right,
succeeded in overcoming the power of the mightiest nation of Europe.

"Truth crushed to earth will rise again."

When once we consider the earnestness for civil and religious liberty,
the record of no nation can stand comparison with that of Holland. Some
of the English Puritans fled across the Atlantic from persecutions very
slight compared with those inflicted upon Dutchmen by Philip, here to
found a New England. Those who did not flee remained in old England,
fought a few battles, and tried to establish a commonwealth, which in
less than fifteen years ended disastrously, because the founders were
unfit for government. But these Puritans of Holland, to their
everlasting praise be it remembered, battled for their homes, lives, and
liberty for eighty years. For four-fifths of a century they faced not
only the best and bravest soldiers of Europe, but they faced, along with
their wives, their children, and their old folk, the flame, the gibbet,
the flood, the siege, the pestilence, the famine, "and all men know, or
dream, or fear of agony," all for one thing--to teach the oppressor that
his cause must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board
at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered
that the heritage of priceless liberty should be their children's pride.
But read Motley, or the recent and remarkably well-written volumes of
Douglas Campbell, and you will see that every atrocity that Spanish
hatred, religious intolerance, and mediaeval bigotry could invent, every
horror that ever followed in the train of war, swept over and desolated
Holland. And yet, to teach a lesson to oppressors, they endured, they
fought, they suffered, they conquered; and when they conquered, the
whole world was taught the lesson--worth all the Dutchmen's agony to
teach it--that the children of a heavenly Father are born free and
equal, and that it is neither the province of nation or church to coerce
them into any religious belief or doctrine whatsoever.

The principle of Protestantism was won in the eighty-year war of the
Netherlanders. During all this time the Dutch were notably giving a
lesson to oppressors. But then and afterward they furnished a brilliant
and commendable example to the oppressed. Though they fought the wrong,
they never opposed the truth. They were fierce, but never fanatical.
They loved liberty, but they never encouraged license; they believed in
freedom and the maintena