The time was one of feverish unrest and unwholesome irritability. Ever since the so-called Carlsbad decrees of 1819 all the agencies of the higher literature and education had been subjected to an inquisitorial supervision which everywhere surmised political insubordination and religious heresy. A petty provincialism pervaded what was then still the small Residenz-Stadt Berlin; and the King, Frederick William III, cherished to the full that paternal conception of his position which has not been unusual in the royal house of Prussia. Champions of orthodoxy warned him that Hegelianism was unchristian, if not even anti-christian. Franz von Baader, the Bavarian religious philosopher (who had spent some months at Berlin during the winter of 1823-4, studying the religious and philosophical teaching of the universities in connexion with the revolutionary doctrines which he saw fermenting throughout Europe), addressed the king in a communication which described the prevalent Protestant theology as infidel in its very source, and as tending directly to annihilate the foundations of the faith. Hegel himself had to remind the censor of heresy that 'all speculative philosophy on religion maybe carried to atheism: all depends on who carries it; the peculiar piety of our times and the malevolence of demagogues will not let us want carriers[12].' His own theology was suspected both by the Rationalists and by the Evangelicals. He writes to his wife (in 1827) that he had looked at the university buildings in Louvain and Liège with the feeling that they might one day afford him a resting-place 'when the parsons in Berlin make the Kupfergraben completely intolerable for him[13].' 'The Roman Curia,' he adds, 'would be a more honourable opponent than the miserable cabals of a miserable boiling of parsons in Berlin.' Hence the tone in which the preface proceeds (p. xviii).