felt by the clergy that, if many churches existed, they would all
remain subject to the civil authority. The power of the priesthood would
thus sink before that of the burgher aristocracy. There must be one
church--the Church of Geneva and Heidelberg--if that theocracy which the
Gomarites meant to establish was not to vanish as a dream. It was founded
on Divine Right, and knew no chief magistrate but the Holy Ghost. A few
years before the States-General had agreed to a National Synod, but with
a condition that there should be revision of the Netherland Confession
and the Heidelberg Catechism.

Against this the orthodox infallibilists had protested and thundered,
because it was an admission that the vile Arminian heresy might perhaps
be declared correct. It was now however a matter of certainty that the
States-General would cease to oppose the unconditional Synod, because the
majority sided with the priesthood.

The magistrates of Leyden had not long before opposed the demand for a
Synod on the ground that the war against Spain was not undertaken to
maintain one sect; that men of various sects and creeds had fought with
equal valour against the common foe; that religious compulsion was
hateful, and that no synod had a right to claim Netherlanders as slaves.

To thoughtful politicians like Barneveld, Hugo Grotius, and men who acted
with them, fraught with danger to the state, that seemed a doctrine by
which mankind were not regarded as saved or doomed according to belief or
deeds, but as individuals divided from all eternity into two classes
which could never be united, but must ever mutually regard each other as
enemies.

And like enemies Netherlanders were indeed beginning to regard each
other. The man who, banded like brothers, had so heroically fought for
two generations long for liberty against an almost superhuman despotism,
now howling and jeering against each other like demons, seemed determined
to bring the very name of liberty into contempt.

Where the Remonstrants were in the ascendant, they excited the hatred and
disgust of the orthodox by their overbearing determination to carry their
Five Points. A broker in Rotterdam of the Contra-Remonstrant persuasion,
being about to take a wife, swore he had rather be married by a pig than
a parson. For this sparkling epigram he was punished by the Remonstrant
magistracy with loss of his citizenship for a year and the right to
practise his trade for life. A casuistic