There is little to see inside this or any other church in Holland; travelers will rather seek for the memorials at the Kloveniers Doelen, of the famous Synod of Dort, which was held 1618-19, in the hope of effecting a compromise between the Gomarists, or disciples of Calvin, and the Arminians who followed Zwingli, and who had recently obtained the name of Remonstrants from the “remonstrance” which they had addrest eight years before in defense of their doctrines.  The Calvinists held that the greater part of mankind was excluded from grace, which the Arminians denied; but at the Synod of Dort the Calvinists proclaimed themselves as infallible as the Pope, and their resolutions became the law of the Dutch Reformed Church.  The Arminians were forthwith outlawed; a hundred ministers who refused to subscribe to the dictates of the Synod were banished; Hugo Grotius and Rombout Hoogerbeets were imprisoned for life at Loevestein; the body of the secretary Ledenberg, was hung; and Van Olden Barneveldt, the friend of William the Silent, was beheaded in his seventy-second year....

Through the street of wine—­Wijnstraat—­built over stonehouses used for the staple, we went to the museum to see the pictures.  There were two schools of Dortrecht.  Jacob Geritee Cuyp (1575); Albert Cuyp (1605), Ferdinand Bol (1611), Nicolas Maas (1632), and Schalken (1643) belonged to the former; Arend de Gelder, Arnold Houbraken, Dirk Stoop, and Ary Scheffer are of the latter.  Sunshine and glow were the characteristics of the first school, grayness and sobriety of the second.  But there are few good pictures at Dort now, and some of the best works of Cuyp are to be found in our National Gallery, [London] executed at his native place and portraying the great brick tower of the church in the golden haze of evening, seen across rich pastures, where the cows are lying deep in the meadow grass.  The works of Ary Scheffer are now the most interesting pictures in the Dortrecht Gallery.  Of the subject, “Christus Consolator,” there are two representations.  In the more striking of these the pale Christ is seated among the sick, sorrowful, blind, maimed, and enslaved, who are all stretching their hands to Him.  Beneath is the tomb which the artist executed for his mother, Cornelia Scheffer, whose touching figure is represented lying with outstretched hands, in the utmost abandonment of repose.

THE ZUYDER ZEE[A]

[Footnote A:  From “Holland and Its People.”  Translated by Caroline Tilton.  By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, G.P.  Putnam’s Sons.  Copyright, 1880.]

BY EDMONDO DE AMICIS

This great basin of the North Sea, which bathes five provinces and has an extent of more than seven hundred square kilometers, six hundred years ago was not in existence.  North Holland touched Friesland, and where the gulf now extends there was a vast region sprinkled with fresh-water lakes, the largest of which, the Flevo, mentioned by Tacitus, was separated from the sea by a fertile and populous isthmus.  Whether the sea by its own force broke through the natural dikes of the region, or whether the sinking of the land left it free to invasion, is not certainly known.  The great transformation was completed during the course of the thirteenth century.