and atheists. In the eyes of the extreme party, the mighty war had been
waged, not to liberate human thought, but to enforce predestination; and
heretics to Calvinism were as offensive in their eyes as Jews and
Saracens had ever been to Torquemada.

The reasons were unanswerable for the refusal of the States to bind
themselves to a foreign sovereign in regard to the interior
administration of their commonwealth; but that diversity of religious
worship should be considered incompatible with the health of the young
republic--that the men who had so bravely fought the Spanish Inquisition
should now claim their own right of inquisition into the human
conscience--this was almost enough to create despair as to the
possibility of the world's progress. The seed of intellectual
advancement is slow in ripening, and it is almost invariably the case
that the generation which plants--often but half conscious of the
mightiness of its work--is not the generation which reaps the harvest.
But all mankind at last inherits what is sown in the blood and tears of a
few. That Government, whether regal or democratic, should dare to thrust
itself between man and his Maker--that the State, not with interfering in
a thousand superfluous ways with the freedom of individual human action
in the business of life, should combine with the Church to reduce human
thought to slavery in regard to the sacred interests of eternity, was one
day to be esteemed a blasphemous presumption in lands which deserved to
call themselves free. But that hour had not yet come.

"If the garrisons should be weakened," said the prince, "nothing could be
expected from the political fidelity of the town populations in question,
unless they should be allowed the exercise of their own religion. But
the States could hardly be disposed to grant this voluntarily, for fear
of injuring the general insecurity and violating the laws of the