est and by the events to which
it had given rise, the Reformers now came boldly forth from their lurking
places and held their religious meetings in the light of day. The
consciousness of numbers and of right had brought the conviction of
strength. The audacity of the Reformers was wonderful to the mind of
President Viglius, who could find no language strong enough with which to
characterize and to deplore such blasphemous conduct. The field-preaching
seemed in the eyes of government to spread with the rapidity of a
malignant pestilence. The miasma flew upon the wings of the wind. As
early as 1562, there had been public preaching in the neighborhood of
Ypres. The executions which followed, however, had for the time
suppressed the practice both in that place as well as throughout Flanders
and the rest of the provinces. It now broke forth as by one impulse from
one end of the country to the other. In the latter part of June, Hermann
Stryoker or Modet, a monk who had renounced his vows to become one of the
most popular preachers in the Reformed Church, addressed a congregation
of seven or eight thousand persons in the neighborhood of Ghent. Peter
Dathenus, another unfrocked monk, preached at various places in West
Flanders, with great effect. A man endowed with a violent, stormy
eloquence, intemperate as most zealots, he was then rendering better
services to the cause of the Reformation than he was destined to do at
later periods.

But apostate priests were not the only preachers. To the ineffable
disgust of the conservatives in Church and State, there were men with
little education, utterly devoid of Hebrew, of lowly station--hatters,
curriers, tanners, dyers, and the like, who began to preach also;
remembering, unseasonably perhaps, that the early disciples, selected by
the founder of Christianity, had not all been doctors of theology, with
diplomas from a "renowned university." But if the nature of such men were
subdued to what it worked in, that charge could not be brought against
ministers with the learning and accomplishments of Ambrose Wille,
Marnier, Guy de Bray, or Francis Junius, the man whom Scaliger called the
"greatest of all theologians since the days of the apostles." An
aristocratic sarcasm could not be levelled against Peregrine de la
Grange, of a noble family in Provence, with the fiery blood of southern
France in his veins, brave as his nation, learned, eloquent,
enthusiastic, who galloped to his field-p