But this process, though real, was hidden, and the victory still seemed on the theological side.
The development of the new truth and its struggle against the old error still went on.

In Holland, Balthazar Bekker wrote his book against the worst forms of the superstition, and attempted to help the scientific side by a text from the Second Epistle of St.Peter, showing that the devils had been confined by the Almighty, and therefore could not be doing on earth the work which was imputed to them.

But Bekker's Protestant brethren drove him from his pulpit, and he narrowly escaped with his life.
The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently the worst.

So it proved in this case.

In the first half of the seventeenth century the cruelties arising from the old doctrine were more numerous and severe than ever before.