very little of either, and who have given but slender proofs of constancy or service to the fatherland, could through pretended zeal gain credit over there against men well proved in all respects.  We wonder the more because they are endeavouring, in ecclesiastical matters at least, to usurp an extraordinary authority, against which his Majesty, with very weighty reasons, has so many times declared his opinion founded upon God’s Word and upon all laws and principles of justice.”

It was Barneveld’s practice on this as on subsequent occasions very courteously to confute the King out of his own writings and speeches, and by so doing to be unconsciously accumulating an undying hatred against himself in the royal breast.  Certainly nothing could be easier than to show that James, while encouraging in so reckless a manner the emancipation of the ministers of an advanced sect in the Reformed Church from control of government, and their usurpation of supreme authority which had been destroyed in England, was outdoing himself in dogmatism and inconsistency.  A king-highpriest, who dictated his supreme will to bishops and ministers as well as to courts and parliaments, was ludicrously employed in a foreign country in enforcing the superiority of the Church to the State.

“You will give good assurances,” said the Advocate, “upon my word, that the conservation of the true Reformed religion is as warmly cherished here, especially by me, as at any time during the war.”

He next alluded to the charges then considered very grave against certain writings of Vorstius, and with equal fairness to his accusers as he had been to the Professor gave a pledge that the subject should be examined.

“If the man in question,” he said, “be the author, as perhaps falsely imputed, of the work ‘De Filiatione Christi’ or things of that sort, you may be sure that he shall have no furtherance here.”  He complained, however, that before proof the cause was much prejudiced by the circulation through the press of letters on the subject from important personages in England.  His own efforts to do justice in the matter were traversed by such machinations.  If the Professor proved to be guilty of publications fairly to be deemed atheistical and blasphemous, he should be debarred from his functions, but the outcry from England was doing more harm than good.

“The published extract from the letter of the Archbishop,” he wrote, “to the effect that the King will declare My Lords the States to be his enemies if they are not willing to send the man away is doing much harm.”

Truly, if it had come to this—­that a King of England was to go to war with a neighbouring and friendly republic because an obnoxious professor of theology was not instantly hurled from a university of which his Majesty was not one of the overseers—­it was time to look a little closely into the functions of governments and the nature of public and international law.  Not that the sword of James was in reality very likely to be unsheathed, but his shriekings and his scribblings, pacific as he was himself, were likely to arouse passions which torrents of blood alone could satiate.