al tinker, expressing himself
violently in the same city against the Five Points, and disrespectfully
towards the magistrates for tolerating them, was banished from the town.
A printer in the neighbourhood, disgusted with these and similar efforts
of tyranny on the part of the dominant party, thrust a couple of lines of
doggrel into the lottery:
"In name of the Prince of Orange, I ask once and again,
What difference between the Inquisition of Rotterdam and Spain?"
For this poetical effort the printer was sentenced to forfeit the prize
that he had drawn in the lottery, and to be kept in prison on bread and
water for a fortnight.
Certainly such punishments were hardly as severe as being beheaded or
burned or buried alive, as would have been the lot of tinkers and
printers and brokers who opposed the established church in the days of
Alva, but the demon of intolerance, although its fangs were drawn, still
survived, and had taken possession of both parties in the Reformed
Church. For it was the Remonstrants who had possession of the churches at
Rotterdam, and the printer's distich is valuable as pointing out that the
name of Orange was beginning to identify itself with the
Contra-Remonstrant faction. At this time, on the other hand, the gabble
that Barneveld had been bought by Spanish gold, and was about to sell his
country to Spain, became louder than a whisper. Men were not ashamed,
from theological hatred, to utter such senseless calumnies against a
venerable statesman whose long life had been devoted to the cause of his
country's independence and to the death struggle with Spain.
As if because a man admitted the possibility of all his fellow-creatures
being saved from damnation through repentance and the grace of God, he
must inevitably be a traitor to his country and a pensionary of her
deadliest foe.
And where the Contra-Remonstrants held possession of the churches and the
city governments, acts of tyranny which did not then seem ridiculous were
of everyday occurrence. Clergymen, suspected of the Five Points, were
driven out of the pulpits with bludgeons or assailed with brickbats at
the church door. At Amsterdam, Simon Goulart, for preaching the doctrine
of universal salvation and for disputing the eternal damnation of young
children, was forbidden thenceforth to preach at all.
But it was at the Hague that the schism in religion and politics first
fatally widened itself. Henry Rosaeus, an eloquent di
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