Of such narrowness we do not find a trace in the fathers of the
Bohemian Reformation, who were themselves men of high intellectual
cultivation; and even their most zealous followers kept themselves
nearly free from it. If, as we have seen in the preceding period,
political, poetical, and religious subjects were merged in each other,
it was only the necessary result of the confusion occasioned by the
struggles of the time. Where one object is predominant, all others
must naturally become subordinate; but wherever that which appears
amiable only as the free tendency of the whole soul, is exacted as a
duty, a spiritual despotism is to be feared; of which we find very
little in the history of Bohemian literature. The classics never were
studied with more attention and devotion, were never imitated with
more taste. Italy, the cradle of fine arts, and then the seat of
general cultivation, was never visited more frequently by the Bohemian
nobility, than when three-fourths of the nation adhered to the
Protestant Church. At the very time, too, when the Bohemian
Protestants had to watch most closely their religious liberties, and
to defend them against the encroachments of a treacherous court, they
did not deem it a desertion of the cause of religion to unite with the
same Romanists, whose theological doctrines they contested, in their
labours in the fields of philology, astronomy, and natural philosophy.
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