Richard Steele

Richard Steele (1629 to 1692) was an English Puritan minister and nonconformist writer whose 1684 treatise The Tradesman's Calling treated commerce and trade as a Christian vocation. He is not to be confused with the later essayist and Spectator co-founder of the same name.

Steele was born in 1629 at Barthomley, in Cheshire, and educated at St John's College, Cambridge. He served as a parish minister through the years of the Commonwealth and the Restoration of the monarchy.

Like roughly two thousand other ministers, Steele lost his living in the Great Ejection of 1662, when the Act of Uniformity required conformity to the newly restored Book of Common Prayer. Afterward he preached privately before eventually settling in London, where he continued to write and minister among nonconformists until his death.

His work was aimed at ordinary Christians living and working in the world rather than at fellow scholars. The Tradesman's Calling addressed the spiritual life of merchants, shopkeepers, and tradesmen, arguing that secular work was a divine calling and that Christians in business had both an opportunity and a duty to honor God through honest dealing, diligence, and generosity. The treatise was unusual among Puritan writings for its close attention to the practical ethics of buying and selling. It was later adapted for an eighteenth-century readership as The Religious Tradesman.

Steele also wrote on the duties of the household and marriage, on the conduct of old age, and on the problem of distraction and wandering thoughts in prayer. He died in 1692 in London.