For they had adopted the useful and practical maxim of “once is enough and too many” and they were so horrified by what had happened during the terrible years of the great Supralapsarian civil war that they uncompromisingly suppressed all further forms of religious frenzy.
Posterity has not always been kind to those aristocrats of the ledger. Undoubtedly they regarded the country as their private property and did not always differentiate with sufficient nicety between the interests of their fatherland and those of their own firm. They lacked that broad vision which goes with empire and almost invariably they were penny-wise and pound-foolish. But they did something which deserves our hearty commendation. They turned their country into an international clearing-house where all sorts of people with all sorts of ideas were given the widest degree of liberty to say, think, write and print whatever pleased them.
I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. Here and there, under a threat of ministerial disapprobation, the Town Councilors were sometimes obliged to suppress a secret society of Catholics or to confiscate the pamphlets printed by a particularly noisy heretic. But generally speaking, as long as one did not climb on a soap-box in the middle of the market place to denounce the doctrine of predestination or carry a big rosary into a public dining-hall or deny the existence of God in the South Side Methodist Church of Haarlem, one enjoyed a degree of personal immunity which for almost two centuries made the Dutch Republic a veritable haven of rest for all those who in other parts of the world were persecuted for the sake of their opinions.
Soon the rumor of this Paradise Regained spread abroad. And during the next two hundred years, the print shops and the coffee-houses of Holland were filled with a motley crew of enthusiasts, the advance guard of a strange new army of spiritual liberation.
CHAPTER XX
BRUNO
It has been said (and with a good deal of reason) that the Great War was a war of non-commissioned officers.
While the generals and the colonels and the three-star strategists sat in solitary splendor in the halls of some deserted château and contemplated miles of maps until they could evolve a new bit of tactics that was to give them half a square mile of territory (and lose some thirty thousand men), the junior officers, the sergeants and the corporals, aided and abetted by a number of intelligent privates, did the so-called “dirty work” and eventually brought about the collapse of the German line of defense.
The great crusade for spiritual independence was fought along similar lines.
There were no frontal attacks which drew into action half a million soldiers.