at republic, suddenly starting into
existence out of nothing, and the great issues of the religious
reformation, were matters not so easily arranged. When the scene shifted,
as it was so soon to do, to the heart of Bohemia, when Protestantism had
taken the Holy Roman Empire by the beard in its ancient palace, and
thrown Imperial stadholders out of window, it would be evident to the
blindest that something serious was taking place.

Meantime Barneveld, ever watchful of passing events, knew that great
forces of Catholicism were marshalling in the south. Three armies were to
take the field against Protestantism at the orders of Spain and the Pope.
One at the door of the Republic, and directed especially against the
Netherlands, was to resume the campaign in the duchies, and to prevent
any aid going to Protestant Germany from Great Britain or from Holland.
Another in the Upper Palatinate was to make the chief movement against
the Evangelical hosts. A third in Austria was to keep down the Protestant
party in Bohemia, Hungary, Austria, Moravia, and Silesia. To sustain this
movement, it was understood that all the troops then in Italy were to be
kept all the winter on a war footing.'

Was this a time for the great Protestant party in the Netherlands to tear
itself in pieces for a theological subtlety, about which good Christians
might differ without taking each other by the throat?

"I do not lightly believe or fear," said the Advocate, in communicating a
survey of European affairs at that moment to Carom "but present advices
from abroad make me apprehend dangers."

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Aristocracy of God's elect
Determined to bring the very name of liberty into contempt
Disputing the eternal damnation of young children
Fate, free will, or absolute foreknowledge
Louis XIII.
No man can be neutral in civil contentions
No synod had a right to claim Netherlanders as slaves
Philip IV.
Priests shall control the state or the state govern the priests
Schism in the Church had become a public fact
That cynical commerce in human lives
The voice of slanderers
Theological hatred was in full blaze throughout the country
Theology and politics were one
To look down upon their inferior and lost fellow creatures
Whether dead infants were hopelessly damned
Whether repentance could effect salvation
Whose mutual hatred was now artfully in