“I have never been able to believe in the matter of high predestination,” said the Advocate.  “I have left it in the hands of God the Lord.  I hold that a good Christian man must believe that he through God’s grace and by the expiation of his sin through our Redeemer Jesus Christ is predestined to be saved, and that this belief in his salvation, founded alone on God’s grace and the merits of our Redeemer Jesus Christ, comes to him through the same grace of God.  And if he falls into great sins, his firm hope and confidence must be that the Lord God will not allow him to continue in them, but that, through prayer for grace and repentance, he will be converted from evil and remain in the faith to the end of his life.”

These feelings, he said, he had expressed fifty-two years before to three eminent professors of theology in whom he confided, and they had assured him that he might tranquilly continue in such belief without examining further.  “And this has always been my creed,” he said.

The preachers replied that faith is a gift of God and not given to all men, that it must be given out of heaven to a man before he could be saved.  Hereupon they began to dispute, and the Advocate spoke so earnestly and well that the clergymen were astonished and sat for a time listening to him in silence.

He asked afterwards about the Synod, and was informed that its decrees had not yet been promulgated, but that the Remonstrants had been condemned.

“It is a pity,” said he.  “One is trying to act on the old Papal system, but it will never do.  Things have gone too far.  As to the Synod, if My Lords the States of Holland had been heeded there would have been first a provincial synod and then a national one.”—­“But,” he added, looking the preachers in the face, “had you been more gentle with each other, matters would not have taken so high a turn.  But you have been too fierce one against the other, too full of bitter party spirit.”

They replied that it was impossible for them to act against their conscience and the supreme authority.  And then they asked him if there was nothing that troubled him in, his conscience in the matters for which he must die; nothing for which he repented and sorrowed, and for which he would call upon God for mercy.

“This I know well,” he said, “that I have never willingly done wrong to any man.  People have been ransacking my letters to Caron—­confidential ones written several years ago to an old friend when I was troubled and seeking for counsel and consolation.  It is hard that matter of impeachment against me to-day should be sought for thus.”

And then he fell into political discourse again on the subject of the Waartgelders and the State rights, and the villainous pasquils and libels that had circulated so long through the country.