From the broad perspective of historical evolution, the history of religion in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is best appreciated as a long era of questioning, reappraisal, and transition. In the fourth century, Constantine the Great had converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, and from that date forward governments in Europe had supported the religion's claim to be the sole foundation for all culture, learning, and civilization. The sixteenth-century Protestant and Catholic Reformations had not challenged these underlying assumptions, but they had opened up the experience of Europeans to an ever-broader range of.....
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