Note 165 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

Faustus, who arrived in Poland in 1579, seems to have been moved to his strenuously “moderate” policy, which for a time unified the bulk of the party, mainly by a desire to keep on tolerable terms with Protestantism. That, however, did not serve him with the Catholics; and when the reaction set in he suffered severely at their hands. His treatise, De Jesu Christu Servatore, created bitter resentment; and in 1598 the Catholic rabble of Cracow, led “as usual by the students of the university,” dragged him from his house. His life was saved only by the strenuous efforts of the rector and two professors of the university; and his library was destroyed, with his manuscripts, whereof “he particularly regretted a treatise which he had composed against the atheists”;165 though it is not recorded that the atheists had ever menaced either his life or his property. He seems to have been zealous against all heresy that outwent his own, preaching passive obedience in politics as emphatically as any churchman, and condemning alike the rising of the Dutch against Spanish rule and the resistance of the French Protestants to their king.166