Bernard Groethuysen

"The Church, sensing that the middle class was slipping out of its grasp, certainly tried to create patterns of living which would enable the bourgeois to remain a bourgeois as well as a Christian; tha…"

"Nothing, then, would prevent him henceforth from living his life, a purely secular life, according to his nature and his habits, without having to ask himself at every moment whether what he had done …"

"The Church would have liked to turn to each of those thousand unbelievers separately, to show him that he was wrong, that he had allowed himself to be led astray by his passions, that he had everythin…"

"Did all these concerns in which the bourgeois was engaged really need external hallowing? They contained their own built-in standards, and the bourgeois was unwilling to recognize any other. If religi…"

"We might say that before the French demanded a charter from their sovereign, French Catholics had demanded one of their God. It was understood that God must be just, that he had certain obligations to…"

"The worldly-minded ... were unable to see why God should not give men their due if men, on their part, fulfilled their obligations. ... A new man had emerged. He was demanding his rights; he was consc…"

"In the bourgeois' world, ... if some respect was shown to God, it was on condition that he in turn would respect the general laws governing the universe and refrain from acting contrary to the plans o…"

"Such, then, was the God of the worldly-minded, who would be grateful that he had organized the things of this world so that everything was in accordance with laws which they could understand, and that…"