from the opportunity it afforded to potentates and great nobles for helping themselves to Church property.  No doubt many Netherlanders thought that their fortunes might be improved at the expense of the monks, and for the benefit of religion.  Even without apostasy from the mother Church, they looked with longing eyes on the wealth of her favored and indolent children.  They thought that the King would do well to carve a round number of handsome military commanderies out of the abbey lands, whose possessors should be bound to military service after the ancient manner of fiefs, so that a splendid cavalry, headed by the gentlemen of the country, should be ever ready to mount and ride at the royal pleasure, in place of a horde of lazy epicureans, telling beads and indulging themselves in luxurious vice.

Such views were entertained; such language often held.  These circumstances and sentiments had their influence among the causes which produced the great revolt now impending.  Care should be taken, however, not to exaggerate that influence.  It is a prodigious mistake to refer this great historical event to sources so insufficient as the ambition of a few great nobles, and the embarrassments of a larger number of needy gentlemen.  The Netherlands revolt was not an aristocratic, but a popular, although certainly not a democratic movement.  It was a great episode—­the longest, the darkest, the bloodiest, the most important episode in the history of the religious reformation in Europe.  The nobles so conspicuous upon the surface at the outbreak, only drifted before a storm which they neither caused nor controlled.  Even the most powerful and the most sagacious were tossed to and fro by the surge of great events, which, as they rolled more and more tumultuously around them, seemed to become both irresistible and unfathomable.

For the state of the people was very different from the condition of the aristocracy.  The period of martyrdom had lasted long and was to last loner; but there were symptoms that it might one day be succeeded by a more active stage of popular disease.  The tumults of the Netherlands were long in ripening; when the final outbreak came it would have been more philosophical to enquire, not why it had occurred, but how it could have been so long postponed.  During the reign of Charles, the sixteenth century had been advancing steadily in strength as the once omnipotent Emperor lapsed into decrepitude.  That extraordinary century had not dawned upon the earth only to increase the strength of absolutism and superstition.  The new world had not been discovered, the ancient world reconquered, the printing-press perfected, only that the inquisition might reign undisturbed over the fairest portions of the earth, and chartered hypocrisy fatten upon its richest lands.  It was impossible that the most energetic and quick-witted people of Europe should not feel sympathy with the great effort made by Christendom to shake off the