and contaminate the
religious sentiments as to elevate the political idea. To mix habitually
the solemn phraseology which men love to reserve for their highest and
most sacred needs with the familiar slang of politics and trade seems to
our generation not a very desirable proceeding.

The aroma of doubly distilled and highly sublimated dogma is more
difficult to catch than to comprehend the broader and more practical
distinctions of every-day party strife.

King James was furious at the thought that common men--the vulgar, the
people in short--should dare to discuss deep problems of divinity which,
as he confessed, had puzzled even his royal mind. Barneveld modestly
disclaimed the power of seeing with absolute clearness into things beyond
the reach of the human intellect. But the honest Netherlanders were not
abashed by thunder from the royal pulpit, nor perplexed by hesitations
which darkened the soul of the great Advocate.

In burghers' mansions, peasants' cottages, mechanics' back-parlours, on
board herring smacks, canal boats, and East Indiamen; in shops,
counting-rooms, farmyards, guard-rooms, ale-houses; on the exchange, in
the tennis-court, on the mall; at banquets, at burials, christenings, or
bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met each other,
there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and
Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the
pelting of hostile texts. The blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the
tinker dropped a kettle half mended, the broker left a bargain
unclinched, the Scheveningen fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the
cracks in his pinkie, while each paused to hold high converse with friend
or foe on fate, free will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing himself in
wandering mazes whence there was no issue. Province against province,
city against city, family against family; it was one vast scene of
bickering, denunciation, heart-burnings, mutual excommunication and
hatred.

Alas! a generation of mankind before, men had stood banded together to
resist, with all the might that comes from union, the fell spirit of the
Holy Inquisition, which was dooming all who had wandered from the ancient
fold or resisted foreign tyranny to the axe, the faggot, the living
grave. There had been small leisure then for men who fought for
Fatherland, and for comparative liberty of conscience, to tear each
others' characters in pieces, and to indulge in mutual h