All the while, though he drew for doctrine on Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius equally with the Bible, Coornhert habitually founded on the latter as the final authority. [154] On no other footing could any one in his age and country stand as a teacher. It was not till after generations of furious intolerance that a larger outlook was possible in the Netherlands; and the first steps towards it were naturally taken independently of theology. Although Grotius figured for a century as one of the chief exponents of Christian evidences, it is certain that his great work on the Law of War and Peace (1625) made for a rationalistic conception of society. "Modern historians of jurisprudence, like Lerminier and Bluntschli, represent it as the distinctive merit of Grotius that he freed the science from bondage to theology." [155] The breach, indeed, is not direct, as theistic sanctions are paraded in the Prolegomena; but along with these goes the avowal that natural ethic would be valid even were there no God, and--as against the formula of Horace, Utilitas justi mater--that "the mother of natural right is human nature itself." [156] Where Grotius, defender of the faith, figured as a heretic, unbelief could not speak out, though there are traces of its underground life. The charge of atheism was brought against the Excercitationes Philosophicæ of Gorlæus, published in 1620; but, the book being posthumous, conclusions could not be tried. Views far short of atheism, however, were dangerous to their holders; for the merely Socinian work of Voelkel, published at Amsterdam in 1642, was burned by order of the authorities, and a second impression shared the same fate. [157] In 1653 the States of Holland forbade the publication of all Unitarian books and all Socinian worship; and though the veto as to books was soon evaded, that on worship was enforced. [158] Still, Holland was relatively tolerant as beside other countries; and when the Unitarian physician Daniel Zwicker (1612-1678), of Dantzig, found his own country too hot to hold him, he came to Holland (about 1652) "for security and convenience." [159] He was able to publish at Amsterdam in 1658 his Latin Irenicum Irenicorum, wherein he lays down three principles for the settlement of Christian difficulties, the first being "the universal reason of mankind," while Scripture and tradition hold only the second and third places. His book is a remarkable investigation of the rise of the doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity, which he traced to polytheism, making out that the first Christians, whom he identified with the Nazarenes, regarded Jesus as a man. The book evoked many answers, and it is somewhat surprising that Zwicker escaped serious persecution, dying peacefully in Amsterdam in 1678, whereas writers much less pronounced in their heresy incurred aggressive hostility. Descartes, as we shall see, during his stay in Holland was menaced by clerical fanaticism. Some fared worse.