“There is no city where cultured people and philosophers are to be found in greater number than in Geneva,” Voltaire wrote in March 1756. His praise had been constant since he had settled there a year before. After leaving Louis XV for the service of Frederick II, he had broken away from the latter in the most humiliating circumstances of his existence; forbidden now by the French King to return to Paris, he was in a frame of mind particularly susceptible to enjoy republican hospitality and to appreciate the very original character of his city of refuge. Geneva was as democratic as ancient Athens and ruled, in principle at least, by the universal suffrage of its citizens; its stabilility and conservatism, on the other hand, had allowed the development of a distinguished patrician society; his new residence was provided with a back-drop both picturesque and elegant. The intellectual life of the city could have been matched by very few capitals: Theodore Tronchin, the first doctor of Europe (and Voltaire's excuse for having settled there), Charles Bonnet, the naturalist and paleontologist, the philologist Abauzit, among scores of others, were in the vanguard of scientific progress. Above all, Geneva symbolized a major victory over Catholicism; true, it had stopped half way, in his judgment, but matters had progressed since the sixteenth century and the present prospects were very hopeful: “Geneva is not any more the Geneva of Calvin,” he wrote to Cideville, “not by a long shot; it is a country filled with philosophers…” And to Pierre Rousseau, a year later: “Geneva is at present perhaps the city in Europe where there are most philosophers…”

The left-wingers of the Protestant Reformation, harassed and persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike, sought shelter where best they could. While the constantly threatening shadow of the Turkish campaigns made the kingdom of Hungary a most uninviting place of refuge, nevertheless large numbers of the persecuted, particularly Anabaptists, pressed their way into Hungary and attempted to establish colonies of their own. The unsettled state of religious affairs offered some hope of existence, perhaps of ultimate triumph of their views. However, the persecuting arms of the law of 1548 reached out to suppress them along with the sacramentarians: “they must be driven far away from everybody's estates … and they or any others must no longer be permitted within the boundaries of the kingdom.”

The Armenian Church's devotional writers, by way of eminence, are of the Middle Ages, or what is known as the Silver Age of Armenian Literature, namely, Gregory of Nareg, and the Catholicos, Nerses the Graceful.

The seventeenth century was a period of tremendous currents and cross currents of theological thought and ecclesiastical development. There were scholasticism and pietism; orthodoxy and liberalism; intolerance and tolerance; confessionalism and syncretism; hierarchy against clergy; state interests and church interests. These vital currents of thought were not confined to the mainland of the Continent, but were to be found also in the development of Swedish ecclesiastical thought and life. Some men were carried on rapidly by the fast moving streams while others were dragged down into the whirlpool of the conflict of ideas and destroyed. Johannes Matthiae, the Comenius of Sweden, was one of those who were engulfed by the conflict and brought to ecclesiastical defeat.