This study describes the period of great changes in European history - the decline in the belief of magic and miracles and emerging of the new way of thinking which has brought the rise of religious persecution, the gradual secularization of politics and the rise of toleration and rationalism.
Contents:
Rationalism in Europe
On the Declining Sense of the Miraculous
Magic and Witchcraft
On the Declining Sense of the Miraculous
The Miracles of the Church
Aesthetic, Scientific, and Moral Developments of Rationalism
On Persecution
The Antecedents of Persecution
The Secularisation of Politics
The Industrial History of Rationalism

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903) was an Irish historian, essayist, and political theorist with Whig proclivities.