sacerdotal and political orders; the controversy
whether priests shall control the state or the state govern the priests.

This was the practical question involved in the fierce dispute as to
dogma. The famous duel between Arminius and Gomarus; the splendid
theological tournaments which succeeded; six champions on a side armed in
full theological panoply and swinging the sharpest curtal axes which
learning, passion, and acute intellect could devise, had as yet produced
no beneficent result. Nobody had been convinced by the shock of argument,
by the exchange of those desperate blows. The High Council of the Hague
had declared that no difference of opinion in the Church existed
sufficient to prevent fraternal harmony and happiness. But Gomarus loudly
declared that, if there were no means of putting down the heresy of
Arminius, there would before long be a struggle such as would set
province against province, village against village, family against
family, throughout the land. He should be afraid to die in such doctrine.
He shuddered that any one should dare to come before God's tribunal with
such blasphemies. Meantime his great adversary, the learned and eloquent,
the musical, frolicsome, hospitable heresiarch was no more. Worn out with
controversy, but peaceful and happy in the convictions which were so
bitterly denounced by Gomarus and a large proportion of both preachers
and laymen in the Netherlands, and convinced that the schism which in his
view had been created by those who called themselves the orthodox would
weaken the cause of Protestantism throughout Europe, Arminius died at the
age of forty-nine.

The magistrates throughout Holland, with the exception of a few cities,
were Arminian, the preachers Gomarian; for Arminius ascribed to the civil
authority the right to decide upon church matters, while Gomarus
maintained that ecclesiastical affairs should be regulated in
ecclesiastical assemblies. The overseers of Leyden University appointed
Conrad Vorstius to be professor of theology in place of Arminius. The
selection filled to the brim the cup of bitterness, for no man was more
audaciously latitudinarian than he. He was even suspected of Socinianism.
There came a shriek from King James, fierce and shrill enough to rouse
Arminius from his grave. James foamed to the mouth at the insolence of
the overseers in appointing such a monster of infidelity to the
professorship. He ordered his books to be publicly burned in