Modern capitalism has as little use for liberum arbitrium [undisciplined] persons as laborers as it has for the businessman fully without scruples in… - Max Weber

The ultimately possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.

Finally, and of central importance, the special life of the saint—fully separate from the "natural" life of wants and desires—could no longer play itself out in monastic communities set apart from the world. Rather, the devoutly religious must now live saintly lives in the world and amid its mundane affairs. This rationalization of the conduct of life—now in the world yet still oriented to the supernatural—was the effect of ascetic Protestantism’s concept of the calling.

Luther understands monasticism as a product of an egoistic lovelessness that withdraws from one's duties in the world. By contrast, this-worldly work in a vocation appears to him to be a visible expression of brotherly love, a notion he anchors in a highly unrealistic manner indeed and in contrast—almost grotesquely—to the well-known passages of Adam Smith.