a fortnight.

Certainly such punishments were hardly as severe as being beheaded or
burned or buried alive, as would have been the lot of tinkers and
printers and brokers who opposed the established church in the days of
Alva, but the demon of intolerance, although its fangs were drawn, still
survived, and had taken possession of both parties in the Reformed
Church. For it was the Remonstrants who had possession of the churches at
Rotterdam, and the printer's distich is valuable as pointing out that the
name of Orange was beginning to identify itself with the
Contra-Remonstrant faction. At this time, on the other hand, the gabble
that Barneveld had been bought by Spanish gold, and was about to sell his
country to Spain, became louder than a whisper. Men were not ashamed,
from theological hatred, to utter such senseless calumnies against a
venerable statesman whose long life had been devoted to the cause of his
country's independence and to the death struggle with Spain.

As if because a man admitted the possibility of all his fellow-creatures
being saved from damnation through repentance and the grace of God, he
must inevitably be a traitor to his country and a pensionary of her
deadliest foe.

And where the Contra-Remonstrants held possession of the churches and the
city governments, acts of tyranny which did not then seem ridiculous were
of everyday occurrence. Clergymen, suspected of the Five Points, were
driven out of the pulpits with bludgeons or assailed with brickbats at
the church door. At Amsterdam, Simon Goulart, for preaching the doctrine
of universal salvation and for disputing the eternal damnation of young
children, was forbidden thenceforth to preach at all.

But it was at the Hague that the schism in religion and politics first
fatally widened itself. Henry Rosaeus, an eloquent divine, disgusted with
his colleague Uytenbogaert, refused all communion with him, and was in
consequence suspended. Excluded from the Great Church, where he had
formerly ministered, he preached every Sunday at Ryswyk, two or three
miles distant. Seven hundred Contra-Remonstrants of the Hague followed
their beloved pastor, and, as the roads to Ryswyk were muddy and sloppy
in winter, acquired the unsavoury nickname of the "Mud Beggars." The
vulgarity of heart which suggested the appellation does not inspire
to-day great sympathy with the Remonstrant party, even if one were
inclined to admit, what is not the fact, that they repr