There had been working substitutes found, as we well know, for the deficiencies of this constitution, but the Advocate felt himself bound to obey and enforce obedience to the laws and privileges of his country so long as they remained without authorized change.  His country was the Province of Holland, to which his allegiance was due and whose servant he was.  That there was but one church paid and sanctioned by law, he admitted, but his efforts were directed to prevent discord within that church, by counselling moderation, conciliation, mutual forbearance, and abstention from irritating discussion of dogmas deemed by many thinkers and better theologians than himself not essential to salvation.  In this he was much behind his age or before it.  He certainly was not with the majority.

And thus, while the election of Ferdinand had given the signal of war all over Christendom, while from the demolished churches in Bohemia the tocsin was still sounding, whose vibrations were destined to be heard a generation long through the world, there was less sympathy felt with the call within the territory of the great republic of Protestantism than would have seemed imaginable a few short years before.  The capture of the Cloister Church at the Hague in the summer of 1617 seemed to minds excited by personal rivalries and minute theological controversy a more momentous event than the destruction of the churches in the Klostergrab in the following December.  The triumph of Gomarism in a single Dutch city inspired more enthusiasm for the moment than the deadly buffet to European Protestantism could inspire dismay.

The church had been carried and occupied, as it were, by force, as if an enemy’s citadel.  It seemed necessary to associate the idea of practical warfare with a movement which might have been a pacific clerical success.  Barneveld and those who acted with him, while deploring the intolerance out of which the schism had now grown to maturity, had still hoped for possible accommodation of the quarrel.  They dreaded popular tumults leading to oppression of the magistracy by the mob or the soldiery and ending in civil war.  But what was wanted by the extreme partisans on either side was not accommodation but victory.

“Religious differences are causing much trouble and discontents in many cities,” he said.  “At Amsterdam there were in the past week two assemblages of boys and rabble which did not disperse without violence, crime, and robbery.  The brother of Professor Episcopius (Rem Bischop) was damaged to the amount of several thousands.  We are still hoping that some better means of accommodation may be found.”