country's independence and to the death struggle with Spain.

As if because a man admitted the possibility of all his fellow-creatures
being saved from damnation through repentance and the grace of God, he
must inevitably be a traitor to his country and a pensionary of her
deadliest foe.

And where the Contra-Remonstrants held possession of the churches and the
city governments, acts of tyranny which did not then seem ridiculous were
of everyday occurrence. Clergymen, suspected of the Five Points, were
driven out of the pulpits with bludgeons or assailed with brickbats at
the church door. At Amsterdam, Simon Goulart, for preaching the doctrine
of universal salvation and for disputing the eternal damnation of young
children, was forbidden thenceforth to preach at all.

But it was at the Hague that the schism in religion and politics first
fatally widened itself. Henry Rosaeus, an eloquent divine, disgusted
with his colleague Uytenbogaert, refused all communion with him, and was
in consequence suspended. Excluded from the Great Church, where he had
formerly ministered, he preached every Sunday at Ryswyk, two or three
miles distant. Seven hundred Contra-Remonstrants of the Hague followed
their beloved pastor, and, as the roads to Ryswyk were muddy and sloppy
in winter, acquired the unsavoury nickname of the "Mud Beggars." The
vulgarity of heart which suggested the appellation does not inspire
to-day great sympathy with the Remonstrant party, even if one were
inclined to admit, what is not the fact, that they represented the cause
of religious equality. For even the illustrious Grotius was at that very
moment repudiating the notion that there could be two religions in one
state. "Difference in public worship," he said, "was in kingdoms
pernicious, but in free commonwealths in the highest degree destructive."