The Protestants whom episcopal tyranny drove from Salzburg found warm hospitality among their northern brethren. While the professors of the reformed faith were denied civil status in France, and subjected to persecution of a mediæval bloodiness, one Christian was counted exactly as another in Prussia. While England was revelling in the infliction of atrocious penal laws on her Catholic citizens, Prussia extended even to the abhorred Jesuit the shelter which was denied him in Spain and at Rome. The transfer of territory from Austria to Prussia meant the extension of toleration in that territory. Silesia, for instance, no sooner became Prussian, than the University of Breslau, whose advantages had hitherto been rigidly confined to Catholics, was at once compulsorily opened to Protestants and Catholics alike. In criticising Frederick’s despotism let us recognise how much enlightenment, how much of what is truly modern, was to be found in the manner in which this despotic power was exercised, long before the same enlightened principles were accepted in other countries. We cannot understand the issues of the Seven Years’ War, nor indeed of the eighteenth century on any of its more important sides, without tolerably distinct ideas about the ages before and behind it, about the sixteenth century and the twentieth; without ideas as to the conditions of the break-up of the Catholic and the feudal organisation, and, next, as to the attitude proper to be assumed, and the methods to be followed, in dealing with the more or less anarchic circumstances in which their break-up and its sequels leave us. There are two ways of regarding these questions. You may say, as Comte says, that the ultimate type of society, perfected on a basis of positive knowledge, will in the essential features of its constitution correspond to the ancient or mediæval constitution which it replaces; because that gave the fullest possible satisfaction to those elements of human nature which are deepest and permanent, and to those social needs which must always press upon us; that anything which either seriously retards the dissolution of the old, or draws men aside from the road which leads on to the same organisation transformed, must therefore be an impediment in the way of the new society, and a peril to civilisation. Hence, they say, the mischievousness of Protestantism, Voltairism, and all the minor manifestations of the critical spirit, because they inspire their followers with a contempt, as mistaken towards the past as it is pernicious to the future, for those fundamental principles of social stability and individual happiness, to which alone we have to look for the establishment of a better order; because they give to the unguided individual judgment the force and authority that can only come with safety from organisation and tradition, that is from a certain definite form of shaping and expressing the common judgment; and because,