religious equality, a condition which had hardly been imagined then and
scarcely exists in Europe even to this day. But among the men in history
whose life and death contributed to the advancement of that blessing, it
would be vain to deny that Barneveld occupies a foremost place.

Moreover, it should be remembered that religious equality then would have
been a most hazardous experiment. So long as Church and State were
blended, it was absolutely essential at that epoch for the preservation
of Protestantism to assign the predominance to the State. Should the
Catholics have obtained religious equality, the probable result would
before long have been religious inequality, supremacy of the Catholics
in the Church, and supremacy of the Church over the State. The fruits of
the forty years' war would have become dust and ashes. It would be mere
weak sentimentalism to doubt--after the bloody history which had just
closed and the awful tragedy, then reopening--that every spark of
religious liberty would have soon been trodden out in the Netherlands.
The general onslaught of the League with Ferdinand, Maximilian of
Bavaria, and Philip of Spain at its head against the distracted,
irresolute, and wavering line of Protestantism across the whole of Europe
was just preparing. Rather a wilderness to reign over than a single
heretic, was the war-cry of the Emperor. The King of Spain, as we have
just been reading in his most secret, ciphered despatches to the Archduke
at Brussels, was nursing sanguine hopes and weaving elaborate schemes for
recovering his dominion over the United Netherlands, and proposing to
send an army of Jesuits thither to break the way to the reconquest.
To play into his hands then, by granting public right of worship to the
Papists, would have been in Barneveld's opinion like giving up Julich and
other citadels in the debatable land to Spain just as the great war
between Catholicism and Protestantism was breaking out. There had been
enough of burning and burying alive in the Netherlands during the century