balanced,
was still an obscure bishop.

The premonitory signs of the great religious war in Germany were not to
be mistaken. In truth, the great conflict had already opened in the
duchies, although few men as yet comprehended the full extent of that
movement. The superficial imagined that questions of hereditary
succession, like those involved in the dispute, were easily to be settled
by statutes of descent, expounded by doctors of law, and sustained, if
needful, by a couple of comparatively bloodless campaigns. Those who
looked more deeply into causes felt that the limitations of Imperial
authority, the ambition of a great republic, suddenly starting into
existence out of nothing, and the great issues of the religious
reformation, were matters not so easily arranged. When the scene shifted,
as it was so soon to do, to the heart of Bohemia, when Protestantism had
taken the Holy Roman Empire by the beard in its ancient palace, and
thrown Imperial stadholders out of window, it would be evident to the
blindest that something serious was taking place.

Meantime Barneveld, ever watchful of passing events, knew that great
forces of Catholicism were marshalling in the south. Three armies were to
take the field against Protestantism at the orders of Spain and the Pope.
One at the door of the Republic, and directed especially against the
Netherlands, was to resume the campaign in the duchies, and to prevent
any aid going to Protestant Germany from Great Britain or from Holland.
Another in the Upper Palatinate was to make the chief movement against
the Evangelical hosts. A third in Austria was to keep down the Protestant
party in Bohemia, Hungary, Austria, Moravia, and Silesia. To sustain this
movement, it was understood that all the troops then in Italy were to be
kept all the winter on a war footing.'

Was this a time for the great Protestant party in the Netherlands to tear
itself in pieces for a theological subtlety, about which good Christians
might differ without taking each other by the throat?

"I do not lightly believe or fear," said the Advocate, in communicating a
survey of European affairs at that moment to Carom "but present advices
from abroad make me apprehend dangers."

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