preachers, the most impassioned converts, the sublimest martyrs, had
lived, preached, fought, suffered, and died with the precepts of Calvin
in their hearts. The fire which had consumed the last vestige of royal
and sacerdotal despotism throughout the independent republic, had been
lighted by the hands of Calvinists.

Throughout the blood-stained soil of France, too, the men who were
fighting the same great battle as were the Netherlanders against Philip
II. and the Inquisition, the valiant cavaliers of Dauphiny and Provence,
knelt on the ground, before the battle, smote their iron breasts with
their mailed hands, uttered a Calvinistic prayer, sang a psalm of Marot,
and then charged upon Guise, or upon Joyeuse, under the white plume of
the Bearnese. And it was on the Calvinist weavers and clothiers of
Rochelle that the great Prince relied in the hour of danger as much as on
his mountain chivalry. In England too, the seeds of liberty, wrapped up
in Calvinism and hoarded through many trying years, were at last destined
to float over land and sea, and to bear large harvests of temperate
freedom for great commonwealths, which were still unborn. Nevertheless
there was a growing aversion in many parts of the States for the rigid
and intolerant spirit of the reformed religion. There were many men in
Holland who had already imbibed the true lesson--the only, one worth
learning of the reformation--liberty of thought; but toleration in the
eyes of the extreme Calvinistic party was as great a vice as it could be
in the estimation of Papists. To a favoured few of other habits of
thought, it had come to be regarded as a virtue; but the day was still
far distant when men were to scorn the very word toleration as an insult
to the dignity of man; as if for any human being or set of human beings,
in caste, class, synod, or church, the right could even in imagination be
conceded of controlling the consciences of their fellow-creatures.

But it was progress for the sixteenth century that there were
individuals, and prominent individuals, who dared to proclaim liberty of
conscience for all. William of Orange was a Calvinist, sincere and rigid,
but he denounced all oppression of religion, and opened wide the doors of
the Commonwealth to Papists, Lutherans, and Anabaptists alike. The Earl
of Leicester was a Calvinist, most rigid in tenet, most edifying of
conversation, the acknowledged head of the Puritan party of England, but
he was intol