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Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland : with a view of the primary causes and movements of the Thirty Years' War, 1618-19 by John Lothrop Motley
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think alike on one of the subtlest and most mysterious problems that
casuistry has ever propounded.

For fifty years, he said, he had been an enemy of all compulsion of the
human conscience. He had always opposed rigorous ecclesiastical decrees.
He had done his best to further, and did not deny having inspired, the
advice given in the famous letters from the King of Great Britain to the
States in 1613, that there should be mutual toleration and abstinence
from discussion of disputed doctrines, neither of them essential to
salvation. He thought that neither Calvin nor Beza would have opposed
freedom of opinion on those points. For himself he believed that the
salvation of mankind would be through God's unmerited grace and the
redemption of sins though the Saviour, and that the man who so held and
persevered to the end was predestined to eternal happiness, and that his
children dying before the age of reason were destined not to Hell but to
Heaven. He had thought fifty years long that the passion and sacrifice
of Christ the Saviour were more potent to salvation than God's wrath and
the sin of Adam and Eve to damnation. He had done his best practically
to avert personal bickerings among the clergy. He had been, so far as
lay in his power, as friendly to Remonstrants as to Contra-Remonstrants,
to Polyander and Festus Hommius as to Uytenbogaert and Episcopius. He
had almost finished a negotiation with Councillor Kromhout for the
peaceable delivery of the Cloister Church on the Thursday preceding the
Sunday on which it had been forcibly seized by the Contra-Remonstrants.

When asked by one of his judges how he presumed to hope for toleration
between two parties, each of which abhorred the other's opinions, and
likened each other to Turks and devil-worshippers, he replied that he had
always detested and rebuked those mutual revilings by every means in his
power, and would have wished to put down such calumniators of either
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