of Arminianism were almost
contemporaneous. The Stadholder, who so unwillingly had seen the
occupation in which he had won so much glory taken from him by the Truce,
might perhaps find less congenial but sufficiently engrossing business as
champion of the Church and of the Union.

The new church--not freedom of worship for different denominations of
Christians, but supremacy of the Church of Heidelberg and Geneva--seemed
likely to be the result of the overthrow of the ancient church. It is the
essence of the Catholic Church to claim supremacy over and immunity from
the civil authority, and to this claim for the Reformed Church, by which
that of Rome had been supplanted, Barneveld was strenuously opposed.

The Stadholder was backed, therefore, by the Church in its purity, by the
majority of the humbler classes--who found in membership of the oligarchy
of Heaven a substitute for those democratic aspirations on earth which
were effectually suppressed between the two millstones of burgher
aristocracy and military discipline--and by the States-General, a
majority of which were Contra-Remonstrant in their faith.

If the sword is usually an overmatch for the long robe in political
struggles, the cassock has often proved superior to both combined. But in
the case now occupying our attention the cassock was in alliance with the
sword. Clearly the contest was becoming a desperate one for the
statesman.

And while the controversy between the chiefs waged hotter and hotter, the
tumults around the churches on Sundays in every town and village grew
more and more furious, ending generally in open fights with knives,
bludgeons, and brickbats; preachers and magistrates being often too glad
to escape with a whole skin. One can hardly be ingenuous enough to
consider all this dirking, battering, and fisticuffing as the legitimate
and healthy outcome of a difference as to the knotty point whether all
men might or might not be saved by repentance and faith in Christ.

The Greens and Blues of the Byzantine circus had not been more typical of
fierce party warfare in the Lower Empire than the greens and blues of
predestination in the rising commonwealth, according to the real or
imagined epigram of Prince Maurice.

"Your divisions in religion," wrote Secretary Lake to Carleton, "have, I
doubt not, a deeper root than is discerned by every one, and I doubt not
that the Prince Maurice's carriage doth make a jealousy of affecting a
party unde