indifferent exchange for a faith in the purgatory and paradise of Rome.
Perplexed in the extreme, the youthful John bethought himself of an
inscription over the gateway of his famous but questionable great
grandfather's house at Amersfort--'nil scire tutissima fides.' He
resolved thenceforth to adopt a system of ignorance upon matters beyond
the flaming walls of the world; to do the work before him manfully and
faithfully while he walked the earth, and to trust that a benevolent
Creator would devote neither him nor any other man to eternal hellfire.
For this most offensive doctrine he was howled at by the strictly pious,
while he earned still deeper opprobrium by daring to advocate religious
toleration: In face of the endless horrors inflicted by the Spanish
Inquisition upon his native land, he had the hardihood--although a
determined Protestant himself--to claim for Roman Catholics the right to
exercise their religion in the free States on equal terms with those of
the reformed faith. "Anyone," said his enemies, "could smell what that
meant who had not a wooden nose." In brief, he was a liberal Christian,
both in theory and practice, and he nobly confronted in consequence the
wrath of bigots on both sides. At a later period the most zealous
Calvinists called him Pope John, and the opinions to which he was to owe
such appellations had already been formed in his mind.

After completing his very thorough legal studies, he had practised as
an advocate in Holland and Zeeland. An early defender of civil and
religious freedom, he had been brought at an early day into contact with
William the Silent, who recognized his ability. He had borne a snap-
hance on his shoulder as a volunteer in the memorable attempt to relieve
Haarlem, and was one of the few survivors of that bloody night. He had
stood outside the walls of Leyden in company of the Prince of Orange when
that magnificent destruction of the dykes had taken place by which the
city had been saved from the fate impending over it. At a still more