avoidance of the use of this income for personal enjoyment: "This is rooted in a belief in the value of efficient performance in a chosen vocation as a duty and a virtue." Weber sees that the idea of a calling came into being at the time of the Reformation, a concept that does not exist in Catholicism or in Antiquity. The significance of this idea in Protestantism is that it serves to bring the affairs of daily life into an all-embracing religious influence:
The calling of the individual is to fulfill his duty to God through the moral conduct of his day-to-day life. This impels the emphasis of Protestantism away from the Catholic ideal of monastic isolation, with its rejection of the temporal, into worldly pursuits.
Weber sees the origins of the capitalist spirit in the religious ethic most precisely developed in Calvinism:
It is to this ethic that we may trace the unique qualities which distinguish the attitudes underlying modern capitalistic activity from the amoral character of most previous forms of capital acquisition.
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