of Meursius, recall two ministerial types of countenance familiar to
those who remember the earlier years of our century.

Under the name of "Remonstrants" and "Contra-Remonstrants,"--Arminians
and old-fashioned Calvinists, as we should say,--the adherents of the two
Leyden professors disputed the right to the possession of the churches,
and the claim to be considered as representing the national religion. Of
the seven United Provinces, two, Holland and Utrecht, were prevailingly
Arminian, and the other five Calvinistic. Barneveld, who, under the title
of Advocate, represented the province of Holland, the most important of
them all, claimed for each province a right to determine its own state
religion. Maurice the Stadholder, son of William the Silent, the military
chief of the republic, claimed the right for the States-General. 'Cujus
regio ejus religio' was then the accepted public doctrine of Protestant
nations. Thus the provincial and the general governments were brought
into conflict by their creeds, and the question whether the republic was
a confederation or a nation, the same question which has been practically
raised, and for the time at least settled, in our own republic, was in
some way to be decided. After various disturbances and acts of violence
by both parties, Maurice, representing the States-General, pronounced for
the Calvinists or Contra-Remonstrants, and took possession of one of the
great churches, as an assertion of his authority. Barneveld, representing
the Arminian or Remonstrant provinces, levied a body of mercenary
soldiers in several of the cities. These were disbanded by Maurice, and
afterwards by an act of the States-General. Barneveld was apprehended,
imprisoned, and executed, after an examination which was in no proper
sense a trial. Grotius, who was on the Arminian side and involved in the
inculpated proceedings, was also arrested and imprisoned. His escape, by
a stratagem successfully repeated by a slave in our own times, may
challenge comparison for its romantic interest with any chapter of
fiction. How his wife packed him into the chest supposed to contain the
folios of the great oriental scholar Erpenius, how the soldiers wondered
at its weight and questioned whether it did not hold an Arminian, how the
servant-maid, Elsje van Houwening, quick-witted as Morgiana of the "Forty
Thieves," parried their questions and convoyed her master safely to the
friendly place of refuge,--all this mu