The contrast between the Elizabethan businessman in armour and the merchant of the ‘moneyed interest’ described by Defoe and Steele raises a fundamental problem about the Elizabethan adherence to the Protestant work ethic. Half a century has elapsed since R.H. Tawney published Religion and the Rise of Capitalism; and in spite of the debate over the nature of the connection between Calvinism and capitalism, there is still generally scholarly agreement that the Puritans' doctrine of the calling engendered a new appreciation of diligent labour and a gradually developing certainty that the wealth which resulted from diligence should be considered a measure of godly activity. In its original form, Tawney's thesis dealt mainly with the ‘later phases’ of Puritanism – the post-Restoration theology of Richard Baxter and his contemporaries. At this time, according to Tawney, Puritanism discarded the suspicion of economic motives which had been a characteristic of earlier reform movements: