tary,
found himself gradually forced into mortal combat with both. To the
individual sovereignty of each province he held with the tenacity of a
lawyer and historian. In that he found the only clue through the
labyrinth which ecclesiastical and political affairs presented. So close
was the tangle, so confused the medley, that without this slender guide
all hope of legal issue seemed lost.

No doubt the difficulty of the doctrine of individual sovereignty was
great, some of the provinces being such slender morsels of territory,
with resources so trivial, as to make the name of sovereignty ludicrous.
Yet there could be as little doubt that no other theory was tenable. If
so powerful a mind as that of the Advocate was inclined to strain the
theory to its extreme limits, it was because in the overshadowing
superiority of the one province Holland had been found the practical
remedy for the imbecility otherwise sure to result from such provincial
and meagre federalism.

Moreover, to obtain Union by stretching all the ancient historical
privileges and liberties of the separate provinces upon the Procrustean
bed of a single dogma, to look for nationality only in common subjection
to an infallible priesthood, to accept a Catechism as the palladium upon
which the safety of the State was to depend for all time, and beyond
which there was to be no further message from Heaven--such was not
healthy constitutionalism in the eyes of a great statesman. No doubt that
without the fervent spirit of Calvinism it would have been difficult to
wage war with such immortal hate as the Netherlands had waged it, no
doubt the spirit of republican and even democratic liberty lay hidden
within that rigid husk, but it was dishonour to the martyrs who had died
by thousands at the stake and on the battle field for the rights of
conscience if the only result of their mighty warfare against wrong had
been to substitute a new dogma for an old one, to stifle for ever the
right of free enquiry, theological criticism, and the hope of further
light from on high, and to proclaim it a libel on the Republic that
within its borders all heretics, whether Arminian or Papist, were safe
from the death penalty or even from bodily punishment. A theological
union instead of a national one and obtained too at the sacrifice of
written law and immemorial tradition, a congress in which clerical
deputations from all the provinces and from foreign nations should
prescribe to