ABSTRACT
The striving for enlightenment sprang from man’s self-confidence, his wish to liberate himself from numerous shackles of the past and to build a new order based on human nature. In this respect enlightenment has achieved most beneficial results and has laid foundations of the modern world. Many believers in enlightenment even had so little confidence in reason that they regarded only the intellectual and ruling classes as fitted to live according to its standards. The activities of Enlightenment were directed against religious fanaticism and the witch-mania. In the old times the Church considered the belief in witchcraft a pagan superstition. Churches and states appeared to them as the Babel of the Apocalypse and they believed in the imminent second advent of Christ. The Church of Rome was less disturbed by religious strife than Protestantism. The Reformed Church had its bulwark in the Netherlands, and the Dutch theologians were in close relations with their German co-religionists.
