“Those who preach faith, or in other words a pure mind, have always produced more popular virtue than those who preached good works, or the mere regulation of outward acts.”
Sir James Macintosh, Diary (July 17, 1808)*
Although his opinion was perhaps colored by a Scotsman’s protestant pride, the famous liberal Sir James Macintosh is almost certainly correct in saying that the doctrine of salvation by faith yields, at least in its first bloom, an exceptionally virtuous society. Calvinism is particularly conducive to popular virtue . It certainly puts a damper on carousing in alehouses, hooting at bawdy shows, betting on cock fights, or cavorting like Peter Pan around a maypole; but it at the same time significantly curtails a man’s chances of being cuckolded, murdered, or robbed.
Every traveler I have ever read agrees with this favorable view of Calvinist societies, although some have been of the opinion that Calvinism and sobriety both depend on some independent third cause.
“The Calvinistic people of Scotland, of Switzerland, of Holland, and of New England have been more moral than the same classes of other nations.”*
Macintosh suggests that this is because men and women governed by the doctrine of good works always end up haggling to secure salvation on the most advantageous terms. It ends in Talmudism; it ends in casuistry. It ends in legalistic dickering over how much credit one receives for each good work, and how much penalty one pays for each act that is not a good work but sin,
“The later mode of considering Ethics naturally gives rise to casuistry . . . .”*
I have read some casuistry, but always with feelings of mild disgust. It seems an answer to the question, “how much can I get away with?” It seems like a definition of technical virginity, or Bill Clinton’s self-serving definition of truth.
“The tendency of casuistry is to discover ingenious pretexts for eluding that rigorous morality and burdensome superstition, which in the first ardor of religion are apt to be established, and to discover rules of conduct more practicable by ordinary men in the common state of the world.”*
It has been said that hypocrisy is the only alternative to casuistry, since men who cannot excuse their base conduct will naturally attempt to conceal it. Possession of a “pure mind” is no doubt superior to invention of ingenious pretexts to sail very close to the wind, but rascals have always found it easy, and have often found it convenient, to dress up and talk like a zealous puritan.** But the significance of this line is Macintosh’s claim that casuistry marks the relaxation phase that follows religious zeal and moral rigor. Standards are set high in the phase of first ardor; casuistry mark the the phase of evasions and excuses that precedes the third stage, in which the standards are abandoned altogether.
Setting pharisaical puritan impostors aside, it does seem that the doctrine of faith yields more and better fruit than the doctrine of good works. The reason is that the doctrine of faith incites a zeal to be good, whereas the doctrine of works incites a calculating desire to be good enough. And from good enough the doctrine of works too easily descends into connivance at being not very good at all.
“The casuist first let down morality from enthusiasm to reason; then lower it to the level of general frailty, until it be at last sunk in loose accommodation to weakness, and even vice.”*
*) Robert James Mackintosh, ed., Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh, second ed., two vols. (London: E. Maxon, 1836), vol. 1, p. 411.
**) H. Hensley, Henson Puritanism in England (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912), pp. 65-69.
The Orthosphere 
Though hospitals and universities have become secular places, you will note that in their founding they were religious. You will find Christian and Jewish ones, the areligious not so much.
Yet you are right that even with such auspicious beginnings of people trying to create virtuous societies, they devolve into box-checking spirituality. I agree with the theological statement of the Four Spiritual Laws, but when one tries to strip things down to such core principles we find that they are in fact, denuded and rather useless. I am trying to imagine Jesus’s response to someone approaching him and asking “Okay, what’s the bare minimum I need to do to creep over the threshold and be saved?”
Far better to have excess in a Chestertonian sense, of festivals with pagan sources, of outsized enjoyment of small pleasures, of venerating too many saints rather than too few.
I’ve been trying to think of a way to articulate the difference between “not counting the cost” and just “spending more.” It is not the quantity of works by the person who has, as you say, “crept over the threshold,” but his cost-counting attitude towards those works. Maybe St. Paul articulated the difference best when he wrote, “God loves a cheerful giver.” It is possible to spend a large sum grudgingly and a small sum cheerfully, and my sense is that this qualitative difference is what matters in the realm of spirit.
If Calvinism is so great, where are the saints? Where are the miracles?
In Calvinism, every Christian who dies in a state of grace is a saint. They do not have a special class they call saints because they deny purgatory. If we use the word saint more loosely, it seems to me that the Calvinist churches have produced many fine Christians. I believe Calvinists would claim all the early miracles as their heritage, but maintain that the Age of Miracles has passed. But the point of this post is that Calvinism gets high marks for popular morality, whatever one may think of its theology.