RC view. Their economics was wrong: they believed in the RC concept of a “just wage,” rather than a market economy and the Mayflower Compact was an out-and-out communist document economically. The did decide that taking of interest in business transactions was okay, a point which I (almost alone) am not sure was right. They did get right the connection between work, frugality, and capital. They were creatures of their time in the form of sumptuary laws, which are a form of especially reprehensible legalism.
