denying the Trinity,
and so forth,[241] but the time was not then ripe. The general
conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in 1685-6,
says that though there were not many among the Genevese of the first
form of learning, "yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of a
learned education."[242] The pacification of civic troubles in 1738 was
followed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity and
contentment, and it is in such periods that the minds of men previously
trained are wont to turn to the great matters of speculation. There was
at all times a constant communication, both public and private, going on
between Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chief
Protestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the seventeenth
century between the two churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as at
Leyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer who deserves a place
in the history of the transition in the beginning of the eighteenth
century from theology proper to that metaphysical theology, which was
the first marked dissolvent of dogma within the Protestant bodies. To
this general movement of the epoch, of course, Descartes supplied the
first impulse. The leader of the movement in Geneva, that is of an
attempt to pacify the Christian churches on the basis of some such Deism
as was shortly to find its passionate expression in the Savoyard
Vicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini (1661-1737). He
belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and his grandfather
had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence of Geneva
against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he visited
Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, and
France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries of
Descartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquent
exposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy from
the people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There was
much stir for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and in
finding many considerable followers.[243] For example, some three years
or so after his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of _La
Religion Essentielle a l'Homme_, showing that faith in the existence of
a God suffices, and treating with contempt the belief in the
inspiration of the Gospels.[244]

Thus we see what vein of thought was