Even now political passion is almost as ready to flame forth, either in ardent affection or enthusiastic hatred, as if two centuries and a half had not elapsed since his death.  His name is so typical of a party, a polity, and a faith, so indelibly associated with a great historical cataclysm, as to render it difficult even for the grave, the conscientious, the learned, the patriotic, of his own compatriots to speak of him with absolute impartiality.

“A foreigner who loves and admires all that is great and noble in the history of that famous republic, and can have no hereditary bias as to its ecclesiastical or political theories, may at least attempt the task with comparative coldness, although conscious of inability to do thorough justice to a most complex subject.”

With all Mr. Motley’s efforts to be impartial, to which even his sternest critics bear witness, he could not help becoming a partisan of the cause which for him was that of religious liberty and progress, as against the accepted formula of an old ecclesiastical organization.  For the quarrel which came near being a civil war, which convulsed the state, and cost Barneveld his head, had its origin in a difference on certain points, and more especially on a single point, of religious doctrine.

As a great river may be traced back until its fountainhead is found in a thread of water streaming from a cleft in the rocks, so a great national movement may sometimes be followed until its starting-point is found in the cell of a monk or the studies of a pair of wrangling professors.

The religious quarrel of the Dutchmen in the seventeenth century reminds us in some points of the strife between two parties in our own New England, sometimes arraying the “church” on one side against the “parish,” or the general body of worshippers, on the other.  The portraits of Gomarus, the great orthodox champion, and Arminius, the head and front of the “liberal theology” of his day, as given in the little old quarto of Meursius, recall two ministerial types of countenance familiar to those who remember the earlier years of our century.

Under the name of “Remonstrants” and “Contra-Remonstrants,”—­Arminians and old-fashioned Calvinists, as we should say,—­the adherents of the two Leyden professors disputed the right to the possession of the churches, and the claim to be considered as representing the national religion.  Of the seven United Provinces, two, Holland and Utrecht, were prevailingly Arminian, and the other five Calvinistic.  Barneveld, who, under the title of Advocate, represented the province of Holland, the most important of them all, claimed for each province a right to determine its own state religion.  Maurice the Stadholder, son of William the Silent, the military chief of the republic, claimed the right for the States-General.  ’Cujus regio ejus religio’ was then the accepted public doctrine of Protestant nations.  Thus the provincial and the general governments were