The precepts of the law were valuable in the eyes of the Scribes because they were the seal of Jewish particularism, the barrier erected between the world at large and the exclusive community of Yahweh's grace.
Among the factors, economic, geographic, political and social, which combined to bring about the decline of the Hanseatic League, none was probably more influential than the absence of a German political power comparable in unity and energy with those of France and England, which could quell particularism at home, and abroad maintain in its vigour the trade which these towns had developed and defended with their imperfect union.
To say nothing of the labours of the Cistercians as colonists, pioneers and churchbuilders, or of the missions of the Dominicans and Franciscans (the former of whom were introduced into Poland by Ivo, bishop of Cracow,' the personal friend of Dominic), the Church was the one stable and unifying element in an age of centrifugal particularism.
But his eloquence offended the narrow and cramped particularism of those little democratic cities, deaf to the sentiment of the common interest.
His policy followed extreme lines in the sense of furthering the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils system, while at the same time he manifested a Bavarian particularism of his own in his efforts to maintain his conceptions of republican government in conjunction with the Councils in Bavaria as against the centralizing tendencies of the Berlin policy.
