The religious quarrel of the Dutchmen in the seventeenth century reminds us in some points of the strife between two parties in our own New England, sometimes arraying the “church” on one side against the “parish,” or the general body of worshippers, on the other.  The portraits of Gomarus, the great orthodox champion, and Arminius, the head and front of the “liberal theology” of his day, as given in the little old quarto of Meursius, recall two ministerial types of countenance familiar to those who remember the earlier years of our century.

Under the name of “Remonstrants” and “Contra-Remonstrants,”—­Arminians and old-fashioned Calvinists, as we should say,—­the adherents of the two Leyden professors disputed the right to the possession of the churches, and the claim to be considered as representing the national religion.  Of the seven United Provinces, two, Holland and Utrecht, were prevailingly Arminian, and the other five Calvinistic.  Barneveld, who, under the title of Advocate, represented the province of Holland, the most important of them all, claimed for each province a right to determine its own state religion.  Maurice the Stadholder, son of William the Silent, the military chief of the republic, claimed the right for the States-General.  ‘Cujus regio ejus religio’ was then the accepted public doctrine of Protestant nations.  Thus the provincial and the general governments were brought into conflict by their creeds, and the question whether the republic was a confederation or a nation, the same question which has been practically raised, and for the time at least settled, in our own republic, was in some way to be decided.  After various disturbances and acts of violence by both parties, Maurice, representing the States-General, pronounced for the Calvinists or Contra-Remonstrants, and took possession of one of the great churches, as an assertion of his authority.  Barneveld, representing the Arminian or Remonstrant provinces, levied a body of mercenary soldiers in several of the cities.  These were disbanded by Maurice, and afterwards by an act of the States-General.  Barneveld was apprehended, imprisoned, and executed, after an examination which was in no proper sense a trial.  Grotius, who was on the Arminian side and involved in the inculpated proceedings, was also arrested and imprisoned.  His escape, by a stratagem successfully repeated by a slave in our own times, may challenge comparison for its romantic interest with any chapter of fiction.  How his wife packed him into the chest supposed to contain the folios of the great oriental scholar Erpenius, how the soldiers wondered at its weight and questioned whether it did not hold an Arminian, how the servant-maid, Elsje van Houwening, quick-witted as Morgiana of the “Forty Thieves,” parried their questions and convoyed her master safely to the friendly place of refuge,—­all this must be read in the vivid narrative of the author.

The questions involved were political, local, personal, and above all religious.  Here is the picture which Motley draws of the religious quarrel as it divided the people:—­