Natural rights presented many aspects and many tendencies: and it would be well to begin by distinguishing and enumerating these. In the first place, the school taken as a whole and in its essential character expressed the social progress by which Europe, on emerging from feudalism and religious warfare, acquired a new consciousness, distinctively bourgeois and non-clerical in character; and it observed that the growth of this consciousness was contemporaneous with the anti-clerical and bourgeois institution of "masonry." The word "natural" meant, among other things, "not supernatural": and hence implied hostility or indifference towards the supernatural, the institutions representing it, and the social conflicts resulting from it. It was not by accident that Grotius was an Arminian; that Puffendorf went to law with theologians; that Thomasius is remembered as one of the champions of freedom of conscience. The protestations of respect for religion and the church, habitually and liberally inserted by these publicists in their works,--which are draped, so to speak, with a veil of piety,--were merely politic safeguards, enabling the author to threaten the enemy unobserved and to strike from under cover. This caution is praised, in Grotius's case for example, by a follower of the school (the author of _Pauco plenior iuris naturalis historia,_ 1719), who extols the master as "the instrument of divine providence," coming like Messiah to redeem the "natural light" from its bondage to the "supernatural," and as such gifted with all the power and ability he could need: so that after tasting the persecutions of Scholasticism, "he behaved with caution, to avoid further irritating the jealousy against his natural and reasonable prudence that had issued forth from its lair at his threats" (_caute versabatur ... ne maius bilem adversus prudentiam naturalem et rationalem ex latebris productam tam minis irritaret_), and in proceeding to separate human from divine laws, did not execute a frontal assault on the theological school when he attacked its fundamental errors, but even praised it in the preface to his work. The word "natural" also denoted what is common to individuals of different nations and ranks: and hence from a practical point of view provided an admirable war-cry for uniting the bourgeoisie of different countries in definite common aspirations and struggles. The treatises of natural rights were for the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries what the "Manifesto of the communists" and the cry "Proletariates of the world, unite" attempted to be for the working classes of the nineteenth.