94	RENAISSANCES
Germany was no less violent than the eighth-century explosion had been
in Anatolia, while, as far as could be seen at the time of writing, rather
more than four hundred years later, its effects showed signs of being
much more persistent. This long delayed discharge of pent-up icono-
phobe feelings in a Western quarter of Christendom in which there had
been evidence of such feelings since as early a date as the beginning of
the fourth century, when they had found expression at the Council of
Elvira, suggests that Christian consciences were haunted by the presence
of a Judaic Iconophobia semper et ulique.
In a Protestant Reformation in Western Christendom an Aniconism
that was one of the two fundamental tenets of Judaism was not the only
Judaic ghost that succeeded in reasserting itself. A Judaic Sabbatarian-
ism simultaneously captivated the sixteenth-century secessionists from
the Roman Catholic Church; and the renaissance of this other clement of
Judaism in a Protestant Western Christianity is less easy to explain,
since the extreme meticulousness to which a post-Exilic Jewry in
Ritualism had been a Jewish diaspora's effective elixir for preserving it3
corporate existence as a community under conditions of adversity under
which most other similarly placed communities hud dissolved;1 but, in a
Modern Western Protestant Christian World, the triumph of a Judaixing
Sabbatarianism was not confined to those Protestant communities which,
like the Calvinist minorities in France and in Hungary, found themselves
scattered abroad, more ludaico, among a Roman Catholic Gentile majority;
the same Sabbatarianism captivated those Protestant communities in
the Northern Netherlands, England, Scotland, the Scandinavian coun-
tries, and a number of autonomous Swiss cantons and German princi-
palities and city-states in which the Protestants were masters in their
own house.
It has been suggested that, in some, at least, of these cases, the decep-
tion' of a Judaic Sabbatarianism was an unconscious act of self protection
against a demonic obsession with gainful economic activities which was
so intense that it might soon have worn its votaries out if they had not
providently reserved for themselves a salutary minimum of leisure by
placing this under the sanction of a no less demonic superstition. But
this psychological explanation of a Protestant Western Christian Sab-
batarianism would appear to be ruled out by the historical fact that
these Modern Western Protestant Christian communities had already
become slaves of the Sabbath long before their enslavement to a power-
driven mechanized industry capable of keeping its human slaves* noses
to the grindstone for all the 168 hours in the week. What, then, are we to
make of this paradoxical spectacle ?
The Protestants' paramount objective was to return to the pristine
practice of a Primitive Church; yet here we see them obliterating a differ-
ence of practice between Primitive Christianity and Judaism which the
Primitive Church had introduced expressly to serve as a distinguishing
mark. The Primitive Church had advertised its secession from Jewry by
i See IX. viii, »74,