n for the damage and danger; the
general cry in the town being that the money he was receiving from
Barneveld and the King of Spain would make him good even if not a stone
of the house had been left standing. On the following Thursday two elders
of the church council waited upon and informed him that he must in future
abstain from the Communion service.

It may well be supposed that the virtual head of the government liked not
the triumph of mob law, in the name of religion, over the civil
authority. The Advocate was neither democrat nor demagogue. A lawyer, a
magistrate, and a noble, he had but little sympathy with the humbler
classes, which he was far too much in the habit of designating as rabble
and populace. Yet his anger was less against them than against the
priests, the foreigners, the military and diplomatic mischief-makers, by
whom they were set upon to dangerous demonstrations. The old patrician
scorned the arts by which highborn demagogues in that as in every age
affect adulation for inferiors whom they despise. It was his instinct to
protect, and guide the people, in whom he recognized no chartered nor
inherent right to govern. It was his resolve, so long as breath was in
him, to prevent them from destroying life and property and subverting the
government under the leadership of an inflamed priesthood.

It was with this intention, as we have just seen, and in order to avoid
bloodshed, anarchy, and civil war in the streets of every town and
village, that a decisive but in the Advocate's opinion a perfectly legal
step had been taken by the States of Holland. It had become necessary to
empower the magistracies of towns to defend themselves by enrolled troops
against mob violence and against an enforced synod considered by great
lawyers as unconstitutional.

Aerssens resided in Zealand, and the efforts of that ex-ambassador were
unceasing to excite popular animosity against the man he hated and to
trouble the political waters in which no man knew better than he how to
cast the net.

"The States of Zealand," said the Advocate to the ambassador in London,
"have a deputation here about the religious differences, urging the
holding of a National Synod according to the King's letters, to which
some other provinces and some of the cities of Holland incline. The
questions have not yet been defined by a common synod, so that a national
one could make no definition, while the particular synods and clerical
personage