has been
taken the power of serving God according to the religion in which they
were brought up. On the contrary, no slavery is more intolerable nor more
exasperates the mind than such restraint. You know this well, my lords
States; you know too that it was the principal, the most puissant cause
that made you fly to arms and scorn all dangers, in order to effect your
deliverance from this servitude. You know that it has excited similar
movements in various parts of Christendom, and even in the kingdom of
France, with such fortunate success everywhere as to make it appear that
God had so willed it, in order to prove that religion ought to be taught
and inspired by the movements which come from the Holy Ghost, and not by
the force of man. Thus kings and princes should be induced by the evils
and ruin which they and their subjects have suffered from this cause, as
by a sentiment of their own interest, to take more care than has hitherto
been taken to practise in good earnest those remedies which were wont to
be used at a time when the church was in its greatest piety, in order to
correct the abuses and errors which the corruption of mankind had tried
to introduce as being the true and sole means of uniting all Christians
in one and the same creed."

Surely the world had made progress in these forty years of war. Was it
not something to gain for humanity, for intellectual advancement, for
liberty of thought, for the true interests of religion, that a Roman
Catholic, an ex-leaguer, a trusted representative of the immediate
successor of Charles IX. and Henry III., could stand up on the
blood-stained soil of the Netherlands and plead for liberty of conscience
for all mankind?

"Those cannot be said to share in, any enjoyment from whom has been taken
the power of serving God according to the religion in which they have
been brought up. No slavery is more intolerable nor more exasperating to
the mind than such restraint."

Most true, O excellent president! No axiom in mathematics is more certain
than this simple statement. To prove its truth William the Silent had
lived and died. To prove it a falsehood, emperors, and kings, and
priests, had issued bans, and curses, and damnable decrees. To root it
out they had butchered, drowned, shot, strangled, poisoned, tortured,
roasted alive, buried alive, starved, and driven mad, thousands and tens
of thousands of their fellow creatures. And behold there had been almost
a century of th