The multitude of Reformers made the edicts impossible, so long as no foreign troops were there to enforce them.  The congregation was encamped and arranged in an orderly manner.  The women, of whom there were many, were placed next the pulpit, which, upon this occasion, was formed of a couple of spears thrust into the earth, sustaining a cross-piece, against which the preacher might lean his back.  The services commenced with the singing of a psalm by the whole vast assemblage.  Clement Marot’s verses, recently translated by Dathenus, were then new and popular.  The strains of the monarch minstrel, chanted thus in their homely but nervous mother tongue by a multitude who had but recently learned that all the poetry and rapture of devotion were not irrevocably coffined with a buried language, or immured in the precincts of a church, had never produced a more elevating effect.  No anthem from the world-renowned organ in that ancient city ever awakened more lofty emotions than did those ten thousand human voices ringing from the grassy meadows in that fervid midsummer noon.  When all was silent again, the preacher rose; a little, meagre man, who looked as if he might rather melt away beneath the blazing sunshine of July, than hold the multitude enchained four uninterrupted hours long, by the magic of his tongue.  His text was the 8th, 9th, and 10th verses of the second chapter of Ephesians; and as the slender monk spoke to his simple audience of God’s grace, and of faith in Jesus, who had descended from above to save the lowliest and the most abandoned, if they would put their trust in Him, his hearers were alternately exalted with fervor or melted into tears.  He prayed for all conditions of men—­for themselves, their friends, their enemies, for the government which had persecuted them, for the King whose face was turned upon them in anger.  At times, according to one who was present, not a dry eye was to be seen in the crowd.  When the minister had finished, he left his congregation abruptly, for he had to travel all night in order to reach Alkmaar, where he was to preach upon the following day.

By the middle of July the custom was established outside all the principal cities.  Camp-meetings were held in some places; as, for instance, in the neighborhood of Antwerp, where the congregations numbered often fifteen thousand and on some occasions were estimated at between twenty and thirty thousand persons at a time; “very many of them,” said an eye-witness, “the best and wealthiest in the town.”

The sect to which most of these worshippers belonged was that of Calvin.  In Antwerp there were Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists.  The Lutherans were the richest sect, but the Calvinists the most numerous and enthusiastic.  The Prince of Orange at this moment was strenuously opposed both to Calvinism and Anabaptism, but inclining to Lutheranism.  Political reasons at this epoch doubtless influenced his mind in religious matters.  The aid of the Lutheran