th intelligent persons,
though no supposition could be more erroneous. All those beliefs
prevalent in the days of Luther are affirmed at this hour, with the
addition of the doctrine of papal infallibility and the immaculate
conception. To-day indulgences are sold in the United States,
noticeably so in Arizona; and a son of a bishop in the Methodist
Episcopal Church, because his name chanced to have a foreign flavor,
was written to and offered one year's indulgences for twenty-five
dollars! Catholicism has not changed. The Inquisition was abolished
in Spain by Napoleon in 1808, re-established after the Spaniards had
reassumed their government, and finally abolished by the Cortes in
1820. The system of Catholicism is leprous, and in the age of William
the Silent had power and political ascendency so as to command rack and
fagot, and dungeons so deep as that from them no cry could reach any
ear save God's; and in the person of the mean, sullen, and
indefatigable Philip had apt instrument.

When the Prince of Orange was ambassador in the court of France, Henry
II, supposing him to be privy to his master's plans, on a
hunting-excursion, casually mentioned a private treaty with Alva to
join with Philip to exterminate heresy from their joint kingdoms.
Small wonder if Orange, riding beside French royalty that day, grew
pitiful toward unsuspicious, doomed thousands, and pitiless toward
Philip and his Spanish soldiers and followers, or that, to use his own
words from the famous "Apology," "From that moment I determined in
earnest to clear the Spanish venom from the land." Watch his flushed
face; his eyes, like coals taken fresh from an altar of vengeance; his
hand, nervously fingering his sword-hilt; his form, dilating as if for
the first time he guessed he had come to manhood,--and I miss in
reckoning if we are not looking on the person of a patriot. For this
William of Orange and Nassau is William the Silent, keeping his
dreadful secret; but keeping the secret, too, that the Inquisition and
Catholicism, and Spain, and Philip have an enemy whose hostility can
only be silenced by a bullet. The day the French king gave William
this fatal confidence was an epoch in the life of William and of Europe.

His life divides into two periods, this dialogue between himself and
Henry II closing the one and opening the other. With that fatal
confidence his youth ended and his manhood began. Get a closer view of
his youth. From hi