Maurice has been characterized as "the "spiritual" leader" of the Christian socialists because he was more interested in disseminating its theological foundations than "their practical endeavours." Maurice once wrote,Let people call me merely a philosopher, or merely anything else... My business, because I am a theologian, and have no vocation except for theology, is not to build, but to dig, to show that economics and politics ... must have a ground beneath themselves, and that society was not to be made by any arrangements of ours, but is to be regenerated by finding the law and ground of its order and harmony, the only secret of its existence, in God.