and liberty for eighty years.  For four-fifths of a century they faced not only the best and bravest soldiers of Europe, but they faced, along with their wives, their children, and their old folk, the flame, the gibbet, the flood, the siege, the pestilence, the famine, “and all men know, or dream, or fear of agony,” all for one thing—­to teach the oppressor that his cause must fail.  It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that the heritage of priceless liberty should be their children’s pride.  But read Motley, or the recent and remarkably well-written volumes of Douglas Campbell, and you will see that every atrocity that Spanish hatred, religious intolerance, and mediaeval bigotry could invent, every horror that ever followed in the train of war, swept over and desolated Holland.  And yet, to teach a lesson to oppressors, they endured, they fought, they suffered, they conquered; and when they conquered, the whole world was taught the lesson—­worth all the Dutchmen’s agony to teach it—­that the children of a heavenly Father are born free and equal, and that it is neither the province of nation or church to coerce them into any religious belief or doctrine whatsoever.

The principle of Protestantism was won in the eighty-year war of the Netherlanders.  During all this time the Dutch were notably giving a lesson to oppressors.  But then and afterward they furnished a brilliant and commendable example to the oppressed.  Though they fought the wrong, they never opposed the truth.  They were fierce, but never fanatical.  They loved liberty, but they never encouraged license; they believed in freedom and the maintenance of chartered rights, but they never denied their lawful allegiance to their governor, nor refused scriptural submission to the powers ordained of God.  The public documents throughout the eighty years of war invariably recognized Philip as lawful king.  Even the University of Leyden, founded as a thanksgiving offering for their successful resistance to the Spanish siege, observed the usual legal fiction, and acknowledged the King as ruler of the realm.  And, although the Dutch had abundant reason to be vindictive, once the opportunity offered, the desire for persecution vanished.  William the Silent, as early as 1556, in a public speech before the regent and her council, says, “Force can make no impression on one’s conscience.”  “It is the nature of heresy,” he goes on to say (would we had the spirit of William in our churches to-day)—­“it is the nature of heresy, if it rests it rusts:  he that rubs it whets it.”  His was an age when religious toleration, except as a political necessity, was unknown.  Holland first practised it, then taught it to the world.  No less in her example to the oppressed than in her warning to oppressors, is Holland conspicuous, is Holland great.  During the reign of William of Orange, first a Romanist, then a Calvinist, never