congregation were listening to one of their preachers in a field outside the town.  Suddenly an unknown individual in plain clothes and with a pragmatical demeanor, interrupted the discourse by giving a flat contradiction to some of the doctrines advanced.  The minister replied by a rebuke, and a reiteration of the disputed sentiment.—­The stranger, evidently versed in ecclesiastical matters, volubly and warmly responded.  The preacher, a man of humble condition and moderate abilities, made as good show of argument as he could, but was evidently no match for his antagonist.  He was soon vanquished in the wordy warfare.  Well he might be, for it appeared that the stranger was no less a personage than Peter Rythovius, a doctor of divinity, a distinguished pedant of Louvain, a relation of a bishop and himself a Church dignitary.  This learned professor, quite at home in his subject, was easily triumphant, while the poor dissenter, more accustomed to elevate the hearts of his hearers than to perplex their heads, sank prostrate and breathless under the storm of texts, glosses, and hard Hebrew roots with which he was soon overwhelmed.  The professor’s triumph was, however, but short-lived, for the simple-minded congregation, who loved their teacher, were enraged that he should be thus confounded.  Without more ado, therefore, they laid violent hands upon the Quixotic knight-errant of the Church, and so cudgelled and belabored him bodily that he might perhaps have lost his life in the encounter had he not been protected by the more respectable portion of the assembly.  These persons, highly disapproving the whole proceeding, forcibly rescued him from the assailants, and carried him off to town, where the news of the incident at once created an uproar.  Here he was thrown into prison as a disturber of the peace, but in reality that he might be personally secure.  The next day the Prince of Orange, after administering to him a severe rebuke for his ill-timed exhibition of pedantry, released him from confinement, and had him conveyed out of the city.  “This theologian;” wrote the Prince to Duchess Margaret, “would have done better, methinks, to stay at home; for I suppose he had no especial orders to perform this piece of work.”

Thus, so long as this great statesman could remain in the metropolis, his temperate firmness prevented the explosion which had so long been expected.  His own government of Holland and Zeland, too, especially demanded his care.  The field-preaching had spread in that region with prodigious rapidity.  Armed assemblages, utterly beyond the power of the civil authorities, were taking place daily in the neighborhood of Amsterdam.  Yet the Duchess could not allow him to visit his government in the north.  If he could be spared from Antwerp for a day, it was necessary that he should aid her in a fresh complication with the confederated nobles in the very midst, therefore, of his Antwerp labors, he had been obliged, by Margaret’s