Was Barneveld, who hated the Reformed religion (so men told each other), and who believed in nothing, to continue dictator of the whole Republic through his influence over one province, prescribing its religious dogmas and laying down its laws; or had not the time come for the States-General to vindicate the rights of the Church, and to crush for ever the pernicious principle of State sovereignty and burgher oligarchy?

The abyss was wide and deep, and the wild waves were raging more madly every hour.  The Advocate, anxious and troubled, but undismayed, did his best in the terrible emergency.  He conferred with Prince Maurice on the subject of the Ryswyk secession, and men said that he sought to impress upon him, as chief of the military forces, the necessity of putting down religious schism with the armed hand.

The Prince had not yet taken a decided position.  He was still under the influence of John Uytenbogaert, who with Arminius and the Advocate made up the fateful three from whom deadly disasters were deemed to have come upon the Commonwealth.  He wished to remain neutral.  But no man can be neutral in civil contentions threatening the life of the body politic any more than the heart can be indifferent if the human frame is sawn in two.

“I am a soldier,” said Maurice, “not a divine.  These are matters of theology which I don’t understand, and about which I don’t trouble myself.”

On another occasion he is reported to have said, “I know nothing of predestination, whether it is green or whether it is blue; but I do know that the Advocate’s pipe and mine will never play the same tune.”

It was not long before he fully comprehended the part which he must necessarily play.  To say that he was indifferent to religious matters was as ridiculous as to make a like charge against Barneveld.  Both were religious men.  It would have been almost impossible to find an irreligious character in that country, certainly not among its highest-placed and leading minds.  Maurice had strong intellectual powers.  He was a regular attendant on divine worship, and was accustomed to hear daily religious discussions.  To avoid them indeed, he would have been obliged not only to fly his country, but to leave Europe.  He had a profound reverence for the memory of his father, Calbo y Calbanista, as William the Silent had called himself.  But the great prince had died before these fierce disputes had torn the bosom of the Reformed Church, and while Reformers still were brethren.  But if Maurice were a religious man, he was also a keen politician; a less capable politician, however, than a soldier, for he was confessedly the first captain of his age.  He was not rapid in his conceptions, but he was sure in the end to comprehend his opportunity.

The Church, the people, the Union—­the sacerdotal, the democratic, and the national element—­united under a name so potent to conjure with as the name of Orange-Nassau, was stronger than any other possible combination.  Instinctively and logically therefore the Stadholder found himself the chieftain of the Contra-Remonstrant party, and without the necessity of an apostasy such as had been required of his great contemporary to make himself master of France.