care than has hitherto been taken to practise in good earnest those
remedies which were wont to be used at a time when the church was in
its greatest piety, in order to correct the abuses and errors which the
corruption of mankind had tried to introduce as being the true and sole
means of uniting all Christians in one and the same creed."

Surely the world had made progress in these forty years of war. Was it
not something to gain for humanity, for intellectual advancement, for
liberty of thought, for the true interests of religion, that a Roman
Catholic, an ex-leaguer, a trusted representative of the immediate
successor of Charles IX. and Henry III., could stand up on the blood-
stained soil of the Netherlands and plead for liberty of conscience
for all mankind?

"Those cannot be said to share in, any enjoyment from whom has been taken
the power of serving God according to the religion in which they have
been brought up. No slavery is more intolerable nor more exasperating to
the mind than such restraint."

Most true, O excellent president! No axiom in mathematics is more
certain than this simple statement. To prove its truth William the
Silent had lived and died. To prove it a falsehood, emperors, and kings,
and priests, had issued bans, and curses, and damnable decrees. To root
it out they had butchered, drowned, shot, strangled, poisoned, tortured,
roasted alive, buried alive, starved, and driven mad, thousands and tens
of thousands of their fellow creatures. And behold there had been almost
a century of this work, and yet the great truth was not rooted out after
all; and the devil-worshippers, who had sought at the outset of the great
war to establish the Holy Inquisition in the Netherlands upon the ruins
of religious and political liberty, were overthrown at last and driven