keep one's eyes from that which God chooses
to conceal. He calls us not to eternal life through subtle and perplexing
questions."

And further exhorting them to conciliation and compromise, he enlarged on
the effect of their internal dissensions on their exterior relations.
"What joy, what rapture you are preparing for your neighbours by your
quarrels! How they will scorn you! How they will laugh! What a hope do
you give them of revenging themselves upon you without danger to
themselves! Let me implore you to baffle their malice, to turn their joy
into mourning, to unite yourselves to confound them."

He spoke much more in the same vein, expressing wise and moderate
sentiments. He might as well have gone down to the neighbouring beach
when a south-west gale was blowing and talked of moderation to the waves
of the German Ocean. The tempest of passion and prejudice had risen in
its might and was sweeping all before it. Yet the speech, like other
speeches and intercessions made at this epoch by de Boississe and by the
regular French ambassador, du Maurier, was statesmanlike and reasonable.
It is superfluous to say that it was in unison with the opinions of
Barneveld, for Barneveld had probably furnished the text of the oration.
Even as he had a few years before supplied the letters which King James
had signed and subsequently had struggled so desperately to disavow, so
now the Advocate's imperious intellect had swayed the docile and amiable
minds of the royal envoys into complete sympathy with his policy. He
usually dictated their general instructions. But an end had come to such
triumphs. Dudley Carleton had returned from his leave of absence in
England, where he had found his sovereign hating the Advocate as doctors
hate who have been worsted in theological arguments and despots who have
been baffled in their imperious designs. Who shall measure the influence
on the destiny of this statesman caused by the French-Spanish marriages,
the sermons of James through the mouth of Carleton, and the mutual
jealousy of France and England?

But the Advocate was in prison, and the earth seemed to have closed over
him. Hardly a ripple of indignation was perceptible on the calm surface
of affairs, although in the States-General as in the States of Holland
his absence seemed to have reduced both bodies to paralysis.

They were the more easily handled by the prudent, skilful, and determined
Maurice.

The arrest of the four gentleme