CHAPTER XXII
THE NEW ZION
There was little reason to fear that the works of Spinoza would ever be popular. They were as amusing as a text-book on trigonometry and few people ever get beyond the first two or three sentences of any given chapter.
It took a different sort of man to spread the new ideas among the mass of the people.
In France the enthusiasm for private speculation and investigation had come to an end as soon as the country had been turned into an absolute monarchy.
In Germany the poverty and the horror which had followed in the wake of the Thirty Years War had killed all personal initiative for at least two hundred years.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, therefore, England was the only one among the larger countries of Europe where further progress along the lines of independent thought was still possible and the prolonged quarrel between the Crown and Parliament was adding an element of instability which proved to be of great help to the cause of personal freedom.
First of all we must consider the English sovereigns. For years these unfortunate monarchs had been between the devil of Catholicism and the deep sea of Puritanism.
Their Catholic subjects (which included a great many faithful Episcopalians with a secret leaning towards Rome) were forever clamoring for a return to that happy era when the British kings had been vassals of the pope.
Their Puritan subjects on the other hand, with one eye firmly glued upon the example of Geneva, dreamed of the day when there should be no king at all and England should be a replica of the happy commonwealth tucked away in a little corner of the Swiss mountains.