It was wearisome for the Advocate thus ever to be foiled; by the
pettinesses and jealousies of those occupying the highest earthly places,
in his efforts to stem the rising tide of Spanish and Catholic
aggression, and to avert the outbreak of a devastating war to which he
saw Europe doomed. It may be wearisome to read the record. Yet it is the
chronicle of Christendom during one of the most important and fateful
epochs of modern history. No man can thoroughly understand the
complication and precession of phenomena attending the disastrous dawn of
the renewed war, on an even more awful scale than the original conflict
in the Netherlands, without studying the correspondence of Barneveld. The
history of Europe is there. The fate of Christendom is there. The
conflict of elements, the crash of contending forms of religion and of
nationalities, is pictured there in vivid if homely colours. The
Advocate, while acting only in the name of a slender confederacy, was in
truth, so long as he held his place, the prime minister of European
Protestantism. There was none other to rival him, few to comprehend him,
fewer still to sustain him. As Prince Maurice was at that moment the
great soldier of Protestantism without clearly scanning the grandeur of
the field in which he was a chief actor, or foreseeing the vastness of
its future, so the Advocate was its statesman and its prophet. Could the
two have worked together as harmoniously as they had done at an earlier
day, it would have been a blessing for the common weal of Europe. But,
alas! the evil genius of jealousy, which so often forbids cordial
relations between soldier and statesman, already stood shrouded in the
distance, darkly menacing the strenuous patriot, who was wearing his life
out in exertions for what he deemed the true cause of progress and
humanity.

Nor can the fate of the man himself, his genuine character, and the