existence in the downs, burrowing like a rabbit in the sand.  They had also much to say in disparagement of all John’s connections.  Not only was his father a murderer, but his wife, whom he had married for money, was the child of a most horrible incest, his sisters were prostitutes, his sons and brothers were debauchees and drunkards, and, in short, never had a distinguished man a more uncomfortable and discreditable family-circle than that which surrounded Barneveld, if the report of his enemies was to be believed.  Yet it is agreeable to reflect that, with all the venom which they had such power of secreting, these malignant tongues had been unable to destroy the reputation of the man himself.  John’s character was honourable and upright, his intellectual power not disputed even by those who at a later period hated him the most bitterly.  He had been a profound and indefatigable student from his earliest youth.  He had read law at Leyden, in France, at Heidelberg.  Here, in the head-quarters of German Calvinism, his youthful mind had long pondered the dread themes of foreknowledge, judgment absolute, free will, and predestination:  To believe it worth the while of a rational and intelligent Deity to create annually several millions of thinking beings, who were to struggle for a brief period on earth, and to consume in perpetual brimstone afterwards, while others were predestined to endless enjoyment, seemed to him an indifferent exchange for a faith in the purgatory and paradise of Rome.  Perplexed in the extreme, the youthful John bethought himself of an inscription over the gateway of his famous but questionable great grandfather’s house at Amersfort—­’nil scire tutissima fides.’  He resolved thenceforth to adopt a system of ignorance upon matters beyond the flaming walls of the world; to do the work before him manfully and faithfully while he walked the earth, and to trust that a benevolent Creator would devote neither him nor any other man to eternal hellfire.  For this most offensive doctrine he was howled at by the strictly pious, while he earned still deeper opprobrium by daring to advocate religious toleration:  In face of the endless horrors inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition upon his native land, he had the hardihood—­although a determined Protestant himself—­to claim for Roman Catholics the right to exercise their religion in the free States on equal terms with those of the reformed faith.  “Anyone,” said his enemies, “could smell what that meant who had not a wooden nose.”  In brief, he was a liberal Christian, both in theory and practice, and he nobly confronted in consequence the wrath of bigots on both sides.  At a later period the most zealous Calvinists called him Pope John, and the opinions to which he was to owe such appellations had already been formed in his mind.