It was only tanners, dyers and apostate priests who were Protestants at that day in the Netherlands.

His determination to protect a multitude of his harmless inferiors from horrible deaths did not proceed from sympathy with their religious sentiments, but merely from a generous and manly detestation of murder.

He carefully averted his mind from sacred matters.

If indeed the seed implanted by his pious parents were really the germ of his future conversion to Protestantism, it must be confessed that it lay dormant a long time.

But his mind was in other pursuits.