The Protestant Reformation was integral in shaping Western Europe from a religious perspective, but undoubtedly the resulting divergence of Christianity was equally important to the development of the political and economic climate of Western Europe. The adoption of Protestant beliefs would serve as a catalyst for the sharp rise of capitalist, mercantilist, and democratic thought and practice. The process by which democracy, capitalism, and, to some extent, nationalism and mercantilism come to fruition is a multi-stage journey that begins with the Reformation and Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. By distinguishing the factors that led to widespread dissatisfaction with the Roman Catholic church, a correlation can be found between the timing of the increase in individual wealth within a newly formed capitalist structure and the advent of Protestant beliefs. Furthermore, democratic politics is believed to increase with increases in capitalist economic behavior, with increases in personal wealth, and the free conduct of business is often the result of fair and liberal representative government and vice versa. The rise of capitalist economic behavior and democratic practices were further catalyzed by Western European geopolitics, the result of which led to the beginnings of nationalism, which ran parallel to and was heavily influenced by what Adam Smith coined mercantilism. Protestantism differs from Catholicism in three aspects. significant ways that are commonly defined; only Scripture, only faith and the 'universal priesthood of believers'. The essence of these principles is the emphasis on the personal practice of one's religion and the mitigation of the power of the central ecclesiastical authority. The Scriptures alone attest to the importance of a critical theory... middle of paper... and a common practice in Europe from the 16th to 18th centuries that promoted government regulation of a nation's economy, particularly importation and export protectionism, with the aim of strengthening the power of a state at the expense of a rival national power. For Schmoller, mercantilism appeared to be essentially “state-building – the replacement of a local and territorial economic policy with that of the national state.” The mercantilist goal was “to create a national economy closed from the outside world, which could satisfy all the needs of its citizens by means of indigenous labor and which, through vigorous internal traffic, mobilized the country's natural resources as well as manpower of each citizen to serve the entire community... it was a system that sought to promote public welfare by tethering, to a large extent, economic life to political norms.”