rn to support that resolution.

Five years later the Prince had himself assured a deputation from Brabant
that the States of each province were supreme in religious matters, no
interference the one with the other being justifiable or possible. In
1602 the States General in letters addressed to the States of the
obedient provinces under dominion of the Archdukes had invited them to
take up arms to help drive the Spaniards from the Provinces and to join
the Confederacy, assuring them that they should regulate the matter of
religion at their good pleasure, and that no one else should be allowed
to interfere therewith.

The Advocate then went into an historical and critical disquisition, into
which we certainly have no need to follow him, rapidly examining the
whole subject of predestination and conditional and unconditional
damnation from the days of St. Augustine downward, showing a thorough
familiarity with a subject of theology which then made up so much of the
daily business of life, political and private, and lay at the bottom of
the terrible convulsion then existing in the Netherlands. We turn from it
with a shudder, reminding the reader only how persistently the statesman
then on his trial had advocated conciliation, moderation, and kindness
between brethren of the Reformed Church who were not able to think alike
on one of the subtlest and most mysterious problems that casuistry has
ever propounded.

For fifty years, he said, he had been an enemy of all compulsion of the
human conscience. He had always opposed rigorous ecclesiastical decrees.
He had done his best to further, and did not deny having inspired, the
advice given in the famous letters from the King of Great Britain to the
States in 1613, that there should be mutual toleration and abstinence
from discussion of disputed doctrines, neither of them essential to
salvation. He thought that neither Calvin nor Beza would have opposed
freedom of opinion on those points. For himself he believed that the
salvation of mankind would be through God's unmerited grace and the
redemption of sins though the Saviour, and that the man who so held and
persevered to the end was predestined to eternal happiness, and that his
children dying before the age of reason were destined not to Hell but to
Heaven. He had thought fifty years long that the passion and sacrifice of
Christ the Saviour were more potent to salvation than God's wrath and the
sin of Adam and Eve to damnation.