This much of
predestination he did know, that if the Advocate and his friends were to
come to open conflict with the Prince of Orange-Nassau, the conqueror of
Nieuwpoort, it was predestined to go hard with the Advocate and his
friends.

The theological quibble did not interest him much, and he was apt to
blunder about it.

"Well, preacher," said he one day to Albert Huttenus, who had come to him
to intercede for a deserter condemned to be hanged, "are you one of those
Arminians who believe that one child is born to salvation and another to
damnation?"

Huttenus, amazed to the utmost at the extraordinary question, replied,
"Your Excellency will be graciously pleased to observe that this is not
the opinion of those whom one calls by the hateful name of Arminians, but
the opinion of their adversaries."

"Well, preacher," rejoined Maurice, "don't you think I know better?" And
turning to Count Lewis William, Stadholder of Friesland, who was present,
standing by the hearth with his hand on a copper ring of the
chimneypiece, he cried,

"Which is right, cousin, the preacher or I?"

"No, cousin," answered Count Lewis, "you are in the wrong."

Thus to the Catholic League organized throughout Europe in solid and
consistent phalanx was opposed the Great Protestant Union, ardent and
enthusiastic in detail, but undisciplined, disobedient, and inharmonious
as a whole.

The great principle, not of religious toleration, which is a phrase of
insult, but of religious equality, which is the natural right of mankind,
was to be evolved after a lapse of, additional centuries out of the
elemental conflict which had already lasted so long. Still later was the
total divorce of State and Church to be achieved as the final
consummation of the great revolution. Meantime it was almost inevitable
that the privileged and richly endowed church, with ecclesiastical armies
and arsenals vastly superior to anything which its antagonist could
improvise, should more than hold its own.

At the outset of the epoch which now occupies our attention, Europe was
in a state of exhaustion and longing for repose. Spain had submitted to
the humiliation of a treaty of truce with its rebellious subjects which
was substantially a recognition of their independence. Nothing could be
more deplorable than the internal condition of the country which claimed
to be mistress of the world and still aspired to universal monarchy.

It had made peace because it could n