Martin Luther and the other Church smashers weakened and divided The Only Church Jesus Founded. That had an unexpected effect on society.
For “The Thousand Year Reign” of the Catholic Church over Christendom, Catholic Europe had a basic formula. “One child for the farm, one child for the King (military service), and one child for The Church.”
The smartest child went into The Church.
After “the dragon was allowed to emerge from the abyss”, the infliction of Protestantism weakened that magnet for genius. Since there was hardly any Catholic Church in England or what would become The United States, most of the extremely intelligent young people went into business instead.
Successive waves of geniuses invented and improved steam engines. They put them in mines, on ships, and on rails. They put countless thousands of their neighbors out of business. The new inventions crystallized into businesses that tended toward assembly lines, child labor, and repetitive work at low pay were the results of Protestant economic damage.
Each new generation of geniuses invented more things that disrupted established businesses in every human endeavor. Catholic economic stability was replaced by Protestant economic damage as family-destroying technological upheavals destroyed stable jobs and careers while making new ones.
At one point, a third of America’s Gross National Product was based on the inventions of one man, Thomas Edison. The brilliant inventor single-handedly destroyed the occupations of two thirds of the businesses that existed when he was 20!
If there had been One Church in this period, there would have been change, but it would not have had the family-destroying effects caused by hundreds of thousands of geniuses poured into the workplace rather than clerical careers in The Only Church Jesus Founded. Thomas Edison, if had The Thousand Year Reign had been allowed to continue, might have been Pope!
Even without the efforts of Luther and the other destroyers we can see how many advances were made by holy Catholic priests and monks who remained in The Clergy. Their intellectual output is visible on links like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_cleric-scientists
If those holy men and women had gone into business instead of The Church, one can barely imagine the disruption to national and global economies.
Today, Catholic priests continue to be be the most intelligent and well-educated men in their communities. We may be grateful to God for leading them into the priesthood, rather than having these humble, obedient geniuses injecting even more disruptive businesses and technologies into society already reeling from unnecessary change.
P.S. Grateful to the CF reader whose comment prompted this: Not one business school reminds its students that Jesus was very clear in Mark 31: 29-31 “Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel 30who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come. 31But many that are first will be last, and [the] last will be first.”
Jesus clearly told us all the best investment we could make. May we be forgiven for not heeding sufficiently.
