grew
more and more furious, ending generally in open fights with knives,
bludgeons, and brickbats; preachers and magistrates being often too glad
to escape with a whole skin. One can hardly be ingenuous enough to
consider all this dirking, battering, and fisticuffing as the legitimate
and healthy outcome of a difference as to the knotty point whether all
men might or might not be saved by repentance and faith in Christ.

The Greens and Blues of the Byzantine circus had not been more typical of
fierce party warfare in the Lower Empire than the greens and blues of
predestination in the rising commonwealth, according to the real or
imagined epigram of Prince Maurice.

"Your divisions in religion," wrote Secretary Lake to Carleton, "have, I
doubt not, a deeper root than is discerned by every one, and I doubt not
that the Prince Maurice's carriage doth make a jealousy of affecting a
party under the pretence of supporting one side, and that the States fear
his ends and aims, knowing his power with the men of war; and that
howsoever all be shadowed under the name of religion there is on either
part a civil end, of the one seeking a step of higher authority, of the
other a preservation of liberty."

And in addition to other advantages the Contra-Remonstrants had now got a
good cry--an inestimable privilege in party contests.

"There are two factions in the land," said Maurice, "that of Orange and
that of Spain, and the two chiefs of the Spanish faction are those
political and priestly Arminians, Uytenbogaert and Oldenbarneveld."

Orange and Spain! the one name associated with all that was most
venerated and beloved throughout the country, for William the Silent
since his death was almost a god; the other ineradicably entwined at that
moment with, everything execrated throughout the land. The Prince of
Orange's claim to be head of the Orange faction could hardly be disputed,
but it was a master stroke of political malice to fix the stigma of
Spanish partisanship on the Advocate. If the venerable patriot who had
been fighting Spain, sometimes on the battle-field and always in the
council, ever since he came to man's estate, could be imagined even in a
dream capable of being bought with Spanish gold to betray his country,
who in the ranks of the Remonstrant party could be safe from such
accusations? Each party accused the other of designs for altering or
subverting the government. Maurice was suspected of what were called
Le