The Long View.

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 religious ideas and practices, which came to be subtly or profoundly affected by the decisions of states to sanction one set of religious beliefs and rituals against another. In the Age of the Baroque that began after 1600, new forces soon appeared that were to transform fundamentally...