To have called to mind some of the principal points in the peace of Westphalia is not sufficient for understanding the real significance of the treaty without some consideration of the war which it closed. As already suggested, this war, looked at from a scientific point of view, is an unconscious experiment of nations, an attempt to solve a problem in abnormal international psychology. In order to comprehend this experiment and its resultant treaty, just how it brought about permanent religious peace, some of the main events of the war must be recalled as a basis upon which to work. The Protestant Reformation had great influence upon almost everything political in Europe, until the peace of Westphalia. The religious peace of Augsburg (1555) furnished no settlement to questions stirred up by the Reformation. It was inevitable that such fundamental disagreements should lead to a general war. The Thirty Years' War marked the end of the Reformation, which changed the idea of Christian unity and altered the theory of a holy Roman empire, replacing it by the idea of autonomy for individual states. On May 23, 1618, a body of Protestants entered the royal palace at Prague and threw two detested representatives of the Crown from the window. This act started a struggle that for 30 years involved Europe in a war which spread gradually from Bohemia over southern Germany, then slowly to northern Germany and Denmark, until country after country began to take part and the fighting became general. The war might have ended in 1623, making it a five years' war, had it not been for the outrageous treatment of the Protestant states of northern Germany, resulting in a political disintegration in which Germany lost half of her population and two-thirds of her wealth. Her religion and morality sank low, and the intellectual damage required generations to restore. The Roman Catholic Church, having guided Christianity for centuries without a rival, naturally felt greatly wronged by Protestant secession. This explains the uncompromising enmities of the Thirty Years' War. Various parties claimed the control of the religious doctrines to be taught the people, as well as control of worship; they were fighting each other for this power, ready to sacrifice their lives for it. The Lutherans were as intolerant toward the Calvinists as they were toward the Catholics. The Catholic Church, convinced of the absolute truth of its doctrines based upon 13 centuries of growth, naturally could not tolerate some young reformers to arise and challenge its divine right, especially not since these reformers seized old monastic and ecclesiastic foundations with domains and edifices and administered them in their own interest. The resistance of the Catholic hierarchy, to the last drop of blood, was a normal reaction. As so often happens, the conditions were abnormal, not the human beings.