ng smacks, canal boats, and East Indiamen; in shops,
counting-rooms, farmyards, guard-rooms, ale-houses; on the exchange, in
the tennis-court, on the mall; at banquets, at burials, christenings, or
bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met each other,
there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and
Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the
pelting of hostile texts. The blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the
tinker dropped a kettle half mended, the broker left a bargain
unclinched, the Scheveningen fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the
cracks in his pinkie, while each paused to hold high converse with friend
or foe on fate, free will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing himself in
wandering mazes whence there was no issue. Province against province,
city against city, family against family; it was one vast scene of
bickering, denunciation, heart-burnings, mutual excommunication and
hatred.

Alas! a generation of mankind before, men had stood banded together to
resist, with all the might that comes from union, the fell spirit of the
Holy Inquisition, which was dooming all who had wandered from the ancient
fold or resisted foreign tyranny to the axe, the faggot, the living
grave. There had been small leisure then for men who fought for
Fatherland, and for comparative liberty of conscience, to tear each
others' characters in pieces, and to indulge in mutual hatreds and
loathing on the question of predestination.

As a rule the population, especially of the humbler classes, and a great
majority of the preachers were Contra-Remonstrant; the magistrates, the
burgher patricians, were Remonstrant. In Holland the controlling
influence was Remonstrant; but Amsterdam and four or five other cities of
that province held to the opposite doctrine. These cities formed
therefore a small minority in the States Assembly of Holland sustained by
a large majority in the States-General. The Province of Utrecht was
almost unanimously Remonstrant. The five other provinces were decidedly
Contra-Remonstrant.

It is obvious therefore that the influence of Barneveld, hitherto so
all-controlling in the States-General, and which rested on the complete
submission of the States of Holland to his will, was tottering. The
battle-line between Church and State was now drawn up; and it was at the
same time a battle between the union and the principles of state
sovereignty.

It had long since been