destined expanse, was as
hopeless a dream as to drive back the Rhine, as it reached the ocean,
into the narrow channel of the Rheinwald glacier whence it sprang.

The republic became the refuge for the oppressed of all nations, where
Jews and Gentiles, Catholics, Calvinists, and Anabaptistis, prayed after
their own manner to the same God and Father. It was too much, however, to
hope that passions which had been so fiercely bubbling during fifty years
would subside at once, and that the most intense religious hatreds that
ever existed would exhale with the proclamation of truce. The march of
humanity is rarely rapid enough to keep pace with the leaders in its most
sublime movements, and it often happens that its chieftains are dwarfed
in the estimation of the contemporaneous vulgar, by the very distance at
which they precede their unconscious followers. But even if the progress
of the human mind towards the truth is fated to be a spiral one, as if to
remind us that mankind is of the earth, earthy--a worm in the dust while
inhabiting this lower sphere--it is at least a consolation to reflect
upon the gradual advancement of the intellect from age to age.

The spirit of Torquemada, of Charles, of Philip, of Titelmann, is even
now not extinct on this globe, but there are counter forces at work,
which must ultimately blast it into insignificance. At the moment of the
great truce, that evil spirit was not exorcised from the human breast,
but the number of its victims and the intensity of its influence had
already miraculously diminished.

The truce was made and announced all over the Netherlands by the ringing
of bells, the happy discharge of innocent artillery, by illuminations, by
Te Deums in all the churches. Papist and Presbyterian fell on their knees
in every grand cathedral or humblest village church, to thank God that
what had seemed the eternal butchery was over. The inhabitants of the
united and of the obedient Netherlands rushed across the frontiers into a
fraternal embrace; like the meeting of many waters when the flood-gates
are lifted. It was pity that the foreign sovereignty, established at
Brussels, could not then and there have been for ever swept away, and
self-government and beneficent union extended over all the seventeen
Netherlands, Walloon and Flemish, Catholic and reformed. But it hardly
needs a word to show that the course of events had created a deeper chasm
between the two sections than the gravest p