prevent inquisition into
opinion, violation of domicile, interference with private worship,
compulsory attendance in Protestant churches of those professing the
Roman creed. This was not attempted. No Catholic was persecuted on
account of his religion. Compared with the practice in other countries
this was a great step in advance. Religious tolerance lay on the road to
religious equality, a condition which had hardly been imagined then and
scarcely exists in Europe even to this day. But among the men in history
whose life and death contributed to the advancement of that blessing, it
would be vain to deny that Barneveld occupies a foremost place.

Moreover, it should be remembered that religious equality then would have
been a most hazardous experiment. So long as Church and State were
blended, it was absolutely essential at that epoch for the preservation
of Protestantism to assign the predominance to the State. Should the
Catholics have obtained religious equality, the probable result would
before long have been religious inequality, supremacy of the Catholics in
the Church, and supremacy of the Church over the State. The fruits of the
forty years' war would have become dust and ashes. It would be mere weak
sentimentalism to doubt--after the bloody history which had just closed
and the awful tragedy, then reopening--that every spark of religious
liberty would have soon been trodden out in the Netherlands. The general
onslaught of the League with Ferdinand, Maximilian of Bavaria, and Philip
of Spain at its head against the distracted, irresolute, and wavering
line of Protestantism across the whole of Europe was just preparing.
Rather a wilderness to reign over than a single heretic, was the war-cry
of the Emperor. The King of Spain, as we have just been reading in his
most secret, ciphered despatches to the Archduke at Brussels, was nursing
sanguine hopes and weaving elaborate schemes for recovering his dominion
over the United Netherlands, and proposing to send an army of Jesuits
thither to break the way to the reconquest. To play into his hands then,
by granting public right of worship to the Papists, would have been in
Barneveld's opinion like giving up Julich and other citadels in the
debatable land to Spain just as the great war between Catholicism and
Protestantism was breaking out. There had been enough of burning and
burying alive in the Netherlands during the century which had closed. It
was not desirable to giv