nious.

Barneveld, Grotius, and other eloquent speakers endeavoured to point out
that the refusal of the seceders to hold communion with the Remonstrant
preachers and to insist on a separation was fast driving the state to
perdition. They warmly recommended mutual toleration and harmony. Grotius
exhausted learning and rhetoric to prove that the Five Points were not
inconsistent with salvation nor with the constitution of the United
Provinces.

The Stadholder grew impatient at last and clapped his hand on his rapier.

"No need here," he said, "of flowery orations and learned arguments. With
this good sword I will defend the religion which my father planted in
these Provinces, and I should like to see the man who is going to prevent
me!"

The words had an heroic ring in the ears of such as are ever ready to
applaud brute force, especially when wielded by a prince. The argumentum
ad ensem, however, was the last plea that William the Silent would have
been likely to employ on such an occasion, nor would it have been easy to
prove that the Reformed religion had been "planted" by one who had drawn
the sword against the foreign tyrant, and had made vast sacrifices for
his country's independence years before abjuring communion with the Roman
Catholic Church.

When swords are handled by the executive in presence of civil assemblies
there is usually but one issue to be expected.

Moreover, three whales had recently been stranded at Scheveningen, one of
them more than sixty feet long, and men wagged their beards gravely as
they spoke of the event, deeming it a certain presage of civil
commotions. It was remembered that at the outbreak of the great war two
whales had been washed ashore in the Scheldt. Although some free-thinking
people were inclined to ascribe the phenomenon to a prevalence of strong
westerly gales, while others found proof in it of a superabundance of
those creatures in the Polar seas, which should rather give encouragement
to the Dutch and Zealand fisheries, it is probable that quite as dark
forebodings of coming disaster were caused by this accident as by the
trumpet-like defiance which the Stadholder had just delivered to the
States of Holland.

Meantime the seceding congregation of the Hague had become wearied of the
English or Gasthuis Church, and another and larger one had been promised
them. This was an ancient convent on one of the principal streets of the
town, now used as a cannon-foundry. The Pr