mighty movement of the great revolt from its destined expanse, was as
hopeless a dream as to drive back the Rhine, as it reached the ocean,
into the narrow channel of the Rheinwald glacier whence it sprang.

The republic became the refuge for the oppressed of all nations, where
Jews and Gentiles, Catholics, Calvinists, and Anabaptistis, prayed after
their own manner to the same God and Father. It was too much, however,
to hope that passions which had been so fiercely bubbling during fifty
years would subside at once, and that the most intense religious hatreds
that ever existed would exhale with the proclamation of truce. The march
of humanity is rarely rapid enough to keep pace with the leaders in its
most sublime movements, and it often happens that its chieftains are
dwarfed in the estimation of the contemporaneous vulgar, by the very
distance at which they precede their unconscious followers. But even if
the progress of the human mind towards the truth is fated to be a spiral
one, as if to remind us that mankind is of the earth, earthy--a worm in
the dust while inhabiting this lower sphere--it is at least a consolation
to reflect upon the gradual advancement of the intellect from age to age.

The spirit of Torquemada, of Charles, of Philip, of Titelmann, is even
now not extinct on this globe, but there are counter forces at work,
which must ultimately blast it into insignificance. At the moment of the
great truce, that evil spirit was not exorcised from the human breast,
but the number of its victims and the intensity of its influence had
already miraculously diminished.

The truce was made and announced all over the Netherlands by the ringing
of bells, the happy discharge of innocent artillery, by illuminations, by
Te Deums in all the churches. Papist and Presbyterian fell on their
knees in every grand cathedral or humblest village church, to thank God