According to the Five Points, “God has from eternity resolved to choose to eternal life those who through his grace believe in Jesus Christ,” etc.  According to the Seven Points, “God in his election has not looked at the belief and the repentance of the elect,” etc.  According to the Five Points, all good deeds must be ascribed to God’s grace in Christ, but it does not work irresistibly.  The language of the Seven Points implies that the elect cannot resist God’s eternal and unchangeable design to give them faith and steadfastness, and that they can never wholly and for always lose the true faith.  The language of the Five Points is unsettled as to the last proposition, but it was afterwards maintained by the Remonstrant party that a true believer could, through his own fault, fall away from God and lose faith.

It must be remembered that these religious questions had an immediate connection with politics.  Independently of the conflict of jurisdiction, in which they involved the parties to the two different creeds, it was believed or pretended that the new doctrines of the Remonstrants led towards Romanism, and were allied with designs which threatened the independence of the country.  “There are two factions in the land,” said Maurice, “that of Orange and that of Spain, and the two chiefs of the Spanish faction are those political and priestly Arminians, Uytenbogaert and Oldenbarneveld.”

The heads of the two religious and political parties were in such hereditary, long-continued, and intimate relations up to the time when one signed the other’s death-warrant, that it was impossible to write the life of one without also writing that of the other.  For his biographer John of Barneveld is the true patriot, the martyr, whose cause was that of religious and political freedom.  For him Maurice is the ambitious soldier who hated his political rival, and never rested until this rival was brought to the scaffold.

The questions which agitated men’s minds two centuries and a half ago are not dead yet in the country where they produced such estrangement, violence, and wrong.  No stranger could take them up without encountering hostile criticism from one party or the other.  It may be and has been conceded that Mr. Motley writes as a partisan,—­a partisan of freedom in politics and religion, as he understands freedom.  This secures him the antagonism of one class of critics.  But these critics are themselves partisans, and themselves open to the cross-fire of their antagonists.  M. Groen van Prinsterer, “the learned and distinguished” editor of the “Archives et Correspondance” of the Orange and Nassau family, published a considerable volume, before referred to, in which many of Motley’s views are strongly controverted.  But he himself is far from being in accord with “that eminent scholar,” M. Bakhuyzen van den Brink, whose name, he says, is celebrated enough to need no comment, or with M. Fruin, of whose impartiality and erudition he himself speaks in the strongest terms.  The ground upon which he is attacked is thus stated in his own words:—­