Certainly, if these statistics were correct or nearly correct, there could be nothing more stupid from a purely political point of view than to exasperate so influential a portion of the community to madness and rebellion by refusing them all rights of public worship.  Yet because the Advocate had uniformly recommended indulgence, he had incurred more odium at home than from any other cause.  Of course he was a Papist in disguise, ready to sell his country to Spain, because he was willing that more than half the population of the country should be allowed to worship God according to their conscience.  Surely it would be wrong to judge the condition of things at that epoch by the lights of to-day, and perhaps in the Netherlands there had before been no conspicuous personage, save William the Silent alone, who had risen to the height of toleration on which the Advocate essayed to stand.  Other leading politicians considered that the national liberties could be preserved only by retaining the Catholics in complete subjection.

At any rate the Advocate was profoundly convinced of the necessity of maintaining harmony and mutual toleration among the Protestants themselves, who, as he said, made up but one-third of the whole people.  In conversing with the English ambassador he divided them into “Puritans and double Puritans,” as they would be called, he said, in England.  If these should be at variance with each other, he argued, the Papists would be the strongest of all.  “To prevent this inconvenience,” he said, “the States were endeavouring to settle some certain form of government in the Church; which being composed of divers persecuted churches such as in the beginning of the wars had their refuge here, that which during the wars could not be so well done they now thought seasonable for a time of truce; and therefore would show their authority in preventing the schism of the Church which would follow the separation of those they call Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants.”

There being no word so offensive to Carleton’s sovereign as the word Puritan, the Ambassador did his best to persuade the Advocate that a Puritan in Holland was a very different thing from a Puritan in England.  In England he was a noxious vermin, to be hunted with dogs.  In the Netherlands he was the governing power.  But his arguments were vapourous enough and made little impression on Barneveld.  “He would no ways yield,” said Sir Dudley.

Meantime the Contra-Remonstrants of the Hague, not finding sufficient accommodation in Enoch Much’s house, clamoured loudly for the use of a church.  It was answered by the city magistrates that two of their persuasion, La Motte and La Faille, preached regularly in the Great Church, and that Rosaeus had been silenced only because he refused to hold communion with Uytenbogaert.  Maurice insisted that a separate church should be assigned them.  “But this is open schism,” said Uytenbogaert.