Since Moses, and since the first feast of Pentecost, the Lord had never left himself without witnesses; he had given the nations of the earth a new culture, had led them to a higher civilisation. He had given them a new code of morals, he had unlocked the other half of the earth, he had willed that the new spirit in men should be contained in the narrow space of one book, which might pass from hand to hand, from one soul to another, from one century to every succeeding one. Restlessly and unceasingly did the Divine Spirit agitate and stir the hearts of men; ever more mighty and more holy did these manifestations of the Eternal, appear to men of powerful intellect; it was a different manifestation to that of the old writings, it was also another word of God, another aspect of the Eternal, which was discovered. Thus men now sought the God of the human race, of the earth, of the universe, not only in the old faith but also in science. Together with the Jesuits and Jews there was Leibnitz. This new culture has elevated the Jews; their fanaticism has vanished since the Christian zeal which persecuted them has ceased, and the descendants of that wandering Asiatic race have become our countrymen and fellow combatants. But the ecclesiastical community of the Society of Jesus, already once expelled, then revived again, remains to this day what it was at the beginning of its emigration into Germany--alien to the German life. CHAPTER XII. THE WASUNGER WAR. (1747.) The great century of enlightenment began with blood and the thunder of cannon. The Spanish war of succession raged on the western frontier, within the distracted realm. Bavaria and Cologne fought under the ban of the Empire, in alliance with Louis XIV. against the house of Hapsburg. The constitution of the Empire had become weak. In the east the Hohenzollerns already held a powerful position by the side of the Hapsburgers; from the beginning of the century they had become kings independent of the Empire, and the Electoral house of Saxony, had shortly before obtained the insecure possession of the Polish Electoral throne. Condemned witches were still burnt on the funeral pile; the ecclesiastics of three persuasions still carried on a wearisome strife; the intolerance of the Church, the pressure of poverty, want of great political interests, and the pitifulness of the small sovereigns and their courts, still weighed upon the masses.