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.

The power of Barneveld and his partisans was now put to a severe strain.  His efforts to bring back the Hague seceders were powerless.  The influence of Uytenbogaert over the Stadholder steadily diminished.  He prayed to be relieved from his post in the Great Church of the Hague, especially objecting to serve with a Contra-Remonstrant preacher whom Maurice wished to officiate there in place of the seceding Rosaeus.  But the Stadholder refused to let him go, fearing his influence in other places.  “There is stuff in him,” said Maurice, “to outweigh half a dozen Contra-Remonstrant preachers.”  Everywhere in Holland the opponents of the Five Points refused to go to the churches, and set up tabernacles for themselves in barns, outhouses, canal-boats.  And the authorities in town and village nailed up the barn-doors, and dispersed the canal boat congregations, while the populace pelted them with stones.  The seceders appealed to the Stadholder, pleading that at least they ought to be allowed to hear the word of God as they understood it without being forced into churches where they were obliged to hear Arminian blasphemy.  At least their barns might be left them.  “Barns,” said Maurice, “barns and outhouses!  Are we to preach in barns?  The churches belong to us, and we mean to have them too.”

Not long afterwards the Stadholder, clapping his hand on his sword hilt, observed that these differences could only be settled by force of arms.  An ominous remark and a dreary comment on the forty years’ war against the Inquisition.