Note 3 — Chapter XIX · FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES

In 1708 there was published at Amsterdam a work under the pseudonym of “Juan di Posos,” wherein, by way of a relation of imaginary travels, something like atheism was said to be taught; but the pastor Leenhof had in 1703 been accused of atheism for his treatise, Heaven on Earth, which was at most Spinozistic.3 Even as late as 1714 a Spinozist shoemaker, Booms, was banished for his writings; but henceforth liberal influences, largely traceable to the works of Bayle, begin to predominate. Welcomed by students everywhere, Bayle must have made powerfully for tolerance and rationalism in his adopted country, which after his time became a centre of culture for the States of northern Europe rather than a source of original works. Holland in the eighteenth century was receptive alike of French and English thought and literature, especially the former;4 and, besides reprinting many of the French deists’ works and translating some of the English, the Dutch cities harboured such heretics as the Italian Alberto Radicati, Count Passerano, who, dying at Rotterdam in 1736, left a collection of deistic treatises of a strongly freethinking cast to be posthumously published.