even to allude to the existence of the peace of Passau. Nor did he
acquiesce only from compulsion, for long before his memorable defeat by
Maurice, he had permitted the German troops, with whose services he could
not dispense, regularly to attend Protestant worship performed by their
own Protestant chaplains. Lutheran preachers marched from city to city
of the Netherlands under the imperial banner, while the subjects of those
patrimonial provinces were daily suffering on the scaffold for their
nonconformity. The influence of this garrison-preaching upon the
progress of the Reformation in the Netherlands is well known. Charles
hated Lutherans, but he required soldiers, and he thus helped by his own
policy to disseminate what had he been the fanatic which he perhaps
became in retirement, he would have sacrificed his life to crush. It is
quite true that the growing Calvinism of the provinces was more dangerous
both religiously and politically, than the Protestantism of the German
princes, which had not yet been formally pronounced heresy, but it is
thus the more evident that it was political rather than religious
heterodoxy which the despot wished to suppress.

No man, however, could have been more observant of religious rites. He
heard mass daily. He listened to a sermon every Sunday and holiday. He
confessed and received the sacrament four times a year. He was sometimes
to be seen in his tent at midnight, on his knees before a crucifix with
eyes and hands uplifted. He ate no meat in Lent, and used extraordinary
diligence to discover and to punish any man, whether courtier or
plebeian, who failed to fast during the whole forty days. He was too
good a politician not to know the value of broad phylacteries and long
prayers. He was too nice an observer of human nature not to know how
easily mint and cummin could still outweigh the "weightier matters of
law, judgment, mercy and faith;" as if the founder of the religion which
he professed, and to maintain which he had established the inquisition