eldest son were, however, condemned to the flames. "Oh God!" prayed the
youth at the stake, "Eternal Father, accept the sacrifice of our lives,
in the name of thy beloved Son."--"Thou liest, scoundrel!" fiercely
interrupted a monk, who was lighting the fire; "God is not your father;
ye are the devil's children." As the flames rose about them, the boy
cried out once more, "Look, my father, all heaven is opening, and I see
ten hundred thousand angels rejoicing over us. Let us be glad, for we
are dying for the truth."--" Thou liest! thou liest !" again screamed
the monk; "all hell is opening, and you see ten thousand devils thrusting
you into eternal fire." Eight days afterwards, the wife of Ogier and his
other son were burned; so that there was an end of that family.

Such are a few isolated specimens of the manner of proceeding in a single
district of the Netherlands. The inquisitor Titelmann certainly deserved
his terrible reputation. Men called him Saul the persecutor, and it was
well known that he had been originally tainted with the heresy which he
had, for so many years, been furiously chastising. At the epoch which
now engages our attention, he felt stimulated by the avowed policy of the
government to fresh exertions, by which all his previous achievements
should be cast into the shade. In one day he broke into a house in
Ryssel, seized John de Swarte, his wife and four children, together with
two newly-married couples, and two other persons, convicted them of
reading the Bible, and of praying in their own doors, and had them all
immediately burned.

Are these things related merely to excite superfluous horror? Are the
sufferings of these obscure Christians beneath the dignity of history?
Is it not better to deal with murder and oppression in the abstract,
without entering into trivial details? The answer is, that these things
are the history of the Netherlands at this epoch; that these hideous