“In burghers’ mansions, peasants’ cottages, mechanics’ back-parlors; on board herring-smacks, canal-boats, and East Indiamen; in shops, counting-rooms, farm-yards, guard-rooms, alehouses; on the exchange, in the tennis court, on the mall; at banquets, at burials, christenings, or bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts.  The blacksmith’s iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while each paused to hold high converse with friend or foe on fate, free- will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing himself in wandering mazes whence there was no issue.  Province against province, city against city, family against family; it was one vast scene of bickering, denunciation, heart-burnings, mutual excommunication and hatred.”

The religious grounds of the quarrel which set these seventeenth-century Dutchmen to cutting each other’s throats were to be looked for in the “Five Points” of the Arminians as arrayed against the “Seven Points” of the Gomarites, or Contra-Remonstrants.  The most important of the differences which were to be settled by fratricide seem to have been these:—­

According to the Five Points, “God has from eternity resolved to choose to eternal life those who through his grace believe in Jesus Christ,” etc.  According to the Seven Points, “God in his election has not looked at the belief and the repentance of the elect,” etc.  According to the Five Points, all good deeds must be ascribed to God’s grace in Christ, but it does not work irresistibly.  The language of the Seven Points implies that the elect cannot resist God’s eternal and unchangeable design to give them faith and steadfastness, and that they can never wholly and for always lose the true faith.  The language of the Five Points is unsettled as to the last proposition, but it was afterwards maintained by the Remonstrant party that a true believer could, through his own fault, fall away from God and lose faith.

It must be remembered that these religious questions had an immediate connection with politics.  Independently of the conflict of jurisdiction, in which they involved the parties to the two different creeds, it was believed or pretended that the new doctrines of the Remonstrants led towards Romanism, and were allied with designs which threatened the independence of the country.  “There are two factions in the land,” said Maurice, “that of Orange and that of Spain, and the two chiefs of the Spanish faction are those political and priestly Arminians, Uytenbogaert and Oldenbarneveld.”

The heads of the two religious and political parties were in such hereditary, long-continued, and intimate relations up to the time when one signed the other’s death-warrant, that it was impossible to write the life of one without also writing that of the other.  For his biographer John of Barneveld is the true patriot, the martyr, whose cause was that of religious and political freedom.  For him Maurice is the ambitious soldier who hated his political rival, and never rested until this rival was brought to the scaffold.