and supremacy of the Church over the State.  The fruits of the forty years’ war would have become dust and ashes.  It would be mere weak sentimentalism to doubt—­after the bloody history which had just closed and the awful tragedy, then reopening—­that every spark of religious liberty would have soon been trodden out in the Netherlands.  The general onslaught of the League with Ferdinand, Maximilian of Bavaria, and Philip of Spain at its head against the distracted, irresolute, and wavering line of Protestantism across the whole of Europe was just preparing.  Rather a wilderness to reign over than a single heretic, was the war-cry of the Emperor.  The King of Spain, as we have just been reading in his most secret, ciphered despatches to the Archduke at Brussels, was nursing sanguine hopes and weaving elaborate schemes for recovering his dominion over the United Netherlands, and proposing to send an army of Jesuits thither to break the way to the reconquest.  To play into his hands then, by granting public right of worship to the Papists, would have been in Barneveld’s opinion like giving up Julich and other citadels in the debatable land to Spain just as the great war between Catholicism and Protestantism was breaking out.  There had been enough of burning and burying alive in the Netherlands during the century which had closed.  It was not desirable to give a chance for their renewal now.

In regard to the Synod, Barneveld justified his course by a simple reference to the 13th Article of the Union.  Words could not more plainly prohibit the interference by the States-General with the religious affairs of any one of the Provinces than had been done by that celebrated clause.  In 1583 there had been an attempt made to amend that article by insertion of a pledge to maintain the Evangelical, Reformed, religion solely, but it was never carried out.  He disdained to argue so self-evident a truth, that a confederacy which had admitted and constantly invited Catholic states to membership, under solemn pledge of noninterference with their religious affairs, had no right to lay down formulas for the Reformed Church throughout all the Netherlands.  The oath of stadholder and magistrates in Holland to maintain the Reformed religion was framed before this unhappy controversy on predestination had begun, and it was mere arrogant assumption on the part of the Contra-Remonstrants to claim a monopoly of that religion, and to exclude the Remonstrants from its folds.

He had steadily done his utmost to assuage those dissensions while maintaining the laws which he was sworn to support.  He had advocated a provincial synod to be amicably assisted by divines from neighbouring countries.  He had opposed a National Synod unless unanimously voted by the Seven Provinces, because it would have been an open violation of the fundamental law of the confederacy, of its whole spirit, and of liberty of conscience.  He admitted that he had himself drawn up a protest on the part of three provinces (Holland,