nds. 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. He had done his best practically to
avert personal bickerings among the clergy. He had been, so far as lay in
his power, as friendly to Remonstrants as to Contra-Remonstrants, to
Polyander and Festus Hommius as to Uytenbogaert and Episcopius. He had
almost finished a negotiation with Councillor Kromhout for the peaceable
delivery of the Cloister Church on the Thursday preceding the Sunday on
which it had been forcibly seized by the Contra-Remonstrants.

When asked by one of his judges how he presumed to hope for toleration
between two parties, each of which abhorred the other's opinions, and
likened each other to Turks and devil-worshippers, he replied that he had
always detested and rebuked those mutual revilings by every means in his
power, and would have wished to put down such calumniators of either
persuasion by the civil authority, but the iniquity of the times and the
exasperation of men's humours had prevented him.

Being perpetually goaded by one judge after another as to his
disrespectful conduct towards the King of Great Britain, and asked why
his Majesty had not as good r