CHANGED ATTITUDE TOWARD THE OLD PROBLEMS. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the bloody Thirty Years' War, itself the culmination of a century of bitter and vindictive religious strife, has often been regarded as both an end and a beginning. Though the persecution of minorities for a time continued, especially in France, this treaty marked the end of the attempt of the Church and the Catholic States to stamp out Protestantism on the continent of Europe. The religious independence of the Protestant States was now acknowledged, and the beginnings of religious freedom were established by treaty. This new freedom of conscience, once definitely begun for the ruling princes, was certain in time to be extended further. Ultimately the day must come, though it might be centuries away, when individual as well as national freedom in religious matters must be granted as a right, and one of the greatest blessings of mankind finally be firmly established by law. [17] The end of the period of bitter religious warfare, too, was followed by a reaction against religious intolerance which contained within itself the germs of much future liberty and human progress. Paulsen has well expressed the change, in the following words: [18] The long and terrible wars to which the ecclesiastical schism had everywhere given rise--the wars of the Huguenots in France, the Thirty Years War, and the Civil War in England--had, in the end, created a feeling of indifference toward religious and theological problems. Did it really pay, people asked themselves, to kill each other and devastate each other's countries for the sake of such questions? Could these problems ever be decided at all? If not, was it not much more reasonable to let everyone believe what he could, and, instead of wasting breath and arguments, convincing to nobody, on transubstantiation, predestination, and real presence, to cultivate sciences which really placed lasting and verifiable truths within the reach of the understanding, such as mathematics and natural philosophy, geography and astronomy? Here were sciences which offered knowledge to the mind that could be turned to account in this earthly life, whereas those transcendental speculations were of no use at all.... Toward the end of the seventeenth century this spirit of indifference and scepticism toward theology, and sometimes even toward religion in general and the future world, formed a most important factor in the changing intellectual attitude of the times. [19]