This belief in God, in virtue, and in immortality was held to have been taught in its purest form in previous ages in the teaching of Jesus, but it was acknowledged that elements of the same beliefs were to be found in all the higher religions._(_32_)_ If the eighteenth century attained to an optimistic-ethical world-view which preached itself so confidently and was so widely accepted, the reason is that it was able to re-interpret Christianity—which had by that time got rid of the world- and life-denial that was originally inherent in it—in that sense. Jesus was to it a teacher who even in his own age and then through all the intervening centuries had been misunderstood, and was now first rightly accepted as a revealer of the religion of reason. Let anyone read a rationalistic Life of Jesus, such as those of Franz Volkmar Reinhard (1753-1812) or Karl Heinrich Venturini (1768-1849)._(_33_)_ They hold Jesus up to admiration as the champion of enlightenment and of blessings for the common people. This transformation of the historical picture is made easier for them by the fact that the chief component element of the Gospel narrative is ethical teaching, while the late-Jewish pessimistic world-view which it presupposes is hardly more than hinted at. [pg 095] As an immediate result of the wiping out of confessional differences the middle of the eighteenth century sees the beginning of a period of tolerance in place of the persecution of all rejecters of orthodoxy which had been common till then. The last serious act of confessional intolerance was expulsion of all evangelicals from the Salzburg district by the Archbishop of that town, Count von Firmian, in the years 1731 and 1732. About the middle of the century there begins also the movement of opposition to the Jesuits, who were recognized as the enemies of tolerance, and this led to the suppression of the order in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV._(_34_)_ But the religion of reason fought superstition as well as intolerance. In 1704 the philosopher and jurist of Halle, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), published his essays condemning trial for witchcraft,_(_35_)_ and about the middle of the century the law courts in most of the States of Europe refused to concern themselves any longer with the crime of magic. The last death sentence on a witch was passed in 1782 at Glarus, in Switzerland. About the end of the century it became good form to detest anything which had even a remote connexion with superstitious convictions.