r guidance in the coming conflict, seemed bent on
self-destruction. The microcosm of the Netherlands now represented, alas!
the war of elements going on without on a world-wide scale. As the
Calvinists and Lutherans of Germany were hotly attacking each other even
in sight of the embattled front of Spain and the League, so the Gomarites
and the Arminians by their mutual rancour were tearing the political
power of the Dutch Republic to shreds and preventing her from assuming a
great part in the crisis. The consummate soldier, the unrivalled
statesman, each superior in his sphere to any contemporary rival, each
supplementing the other, and making up together, could they have been
harmonized, a double head such as no political organism then existing
could boast, were now in hopeless antagonism to each other. A mass of
hatred had been accumulated against the Advocate with which he found it
daily more and more difficult to struggle. The imperious, rugged, and
suspicious nature of the Stadholder had been steadily wrought upon by the
almost devilish acts of Francis Aerssens until he had come to look upon
his father's most faithful adherent, his own early preceptor in
statesmanship and political supporter, as an antagonist, a conspirator,
and a tyrant.

The soldier whose unrivalled ability, experience, and courage in the
field should have placed him at the very head of the great European army
of defence against the general crusade upon Protestantism, so constantly
foretold by Barneveld, was now to be engaged in making bloodless but
mischievous warfare against an imaginary conspiracy and a patriot foe.

The Advocate, keeping steadily in view the great principles by which his
political life had been guided, the supremacy of the civil authority in
any properly organized commonwealth over the sacerdotal and military,
found himself gradually forced into mortal combat with both. To the
individual sovereignty of each province he held with the tenacity of a
lawyer and historian. In that he found the only clue through the
labyrinth which ecclesiastical and political affairs presented. So close
was the tangle, so confused the medley, that without this slender guide
all hope of legal issue seemed lost.

No doubt the difficulty of the doctrine of individual sovereignty was
great, some of the provinces being such slender morsels of territory,
with resources so trivial, as to make the name of sovereignty ludicrous.
Yet there could be as lit