Of the countries immediately contiguous to Germany, the home and cradle of Protestantism, Switzerland was at the commencement of the Reformation, the theatre of a fierce civil war, in which the Swiss Reformer fell fighting on the field of battle. But the strong federal spirit of the Swiss, the necessity of mutual defence, and the nearly equal numbers and strength of both religious parties, produced at an early period a religious pacification. The indirect Protestant influence which French Switzerland has exerted over France, has continued very great and powerful from Calvin to Rousseau. After the German treaty of Westphalia, the Austrian Emperors established in Hungary, which was already half subdued by the Turks, and still more exposed to their ravages, the principle of religious toleration--a principle that became a received maxim of state, and was incorporated into the very constitution of the country. In the last half of the sixteenth century, there penetrated into Poland the sect of Socinus, which professed tenets distinct from those of the primitive Reformers, and which with the usually rapid march of religious innovation, and schismatic dissent, had now rejected along with the great Mystery of devotion, the fundamental article of Christian theology, the doctrine of the Trinity. As long as the Socinians formed a distinct and separate body of religionists, they were not very numerous in Poland, or elsewhere; but during the prevailing infidelity of the eighteenth century, they acquired many more disciples, and in many countries have become almost the predominant sect.--How Prussia, the land of the Teutonic order was transformed into a secular duchy, which for about a century remained connected with Poland, I have already had occasion to observe. Into no country of Europe was Christianity introduced so late as into Lithuania, where the faith was planted only towards the end of the fourteenth century. In the ancient Russian provinces of Poland, as well as in Hungary and other neighbouring countries, a large portion of the population belonged to the Greek church. In the great struggle of the following age, and in the perpetual wars which Poland had to sustain against Turkey, Sweden and Russia, all these hostile and heterogeneous elements of which I have spoken, and to which may be added the real or apparent attachment of the religious Dissenters to Sweden, increased the general ferment and confusion in the Polish state, down to the final dissolution and dismemberment of the kingdom. Russia, which towards the end of the fifteenth century had been restored to a high degree of power and splendour by Wassili Ivanowitch, (who entertained the most friendly relations with the Emperor Maximilian, and who had established in his Empire the German Hanseatic league), Russia still remained totally separated from the European community, and was exempt from the influence of Protestantism, like Spain and Italy at the opposite extremity of Europe.