quartered on the inhabitants. On this one condition the King insisted, that the Catholic worship should be restored, and Protestantism be abolished. The utmost that he could be persuaded to grant was that two years should be allowed the inhabitants of every place either to become Catholic or to quit the country. Brabant and Flanders were recovered to Spain.

The archives of Simancas have disclosed the fact, which was not known to Parma himself, in consequence of his death before the execution of the design, that Philip was on the point of removing him from his command. Instigated, perhaps, by jealousy, on the alleged ground that Parma had given too little authority to Spaniards, and for other reasons of even less weight, Philip had actually determined to displace the general who had reconquered for him the southern provinces of the Netherlands, and twice carried his victorious arms into France, forcing Henry IV. to raise the siege of Paris and of Rouen. The King did not shrink from the ingratitude involved in such an act, and from the indignant condemnation which the public opinion of Europe would have pronounced upon it.1 It was characteristic of Philip to seek the accomplishment of his ends by indirection and falsehood.

brought up to serve the Spanish government

The death of William did not destroy the Republic which he had called into being. In Maurice, his second son for his eldest son was detained in Spain and the party of liberty found a head who was possessed of distinguished military ability. The new commonwealth grew in power. The Dutch sailors captured the vessels of Spain on every sea where they appeared, and attacked her remotest colonies. The magnificent schemes of Philip were doomed to an ignominious failure. His despotic system had full sway in Spain, but it brought ruin upon 1 Gachard, ii. lxxxi.

the country. His colossal armada, which was slowly prepared at enormous cost, for the conquest of England, was shattered in pieces. He had planned to turn France into a Spanish province, but he was forced to conclude the peace of Vervins with Henry IV., and thereby to concede the superiority of the French power. Under Philip III., his imbecile successor, Spain was driven to conclude a truce of twelve years with the revolted Netherlands; and finally, in the Peace of Westphalia, was obliged to acknowledge their independence.

The absorbing interest of the great struggle with Spain leaves in the background the distinctively religious and theological side of the Reformation in the Netherlands. Anabaptists were numerous, but their wild and disor ganizing theories received a check through the influence of Menno, who, after the year 1536, exerted a wholesome influence among them, organizing churches which he taught and regulated for many years. The Mennonites were free from the licentious and revolutionary principles which had covered the name of Anabaptist with reproach.' Apart from their peculiarity respecting baptism, their rejection of oaths, and their refusal to serve in war and in civil offices, together with the ascetic discipline which they adopted a point on which they became divided among themselves they were not distinguished from ordinary Protestants. Yet they continued to be confounded with the fanatical Anabaptists, and were objects of a ferocious persecution, which they endured with heroic patience. The Calvinists gradually obtained a decided preponderance over the Lutherans. In 1561, Guido de Bres and a few other ministers composed the "Confessio Belgica," which was revised and adopted by a Synod at Antwerp in 1566. This creed differs from the "Confessio Gallica" chiefly in its more full exposition of Baptism, with

1 See the art. Menno u. die Mennoniten, by Van Oosterzee, in Herzog, RealEncycl. ix.

special reference to the Anabaptist opinions. The Anabaptists are expressly condemned in another Article. The Calvinists sent a copy of their Symbol, with a Letter, to the King of Spain, in the vain hope to soften his animosity against them. They say in their Letter that "they were never found in arms or plotting against their sovereign; that the excommunications, imprisonments, banishments, racks, and tortures, and other numberless oppressions which they had undergone, plainly demonstrate that their desires and opinions are not carnal; "but that having the fear of God before their eyes, and being terrified by the threatening of Christ, who had declared in the Gospel that he would deny them before God the Father, in case they denied him before men, they therefore offered their backs to stripes, their tongues to knives, their mouths to gags, and their whole bodies to the fire." 1

