e old patrician
scorned the arts by which highborn demagogues in that as in every age
affect adulation for inferiors whom they despise. It was his instinct to
protect, and guide the people, in whom he recognized no chartered nor
inherent right to govern. It was his resolve, so long as breath was in
him, to prevent them from destroying life and property and subverting the
government under the leadership of an inflamed priesthood.

It was with this intention, as we have just seen, and in order to avoid
bloodshed, anarchy, and civil war in the streets of every town and
village, that a decisive but in the Advocate's opinion a perfectly legal
step had been taken by the States of Holland. It had become necessary to
empower the magistracies of towns to defend themselves by enrolled troops
against mob violence and against an enforced synod considered by great
lawyers as unconstitutional.

Aerssens resided in Zealand, and the efforts of that ex-ambassador were
unceasing to excite popular animosity against the man he hated and to
trouble the political waters in which no man knew better than he how to
cast the net.

"The States of Zealand," said the Advocate to the ambassador in London,
"have a deputation here about the religious differences, urging the
holding of a National Synod according to the King's letters, to which
some other provinces and some of the cities of Holland incline. The
questions have not yet been defined by a common synod, so that a national
one could make no definition, while the particular synods and clerical
personages are so filled with prejudices and so bound by mutual
engagements of long date as to make one fear an unfruitful issue. We are
occupied upon this point in our assembly of Holland to devise some
compromise and to discover by what means these difficulties may be
brought into a state of tranquillity."

It will be observed that in all these most private and confidential
utterances of the Advocate a tone of extreme moderation, an anxious wish
to save the Provinces from dissensions, dangers, and bloodshed, is
distinctly visible. Never is he betrayed into vindictive, ambitious, or
self-seeking expressions, while sometimes, although rarely, despondent in
mind. Nor was his opposition to a general synod absolute. He was probably
persuaded however, as we have just seen, that it should of necessity be
preceded by provincial ones, both in due regard to the laws of the land
and to the true definition of