Many comments by intellectual historians and historians of philosophy about the early impact of Spinoza's thought suggest there prevailed more or less everywhere a fairly uniform pattern of rejection, denunciation, and repudiation. Even the earliest reactions in Holland and Germany demonstrate many conflicting responses which were indeed in part confessional, much depending on whether the critic was a Calvinist, Lutheran, Arminian, or Socinian-Collegiant but which were even more varied from the standpoint of philosophy and the question of the status of reason. A high proportion of the early antagonists were perfectly willing to embrace this or that slice of Spinoza's argument such as his plea for toleration. In the light of this, it is hardly surprising that the early Dutch and German reactions to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus turn out to have foreshadowed the wide variety of positions surrounding Spinoza's philosophical challenge characteristic of the Enlightenment as a whole.