Yet the Calvinists of the Netherlands, notwithstanding their own dreadful sufferings, did not themselves relinquish the dogma that heresy may be suppressed by the magistrate. Their difference from their opponents was not on the question whether heresy is to be punished, but how heresy is to be defined. This dogma they introduce into the Belgic Confession,2 and into their letter to the King. They were disposed, where they had the power, to inflict disabilities and penalties on the Anabaptists, even when they were peaceful subjects. It must not be forgotten that at the very time when Philip's agents were doing their terrible work in the Netherlands, Queen Elizabeth was likewise striving to enforce uniformity in Protestant England. With one hand she helped the Calvinistic subjects of Philip; with the other she thrust her own Puritan subjects into loathsome dungeons. Not that Protestants on either side of the sea were capable of the atrocities for which Philip was responsible. And a dif2 Art. xxxvi. "De Magistratu."

1 Brandt, i. 158.

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION.

313

ference of degree in the exercise of the inhumanity, which was the fruit of a false principle, is a circumstance of the highest importance. But the principle was at the root the same. Hence the doctrine of religious toleration, which was avowed and practiced by William of Orange and a part of his supporters, is the more honorable to them, in contrast with the prevalent intolerance of the age. As early as 1566, in his speech before the Regent and the Council, William denounced persecution as futile, and confirmed his assertion by an appeal to experience, to historical examples, ancient and recent. "Force,” he said, " can make no impression on the conscience." He compared inquisitors to physicians who, instead of using mild and gentle medicines, are "for immediately burning or cutting off the infected part.” "This is the nature of heresy," he added, "if it rests, it rusts; but he that rubs it, whets it."1 At a later time, he had to withstand the importunities of his friends, who wished to use force against the Anabaptists. St. Aldegonde reports that to his arguments in behalf of such a measure, his illustrious chief "replied pretty sharply," that the affirmation of the adherents of that sect might take the place of an oath, and that "we ought not to press this matter further, unless we would own at the same time, that the Papists were in the right, in forcing us to a religion that was incompatible with our consciences." "And upon this occasion," adds St. Aldegonde, "he commended the saying of a monk that was here not long since, who, upon several objections brought against his religion, answered: that our pot had not been so long upon the fire as theirs, whom we so much blamed; but that he plainly foresaw that in the course of a pair of hundred years, ecclesiastical dominion would be upon an equal foot in both churches." St. Aldegonde himself states that a multitude of nobles and of common people kept away 1 Brandt, i. 164.

999

from the Calvinistic assemblies from the fear "of a new tyranny and yoke of spiritual dominion." The Germans, especially, he says, join the heterodox "because they dread our insufferable rigidness.” In 1578, the National Synod of all the reformed churches sent up to the Council a petition for religious toleration, which they desired for themselves and pledged to Roman Catholics. "The experience of past years," say the Synod, "had taught them that by reason of their sins they could not all be reduced to one and the same religion;" and that without mutual toleration, they could not throw off the Spanish tyranny.2 They refer to the rivers of blood that had been shed in France to no purpose, in the effort to procure unanimity in religion.

There was another question which gave rise to division among the reformed, the question of the relation of the Church to the civil authority. The Calvinists insisted on their principle of the autonomy of the Church, and rejected ecclesiastical control on the part of the State. As in Geneva and in Scotland, they demanded that the Church should be not separate, but distinct. On the contrary, a great part of the magistrates, and with them. an influential portion of the laity, especially such as cared little for the peculiarities of Calvinism as distinguished from Lutheranism, resisted this demand. These claimed that the civil authority should have power in the appointment of ministers and in the administration of Church government. In 1576, under the auspices of William of Orange, a programme of forty ecclesiastical laws was drawn up, in conformity with this principle. The second Synod of Dort, in 1578, endeavored to realize the idea of ecclesiastical autonomy, through a system of presbyteries and of provincial and national synods. But the result of the strife was that the Church was limited to a provincial organization, the provinces being subdivided into classes, 1 Brandt, i. 333. 3 Ibid., i. 318.

2 Ibid., i. 340.