RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND RELIGIOUS WARFARE. Of course the revolt against the authority of the Church, once inaugurated, could not be stopped. The same right to freedom in religious belief which Luther claimed for himself and his followers had of course to be extended to others. This the Protestants were not much more willing to grant than had been the Catholics before them. The world was not as yet ready for such rapid advances, and religious toleration, [16] though established in principle by the revolt, was an idea to which the world has required a long time to become accustomed. It took two centuries of intermittent religious warfare, during which Catholic and Protestant waged war on one another, plundered and pillaged lands, and murdered one another for the salvation of their respective souls, before the people of western Europe were willing to stop fighting and begin to recognize for others that which they were fighting for for themselves. When religious tolerance finally became established by law, civilization had made a tremendous advance. The religious wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were waged with greatest intensity in Spain, France, and the German States, though no land wholly escaped. The result of this religious strife was to check the progress of the higher civilization of the people for nearly three centuries, and to delay greatly the coming of the great blessing of freedom in matters of religious belief, while the poverty and misery resulting from the devastation of these religious wars left neither the energy for nor the interest in educational or political progress.