o exchange against an increased power to be actively
useful to his country. To expel the foreign oppressor; to strangle the
Inquisition; to maintain the ancient liberties of the nation; here was
labor enough for his own hands. The vulgar thought of carving a throne
out of the misfortunes of his country seems not to have entered his mind.
Upon one point, however, the Prince had been peremptory. He would have no
persecution of the opposite creed. He was requested to suppress the
Catholic religion, in terms. As we have seen, he caused the expression to
be exchanged for the words, "religion at variance with the Gospel." He
resolutely stood out against all meddling with men's consciences, or
inquiring into their thoughts. While smiting the Spanish Inquisition into
the dust, he would have no Calvinist inquisition set up in its place.
Earnestly a convert to the Reformed religion, but hating and denouncing
only what was corrupt in the ancient Church, he would not force men, with
fire and sword, to travel to heaven upon his own road. Thought should be
toll-free. Neither monk nor minister should burn, drown, or hang his
fellow-creatures, when argument or expostulation failed to redeem them
from error. It was no small virtue, in that age, to rise to such a
height. We know what Calvinists, Zwinglians, Lutherans, have done in the
Netherlands, in Germany, in Switzerland, and almost a century later in
New England. It is, therefore, with increased veneration that we regard
this large and truly catholic mind. His tolerance proceeded from no
indifference. No man can read his private writings, or form a thorough
acquaintance with his interior life, without recognizing him as a deeply
religious man. He had faith unfaltering in God. He had also faith in man
and love for his brethren. It was no wonder that in that age of religious
bigotry he should have been assaulted on both sides. While the Pope
excommunicated him as a heretic, and the King set a price upon his head
as a rebel, the fanatics of the new religion denounced him as a godless
man. Peter Dathenus, the unfrocked monk of Poperingen, shrieked out in
his pulpit that the "Prince of Orange cared nothing either for God or for
religion."

The death of Requesens had offered the first opening through which the
watchful Prince could hope to inflict a wound in the vital part of
Spanish authority in the Netherlands. The languor of Philip and the
procrastinating counsel of the dull Hopper unexp