inspired by the movements which come from the Holy Ghost, and not by the force of man.  Thus kings and princes should be induced by the evils and ruin which they and their subjects have suffered from this cause, as by a sentiment of their own interest, to take more care than has hitherto been taken to practise in good earnest those remedies which were wont to be used at a time when the church was in its greatest piety, in order to correct the abuses and errors which the corruption of mankind had tried to introduce as being the true and sole means of uniting all Christians in one and the same creed.”

Surely the world had made progress in these forty years of war.  Was it not something to gain for humanity, for intellectual advancement, for liberty of thought, for the true interests of religion, that a Roman Catholic, an ex-leaguer, a trusted representative of the immediate successor of Charles ix. and Henry iii., could stand up on the blood-stained soil of the Netherlands and plead for liberty of conscience for all mankind?

“Those cannot be said to share in, any enjoyment from whom has been taken the power of serving God according to the religion in which they have been brought up.  No slavery is more intolerable nor more exasperating to the mind than such restraint.”

Most true, O excellent president!  No axiom in mathematics is more certain than this simple statement.  To prove its truth William the Silent had lived and died.  To prove it a falsehood, emperors, and kings, and priests, had issued bans, and curses, and damnable decrees.  To root it out they had butchered, drowned, shot, strangled, poisoned, tortured, roasted alive, buried alive, starved, and driven mad, thousands and tens of thousands of their fellow creatures.  And behold there had been almost a century of this work, and yet the great truth was not rooted out after all; and the devil-worshippers, who had sought at the outset of the great war to establish the Holy Inquisition in the Netherlands upon the ruins of religious and political liberty, were overthrown at last and driven back into the pit.  It was progress; it was worth all the blood and treasure which had been spilled, that, instead of the Holy Inquisition, there was now holy liberty of thought.

That there should have been a party, that there should have been an individual here and there, after the great victory was won, to oppose the doctrine which the Catholic president now so nobly advocated, would be enough to cause every believer in progress to hide his face in the dust, did we not know that the march of events was destined to trample such opposition out of existence, and had not history proved to us that the great lesson of the war was not to be rendered nought by the efforts of a few fanatics.  Religious liberty was the ripened and consummate fruit, and it could not but be gathered.