THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
predominate in public affairs and in social life. The animosities between Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist powers gradually disappeared; 2. Political the Northern War brought Orthodox Phase. Russia into the sphere of European affairs; colonial growth widened the arena of political activity by offering new fields for material development wherein the religious element was of relative unimportance. Diplomacy abandoned the religious view-point and became Machiavellian with the reason of State as its guiding principle. Within the states the ancient pretensions of the Church yielded to the interests of a society that was rapidly being reorganized on the basis of commercialism, militarism, and bureaucracy. Formally, orthodoxy retained its own and established religions prevailed; yet the secular principle determined the attitude of the governments to the Church and toward their subjects. This is the period of Concordats (q.v.), of the persecution of the Jesuits and of territorial church legislation. The theory of sovereignty, fostered by the revival of the Roman law and the Reformation, developed into absolutism, which in turn subordinated Church to State completely, and broke the political influence of creed. With these changes in the conception of the purpose and authority of the State appeared new theories as to its nature and origin. Following out the traditions of Aristotle and Machiavelli, Jean Bodin (d. 1596) advanced a purely rational origin of society and in his Colloquium heptaplomeres, widely read in manuscript (ed. Noack, Schwerin, 1857), developed the destructive effects of such a theory on the religious power in the State. But it was Grotius (d. 1645; see Ghotius, Hugo) who destroyed the scholastic dualism of lex naturm and lex divina and found sanction for the law of nature, the law of nations, public law, and natural morality in the human understanding unaided by revelation. His cause was strengthened by the rise of the modern Stoics in Holland and by Hobbes (d. 1679; see Hobbes, Thomas) with his Epicurean teachings. Pufendorf (d. 1694), in Germany, and Locke (d. 1704), in England (see Pufendorf, Samuel; Locke, John), made the new ideas the common possession of European culture. In this newly developed theory of the State is the true precursor of the Enlightenment; for, though it assumed no radical attitude in the beginning and maintained friendly relations with the religious creeds of the time, its result was the destruction of the theological bases of the prevailing culture. It exercised a powerful influence on the remodeling of church law, especially among the Protestants, marking, as it did, the beginning of ecclesiastical legislation on purely political principles. It furthered the growth of toleration and attained its final development in the theory of the freedom of religion and of conscience, and further still, of the universal rights of man. Yet so complex are the sources of the various manifestations which in their entirety are known as the Enlightenment, that the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French States-General in 1789 is more immediately to be traced to the influence of the constitution of
the United States (1783) than to Rousseau's Contrat social (1762).
Parallel with this process of political transformation went a line of cognate economic and social development. The old rigidity of social organization— the feudal separation of classes — gave way slowly with the development of an extensive world commerce and the rise of industry. The financial needs of the absolute state made it the friend of the rising commercial and 3. Econom- industrial classes for whose protection
ic Phase, laws are now enacted. The growth of economic freedom reacted in turn upon the development of the individual. The natural sciences came to the aid of the rising technical industries, and in this manner an alliance between the industrial and the learned classes was effected. The final result was a fluent intermingling among the different classes of the population, revealing itself in the appearance of a powerful citizen class eager for political, economic, and spiritual liberty, the inheritors of a new literature and a new education that was tending to free itself from theological guardianship. England and Holland were the models of this close union of commercialism and liberty and as changed political conditions had led to the formulation of a new political theory, so the transformation of economic facts in Europe brought forth a new economic and social theory, which, like the new theory of the State, bore a deep impress of the idea of natural rights. Bound up for a time with the theological teaching, it was developed into an independent theory by the English and French bourgeoisie and became, finally, antitheological and, to a degree, antireligious. Its independence was fully established by Adam Smith (d. 1790) and Quesnay (d. 1774). The spirit of individual freedom and courageous optimism appears more prominently in this economic phase than in any other phase of the Enlightenment. Unrestricted freedom of labor and of capital became inalienable human rights, and of all the ideas of the Enlightenment have maintained themselves longest and affected the world most.
Along with political and economic changes there
is to be noted a transformation in the general
spirit of the age, which arose in reaction against
the excesses of religious wars, the
4. Relig- burden of established creeds, and the
ious and ceaseless strife of theologians. Out Ethical of religious conflict in England came
Aspects, the Levelers and Latitudinarians (qq.v.), and, in Germany, the Calixtines (see Huss, John, Hussites), together with the many attempts at religious union. A powerful cause contributing to the weakening of the religious influence was the patent inefficiency of established creeds as a force for morality. The rise of Pietism (q.v.) prepared the way for the Enlightenment. There comes a revolt against the belief in magic, witchcraft, and other superstitions. A growing spirit of humaneness, of active philanthropy, and of cosmopolitan tolerance, appears, indicated, for example, in the mitigation of the severity of judicial procedure. The tendency to