long sermon to the States on the brief
supplied by his Majesty, told them that to have Vorstius as successor to
Arminius was to fall out of the frying-pan into the fire, and handed them
a "catalogue" prepared by the King of the blasphemies, heresies, and
atheisms of the Professor. "Notwithstanding that the man in full assembly
of the States of Holland," said the Ambassador with headlong and confused
rhetoric, "had found the means to palliate and plaster the dung of his
heresies, and thus to dazzle the eyes of good people," yet it was
necessary to protest most vigorously against such an appointment, and to
advise that "his works should be publicly burned in the open places of
all the cities."

The Professor never was admitted to perform his functions of theology,
but he remained at Leyden, so Winwood complained, "honoured, recognized
as a singularity and ornament to the Academy in place of the late Joseph
Scaliger."--"The friendship of the King and the heresy of Vorstius are
quite incompatible," said the Envoy.

Meantime the Advocate, much distressed at the animosity of England
bursting forth so violently on occasion of the appointment of a divinity
professor at Leyden, and at the very instant too when all the acuteness
of his intellect was taxed to keep on good or even safe terms with
France, did his best to stem these opposing currents. His private letters
to his old and confidential friend, Noel de Carom, States' ambassador in
London, reveal the perplexities of his soul and the upright patriotism by
which he was guided in these gathering storms. And this correspondence,
as well as that maintained by him at a little later period with the
successor of Aerssens at Paris, will be seen subsequently to have had a
direct and most important bearing upon the policy of the Republic and
upon his own fate. It is necessary therefore that the reader, interested
in these complicated affairs which were soon to bring on a sanguinary war
on a scale even vaster than the one which had been temporarily suspended,
should give close attention to papers never before exhumed from the musty
sepulchre of national archives, although constantly alluded to in the
records of important state trials. It is strange enough to observe the
apparent triviality of the circumstances out of which gravest events seem
to follow. But the circumstances were in reality threads of iron which
led down to the very foundations of the earth.

"I wish to know," wrote