ABSTRACT
W e return now to the story of events in Western Christendom. The seventeenth century had accepted the principle of nationalism accompanied by religious intolerance. The idea that one nation must have only one religion was as strong in the minds of the reformers as had been the idea that the world itself could have only one form of Christianity in the mind of S. Augustine. There was no spirit of tolerance inherent in Protestantism, but the logic of events ultimately produced it. To have three mutually intolerant religions established side by side was already a step forward, In the eighteenth century, while nationalism still grew in strength, it was accompanied by the dawning realisation that people of differing creeds might live together with mutual forbearance under the same Government. We shall see how this came about, first in Germany and Austria, and then in England.
