7. It is possible for a regenerate man to live without sin.
Arminius’s works are mostly occasional treatises drawn from him by controversial emergencies, but they everywhere exhibit a calm, well-furnished, undogmatic and progressive mind. He was essentially an amiable man, who hated the zeal for an impossible orthodoxy that constrained “the church to institute a search after crimes which have not betrayed an existence, yea, and to drag into open contentions those who are meditating no evil.” His friend Peter Bertius, who pronounced his funeral oration, closed it with these words: “There lived a man whom it was not possible for those who knew him sufficiently to esteem; those who entertained no esteem for him are such as never knew him well enough to appreciate his merits.”
The works of Arminius (in Latin) were published in a single quarto volume at Leiden in 1629, at Frankfort in 1631 and 1635. Two volumes of an English translation, with copious notes, by James Nichols, were published at London, 1825-1828; three volumes (complete) at Buffalo, 1853. A life was written by Caspar Brandt, son of Gerard Brandt, the historian of the Dutch reformation, and published in 1724; republished and annotated by J.L. Mosheim in 1725; and translated into English by the Rev. John Guthrie, 1854. James Nichols also wrote a life (London, 1843).
ARMISTICE (from Lat. arma, arms, and sistere, to stop), a suspension of hostilities by mutual agreement between two nations at war, or their respective forces. An armistice may be either general or particular; in the first case there is a complete cessation of hostile operations in every part of the dominions of the belligerent powers; in the second there is merely a temporary truce between two contending armies, or between a besieged fortress and the force besieging it. Such a temporary truce, when for a very limited period and for a special purpose, e.g. the collection of the wounded and the burial of the dead, is termed a suspension of arms. A general armistice cannot be concluded by the commanders-in-chief unless special authority has been previously delegated to them by their respective governments; otherwise any arrangement entered into by them requires subsequent ratification by the supreme powers of the states. A partial truce may be concluded by the officers of the respective powers, without any special authority from their governments, wherever, from the nature and extent of the commands they exercise, their duties could not be efficiently discharged without their possession of such a power. The conduct of belligerent parties during an armistice is usually regulated in modern warfare by express agreement between the parties, but where this is not the case the following general conditions may be laid down. (1) Each party may do, within the limits prescribed by the truce, whatever he could have done in time of peace. For example, he can raise troops, collect stores, receive reinforcements and fortify places that are not actually in a state of siege. (2) Neither party can take advantage of the armistice to do what he could not have done had military operations continued. Thus he cannot throw provisions or reinforcements into a besieged town, and neither besiegers nor besieged are at liberty to repair their fortifications or erect new works. (3) All things contained in places the possession of which was contested, must remain in the state in which they were before the armistice began. Any infringement by either party of the conditions of the truce entitles the other to recommence hostile operations without previous intimation.
ARMOIRE, the French name (cf. Almery) given to a tall movable cupboard, or “wardrobe,” with one or more doors. It has varied considerably in shape and size, and the decoration of its doors and sides has faithfully represented mutations of fashion and modifications of use. It was originally exceedingly massive and found its chief decoration in elaborate hinges and locks of beaten iron. The finer ecclesiastical armoires or aumbries which have come down to us—used in churches for the safe custody of vestments, eucharistic vessels, reliquaries and other precious objects—are usually painted, sometimes even upon the interior, with sacred subjects or with incidents from the lives of the saints. The cathedrals of Bayeux and Noyon contain famous examples; the most typical English one is in York minster. By the end of the 14th century, when the carpenter and the wood-carver had acquired a better mastery of their material, the taste for painted surfaces appears to have given place to the vogue of carving, and the simple rectangular panels gradually became sculptured with a simple motive, such as the linen-fold or parchment patterns. In the treasury of St Germain l’Auxerrois the ends of the 15th-century armoires are treated in this way. In that and the two following centuries the keys and the escutcheons of the locks became highly ornamental; usually in forged iron, they were occasionally made of more precious metals. By slow degrees the shape of this receptacle changed—from breadth was evolved height, and the tall form of armoire became characteristic. The Renaissance exercised a notable effect upon this, as upon so many other varieties of furniture. It became less obviously and aggressively a thing of utility; its proportions shrank from the massive to the elegant; its artistic effectiveness was vastly enhanced by its division into an upper and a lower part. Enriched with columns and pilasters, its panels carved with mythology, its canopied niches filled with sculptured statuettes, and terminating with a rich cornice and perhaps a broken pediment, it was widely removed in appearance, if not in purpose, from the uncompromising iron-mounted receptacle of earlier generations. During the 16th century, when the surging impulses of the Renaissance had died away, the armoire relapsed into plainness, its proportions increased, and it was again constructed in one piece. Ere long, however, it grew more sumptuous than ever. Boulle encrusted it with marqueterie from designs by Bérain; it glowed with amorini, with the torches and arrows of Cupid, with the garlands which he weaves for his captives, and when allusiveness left a corner vacant, it was filled with arabesques in ebony or ivory, in brass or white metal. While the royal palaces and the hôtels of the great nobility were filled with those costly splendours, the ordinary cabinetmaker continued to construct his modest pieces, and by the middle of the 18th century the armoire was found in every French house, ample in width and high in proportion to the lofty rooms of the period. It is not to be supposed that so useful a piece of furniture was confined to France. It was used, more or less, throughout a considerable part of Europe, but it was distinctively Gallic nevertheless, and never became thoroughly acclimatized elsewhere until about the beginning of the 19th century, when it developed into the glass-fronted wardrobe which is now an essential detail in the plenishing of the bed-chamber, not merely in France and England, but in many other countries. The armoire à glace was known and occasionally made in France as far back as the middle of the 18th century, and almost the earliest mention of it connects it with the scandalous relations of the Maréchal de Richelieu and the beautiful fermière générale, Mme de la Popelinière, who had one made to mask a secret door. In the conventional and not very attractive wardrobe of commerce it is difficult to descry the gracious characteristics of the armoire of the Renaissance or the 17th century, and it is not altogether surprising that Théodore de Banville should have condemned one of the most solidly useful of household necessaries as a “hideous monster.”
ARMORICA (Aremorica), the Roman name, derived from two Celtic words meaning the “seaside” (ar, on, and mor, sea), for the land of the Armorici, roughly the peninsula of Brittany. At the time of the Roman advance on Gaul there were five principal tribes in Armorica, the Namneti, the Veneti, the Osismii, the Curiosolitae and the Redones. It was subdued by Caesar, who entirely destroyed the seafaring tribe of its south coast, the Veneti. Under the Empire it formed part of the province of Gallia Lugudunensis (Lugdunensis). It contained hardly any towns, though many large country houses, and was perhaps less Romanized than the rest of Gaul. In and after the later part of the 5th century it received many Celtic immigrants from the British Isles, fleeing (it is said) from the Saxons; and the Celtic dialect which the Bretons still speak is thought to owe its origin to these immigrants. (See further [Brittany].)