Joseph II had been converted to the ideas of the French Encyclopaedists and Physiocrats as well as to the teachings of Febronianism. An absolutist by conviction, an enemy of the liberties of the church, despising all things of the past, and lacking in the adroitness which characterized Maria Theresa’s government, he sought to put in force without delay the new concept of human society that he had conceived. He tried to force upon Belgium a whole series of reforms, by means of sovereign decrees, between the years 1781 and 1787. The fundamental ideas at the basis of these reforms may be summarized as follows: the secularization of political society; the incorporation of the Catholic church in Belgium as a part of the national Austrian church; and the recognition of the sovereign power as absolute and unlimited. The political secularization of Belgium was attempted by the Edicts of Tolerance, issued in 1781-82. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction was suppressed; non-Catholics were put upon nearly the same level as Catholics, and public worship was permitted to them under certain restrictions. Subject to a dispensation from the sovereign, they were admitted to public offices and could become burgesses and members of craft-guilds. In 1784 another edict fixed new rules for marriages, and prevented the ecclesiastical judge from dealing with the canonical impediments declared by canon law. As for the subordination of the church to the state, the religious orders were no longer allowed to show obedience to their foreign superiors; the jurisdiction of the Nuncio of Cologne over Belgium was abolished; the Belgian bishops were forbidden to correspond with Rome on the matter of dispensations for marriages; a large number of convents were declared to be useless and were suppressed, their properties being placed under the administration of the state; parishes were delimited by the government; all the confraternities of a religious nature were suppressed and replaced by a single one, which the Emperor-Philosopher called the “Brotherhood of Love for Fellow-Creatures.” All the seminaries for the education of priests were closed, and in 1786 a General Seminary was established at Louvain and in Luxemburg, at which theology was to be taught, subject to the control of the state. A very drastic measure was the suppression of any subsidy to the society of the Bollandists, the Belgian Jesuits who were responsible for the criticism and the publication of the Lives of the Saints, and who were known all over Europe for their scientific methods and their superior culture.