I wish it were true. Joseph and a few of his ministers might rise to a sudden height of common sense, but the Austrian peasant, taught since time immemorial to regard the Jew as his natural enemy and the Protestant as a rebel and a renegade, could not possibly overcome that old and deep-rooted prejudice which told him to regard such people as his natural enemies. A century and a half after the promulgation of these excellent Edicts of Tolerance, the position of those who did not belong to the Catholic Church was quite as unfavorable as it had been in the sixteenth century. Theoretically a Jew and a Protestant could hope to become prime ministers or to be appointed commander-in-chief of the army. And in practice it was impossible for them to be invited to dinner by the imperial boot-black. So much for paper decrees. CHAPTER XXIX TOM PAINE Somewhere or other there is a poem to the effect that God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform. The truth of this statement is most apparent to those who have studied the history of the Atlantic seaboard. During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern part of the American continent was settled by people who had gone so far in their devotion to the ideals of the Old Testament that an unsuspecting visitor might have taken them for followers of Moses, rather than disciples of the words of Christ. Cut off from the rest of Europe by a very wide and very stormy and very cold expanse of ocean, these pioneers had set up a spiritual reign of terror which had culminated in the witch-hunting orgies of the Mather family. Now at first sight it seems not very likely that those two reverend gentlemen could in any way be held responsible for the very tolerant tendencies which we find expounded with such able vigor in the Constitution of the United States and in the many documents that were written immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between England and her former colonies. Yet such is undoubtedly the case, for the period of repression of the seventeenth century was so terrible that it was bound to create a furious reaction in favor of a more liberal point of view. This does not mean that all the colonists suddenly sent for the collected works of Socinius and ceased to frighten little children with stories about Sodom and Gomorrah. But their leaders were almost without exception representatives of the new school of thought and with great ability and tact they infused their own conceptions of tolerance into the parchment platform upon which the edifice of their new and independent nation was to be erected.