and intolerant spirit of the reformed religion. There were many men in
Holland who had already imbibed the true lesson--the only, one worth
learning of the reformation--liberty of thought; but toleration in the
eyes of the extreme Calvinistic party was as great a vice as it could be
in the estimation of Papists. To a favoured few of other habits of
thought, it had come to be regarded as a virtue; but the day was still
far distant when men were to scorn the very word toleration as an insult
to the dignity of man; as if for any human being or set of human beings,
in caste, class, synod, or church, the right could even in imagination be
conceded of controlling the consciences of their fellow-creatures.

But it was progress for the sixteenth century that there were
individuals, and prominent individuals, who dared to proclaim liberty
of conscience for all. William of Orange was a Calvinist, sincere and
rigid, but he denounced all oppression of religion, and opened wide the
doors of the Commonwealth to Papists, Lutherans, and Anabaptists alike.
The Earl of Leicester was a Calvinist, most rigid in tenet, most edifying
of conversation, the acknowledged head of the Puritan party of England,
but he was intolerant and was influenced only by the most intolerant of
his sect. Certainly it would have required great magnanimity upon his
part to assume a friendly demeanour towards the Papists. It is easier
for us, in more favoured ages, to rise to the heights of philosophical
abstraction, than for a man, placed as was Leicester, in the front rank
of a mighty battle, in which the triumph of either religion seemed to
require the bodily annihilation of all its adversaries. He believed that
the success of a Catholic conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth or of
a Spanish invasion of England, would raise Mary to the throne and consign
himself to the scaffold. He believed that the subjugation of the
independent Netherlands would place the Spaniards instantly in England,
and he frequently received information, true or false, of Popish plots