This was the practical question involved in the fierce dispute as to dogma.  The famous duel between Arminius and Gomarus; the splendid theological tournaments which succeeded; six champions on a side armed in full theological panoply and swinging the sharpest curtal axes which learning, passion, and acute intellect could devise, had as yet produced no beneficent result.  Nobody had been convinced by the shock of argument, by the exchange of those desperate blows.  The High Council of the Hague had declared that no difference of opinion in the Church existed sufficient to prevent fraternal harmony and happiness.  But Gomarus loudly declared that, if there were no means of putting down the heresy of Arminius, there would before long be a struggle such as would set province against province, village against village, family against family, throughout the land.  He should be afraid to die in such doctrine.  He shuddered that any one should dare to come before God’s tribunal with such blasphemies.  Meantime his great adversary, the learned and eloquent, the musical, frolicsome, hospitable heresiarch was no more.  Worn out with controversy, but peaceful and happy in the convictions which were so bitterly denounced by Gomarus and a large proportion of both preachers and laymen in the Netherlands, and convinced that the schism which in his view had been created by those who called themselves the orthodox would weaken the cause of Protestantism throughout Europe, Arminius died at the age of forty-nine.

The magistrates throughout Holland, with the exception of a few cities, were Arminian, the preachers Gomarian; for Arminius ascribed to the civil authority the right to decide upon church matters, while Gomarus maintained that ecclesiastical affairs should be regulated in ecclesiastical assemblies.  The overseers of Leyden University appointed Conrad Vorstius to be professor of theology in place of Arminius.  The selection filled to the brim the cup of bitterness, for no man was more audaciously latitudinarian than he.  He was even suspected of Socinianism.  There came a shriek from King James, fierce and shrill enough to rouse Arminius from his grave.  James foamed to the mouth at the insolence of the overseers in appointing such a monster of infidelity to the professorship.  He ordered his books to be publicly burned in St. Paul’s Churchyard and at both Universities, and would have burned the Professor himself with as much delight as Torquemada or Peter Titelman ever felt in roasting their victims, had not the day for such festivities gone by.  He ordered the States of Holland on pain of for ever forfeiting his friendship to exclude Vorstius at once from the theological chair and to forbid him from “nestling anywhere in the country.”

He declared his amazement that they should tolerate such a pest as Conrad Vorstius.  Had they not had enough of the seed sown by that foe of God, Arminius?  He ordered the States-General to chase the blasphemous monster from the land, or else he would cut off all connection with their false and heretic churches and make the other Reformed churches of Europe do the same, nor should the youth of England ever be allowed to frequent the University of Leyden.