and. Pray have the kindness to send me the English Confession of the
year 1572, with the corrections and alterations up to this year."

But the fires were growing hotter, fanned especially by Flemish
ministers, a brotherhood of whom Barneveld had an especial distrust, and
who certainly felt great animosity to him. His moderate counsels were but
oil to the flames. He was already depicted by zealots and calumniators as
false to the Reformed creed.

"Be assured and assure others," he wrote again to Caron, "that in the
matter of religion I am, and by God's grace shall remain, what I ever
have been. Make the same assurances as to my son-in-law and brother. We
are not a little amazed that a few extraordinary Puritans, mostly
Flemings and Frisians, who but a short time ago had neither property nor
kindred in the country, and have now very little of either, and who have
given but slender proofs of constancy or service to the fatherland, could
through pretended zeal gain credit over there against men well proved in
all respects. We wonder the more because they are endeavouring, in
ecclesiastical matters at least, to usurp an extraordinary authority,
against which his Majesty, with very weighty reasons, has so many times
declared his opinion founded upon God's Word and upon all laws and
principles of justice."

It was Barneveld's practice on this as on subsequent occasions very
courteously to confute the King out of his own writings and speeches, and
by so doing to be unconsciously accumulating an undying hatred against
himself in the royal breast. Certainly nothing could be easier than to
show that James, while encouraging in so reckless a manner the
emancipation of the ministers of an advanced sect in the Reformed Church
from control of government, and their usurpation of supreme authority
which had been destroyed in England, was outdoing himself in dogmatism
and inconsistency. A king-highpriest, who dictated his supreme will to
bishops and ministers as well as to courts and parliaments, was
ludicrously employed in a foreign country in enforcing the superiority of
the Church to the State.

"You will give good assurances," said the Advocate, "upon my word, that
the conservation of the true Reformed religion is as warmly cherished
here, especially by me, as at any time during the war."

He next alluded to the charges then considered very grave against certain
writings of Vorstius, and with equal fairness to his accusers as he