Our church of St Michael's, Cornhill, is just up the road from the Bank of England, and every year when we host the City New Year service, the church is packed full of bankers, brokers and liverymen lustily singing the old warhorse hymns Jerusalem and I Vow to Thee my Country. The service also uses great chunks from the King James Bible (1611) and The Book of Common Prayer (1662). In short, it is everything the liberal modernisers and social-gospellers in the Church of England loathe.

Each year we welcome a visiting preacher and recently a prominent prelate came and admonished us as follows: “Money is important but it isn't everything.” On our way across to Drapers' Hall for the customary reception, the preacher asked me quietly how I thought his sermon had gone down with the City types. I said: “They loved the joke you started with, but I saw their heads go down when you said that bit about money not being the be-all and end-all. They know that only too well. Those movers and shakers spend only about two per cent of their money on wining and dining; and they spend hours in tedious meetings deciding how they're going to give the rest of it away to needy causes.”

I don't know why so many churchmen are so antipathetic to wealth creation, so down on capitalism. They should be reminded of Prime Minister Thatcher's memorable address when she said that the Good Samaritan would have been useless unless he'd had some money to pay the innkeeper to look after the one who fell among thieves. Modern churchmen give the impression that they think it is the money-makers who are the thieves.

Capitalism reflects Christian teaching in that it accepts the doctrine of Original Sin and works with the grain of human nature rather than against it. It accepts that we are self-interested and then shows how sincere self-interest can work to the good of all. A man who wants to do well for himself and his family is likely to produce something which will be of use and value to the community at large.

Socialism — the favoured ideology of the modern churchman — is an unrealistic economic system that has been shown to fail too many times for that particular lesson to have to be learnt again. Give me a mitigated evil any day, rather than an unworkable ideology which is only a sentimental fantasy. Look around the world and you notice that those countries which have hitched their wagon to wealth creation through private enterprise and you see populations thriving. Look at the nations which have rejected this path and you see populations in poverty and want.

As a City rector and chaplain to six livery companies and to the stock exchange, I do not see any virtue in the fantasy economics of socialism. And capitalism is not a perfect system. No system is. That's the whole point of Original Sin. Socialists talk a great deal about economic justice and fair dealing, but I see no justice in vast subsidies and the socialistic creation of a fractious underclass rewarded by the giveaway culture of excessive benefits. It is not good for the sick and the needy to go hungry. But neither is it good, morally, for robust and able-bodied people to be encouraged to live on benefits rather than to work for a living.

But we should not serve money: for that is the sin of Mammon. The City must look beyond itself to the values of the City of God. St Augustine warns that the error of believing in merely economic and utilitarian justice can easily become a bad habit dressed up as a virtue: “Like the Athenian woman, you can, by a series of small doses, accustom yourself to poison.”

The maladies that afflict the mere exercise of economic competition are, says Augustine, the reduction of life to the status of “simply providing more opportunities for making and spending money. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you”.

The Rev Dr Peter Mullen is chaplain to the Stock Exchange and rector of St Michael's, Cornhill