The failure of Protestantism to gain any ground in Europe after the sixteenth century had naturally the effect of increasing the zeal of its adherents within their own sphere; and though nowhere did Protestant organization compare in energy with that shown by the Society of Jesus and the Roman College of Propaganda, the system of popular education in several countries--as Switzerland, Scotland, and parts of Germany--was raised much above the popular Catholic level. Presbyterians in particular felt the need of popular schools for the maintenance of their polity. The result was, after a time, a certain improvement in the capacity and conditions of the common people where other causes did not interfere. Thus the Protestant cantons of Switzerland have in general been noted for a greater material prosperity than that of the Catholic cantons; and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Presbyterian Scotland, though naturally much the poorer country, admittedly turned out a larger proportion of men qualified for responsible positions than did episcopalian England. All the while, the influence of a Presbyterian clergy, in touch with the people and able to ostracize socially those who avowed unbelief, maintained in the Calvinistic countries a higher average of professed orthodoxy, the normal effect of higher education being thus checked on the side of religion. Scotland contributed little to the earlier deistic movement of the eighteenth century, Smith and Hume having taken it up after it had flourished for a generation in England; and at no time was rationalism socially avowed to the same extent in the north as in the south, the enlightenment of the lay authors being confined to a small town circle. On the moral and æsthetic side, however, popular Presbyterianism tended to be hard and joyless, with the natural result, seen alike in Geneva and in Scotland, of breeding much licence. On the other hand there arose a higher reaction, towards intellectual interests; and the Switzerland of the eighteenth century produced a remarkably large proportion of scientific men; while in Scotland, where centuries of theological life and strife set up even in the Church a notable spirit of "moderation," both the physical and the moral or social sciences were conspicuously cultivated. Popular freethinking was beginning to follow in both cases, when the reaction against the French Revolution arose to arrest it. When in the next generation there began in Scotland the ecclesiastical struggle which ended in the formation of the Free Church (1842) a new impulse was given to doctrinal fanaticism, which the competition of three rival Presbyterian Churches was well fitted to maintain.