decisions concerning religious matters belonged to the supreme authority.
The Gomarites contended that sacred matters should be referred to synods
of the clergy. Here was the germ of a conflict which might one day shake
the republic to its foundations.

Barneveld, the great leader of the municipal, party, who loved political
power quite as well as he loved his country; was naturally a chieftain of
the Arminians; for church, matters were no more separated from political
matters in the commonwealth at that moment than they were in the cabinets
of Henry, James, or Philip.

It was inevitable therefore that the war party should pour upon his head
more than seven vials of theological wrath. The religious doctrines
which he espoused were, odious not only because they were deemed vile in
themselves but because he believed in them.

Arminianism was regarded as a new and horrible epidemic, daily gaining
ground, and threatening to destroy the whole population. Men deliberated
concerning the best means to cut off communication with the infected
regions, and to extirpate the plague even by desperate and heroic
remedies, as men in later days take measures against the cholera or the
rinderpest.

Theological hatred was surely not extinct in the Netherlands. It was a
consolation, however, that its influence was rendered less noxious by the
vastly increased strength of principles long dormant in the atmosphere.
Anna van der Hoven, buried alive in Brussels, simply because her
Calvinistic creed was a crime in the eyes of the monks who murdered her,
was the last victim to purely religious persecution. If there were one
day to be still a tragedy or two in the Netherlands it was inevitable