in our belief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese pastors, who contend that it is an insult to the Divinity to imagine that a being full of goodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by an eternity of torment.  In a word, they have no other creed than pure Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call mysteries, and supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that it shall propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason.  Religion here is almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among nearly all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect for Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism."[240] And it would be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising tendencies.  Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who anticipated some of the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in 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]