tic
colouring. It was no accident that one of his most important literary
works was on Ethics ("Sittenkunst"), for his primary interest centred in
man and in the art of living well ("Die Kunst wohl zu leben").[3]

As he developed into independent manhood, he threw himself with great
zeal into the cause of political freedom for the city of Haarlem, on
account of which he suffered a severe imprisonment in the Hague in 1560,
and at a later time was compelled to flee into temporary exile. He
attracted the attention of William of Orange, who discovered his
abilities and made him Secretary to the States-General in 1572, prized
him highly for his character and abilities, commissioned him to write
important state papers, and intrusted very weighty affairs to him.

In his youth he had been an extensive traveller and had seen with his own
eyes the methods which the Spanish Inquisition employed to compel
uniformity of faith and, with his whole moral being revolting from these
unspiritual methods, he dedicated himself to the cause of liberty of
religious thought, and for this he wrote and spoke and wrought with a
fearlessness and bravery not often surpassed.[4] With this passion of
his for intellectual and spiritual freedom was joined a deeply grounded
disapproval of the fundamental ideas of Calvinism, as he found it
expounded by the preachers and theologians of the Reformed Church in
Holland. As a Humanist, he was convinced of man's freedom of will, and
he was equally convinced that however man had been marred by a _fall_
from his highest possibilities, he was still possessed of native gifts
and graces, and bore deep within himself an unlost central being, which
in all his wanderings joined him indissolubly to God. On the great
theological {107} issues of the day he "disputed," with penetrating
insight, against the leading theologians of the Netherlands, and he
always proved to be a formidable antagonist who could not be put down or
kept refuted. Jacobus Arminius, at the turning of his career, was
selected by the Consistory to make once for all a refutation of
Coornhert's dangerous writings. He, however, became so impressed, as he
studied the works which he was to refute, that he shifted his own
fundamental points of belief, accepted many of Coornhert's views, and
became himself a greater "heretic" and a more dangerous opponent of
Calvinism than the man whom he was chosen to annihilate.[5]

Sometime in his religious devel