Thenceforth, in the sphere of the Church of Rome, unbelief persisted either audaciously or secretly alongside of the faith. Within the Church the long battle with Protestantism had evolved fresh energies of propaganda, and even a measure of ascetic reformation. In particular, the new Order of Jesuits (founded in 1534), which we have seen completing the recapture of Poland, strove everywhere by every available means, fair and foul, for the Church's supremacy. Where treachery and cruelty could not be used, as they were in Poland, the Jesuits made play with a system of education which realized the ideals of the time; and besides thus training the young as adherents, the Church developed within itself a revival of ecclesiastical learning that made a formidable resistance to the learning of French and English Protestantism. In the latter half of the seventeenth century the combatants thus wrought by their literary warfare what they had previously done by their physical strife--a gain to the spirit of unbelief. Neither side convinced the other; and while the Protestants discredited many of the old Catholic beliefs, their opponents more subtly discredited the faculty of theological reason, putting all human judgments in doubt as such. The outcome was a strengthening of the anti-theological bias. Jesuit education, where it became at all scientific, armed the born skeptics; and where it was limited to belles lettres it failed in the long run to make either earnest believers or able disputants. Thus the Reformation, in the act of giving Christianity a new intensity of life among certain populations, where it fostered and was fostered by a growth of intolerant democracy, unwittingly promoted at once fanaticism and freethinking both in its own and in its enemy's sphere. Deepened superstition forced a deepening of skepticism; fanaticism drove moderate men to science; and theological learning discredited theology. In papal and downtrodden Italy, in monarchic and military France, in the England of the Restoration, and in semi-democratic Holland, there worked in the seventeenth century the same divergent forces. In both Holland and England, by help of the spirit of fanatical democracy, the multiplication of sects and heresies in the second generation of the seventeenth century was so great--180 being specified in England alone--that no repressive policy could deal with them; and under cover of their political freedom there arose some Unitarian doctrine among the common people, even as anti-Scriptural Deism spread among the educated. Devoutly religious men, such as George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, by the very thoroughness of their loyalty to the doctrine of the inward light, helped to shake among sincere people the old docility of belief in revelation, though in some cases they reinforced it, and in many more evoked, by reaction, the spirit of persecution.