"He knew nothing of predestination," he was wont to say, "whether it was green or whether it was blue.

He only knew that his pipe and the Advocate's were not likely to make music together." This much of predestination he did know, that if the Advocate and his friends were to come to open conflict with the Prince of Orange-Nassau, the conqueror of Nieuwpoort, it was predestined to go hard with the Advocate and his friends.
The theological quibble did not interest him much, and he was apt to blunder about it.
"Well, preacher," said he one day to Albert Huttenus, who had come to him to intercede for a deserter condemned to be hanged, "are you one of those Arminians who believe that one child is born to salvation and another to damnation ?" Huttenus, amazed to the utmost at the extraordinary question, replied, "Your Excellency will be graciously pleased to observe that this is not the opinion of those whom one calls by the hateful name of Arminians, but the opinion of their adversaries." "Well, preacher," rejoined Maurice, "don't you think I know better ?" And turning to Count Lewis William, Stadholder of Friesland, who was present, standing by the hearth with his hand on a copper ring of the chimneypiece, he cried, "Which is right, cousin, the preacher or I ?" "No, cousin," answered Count Lewis, "you are in the wrong." Thus to the Catholic League organized throughout Europe in solid and consistent phalanx was opposed the Great Protestant Union, ardent and enthusiastic in detail, but undisciplined, disobedient, and inharmonious as a whole.
The great principle, not of religious toleration, which is a phrase of insult, but of religious equality, which is the natural right of mankind, was to be evolved after a lapse of, additional centuries out of the elemental conflict which had already lasted so long.

Still later was the total divorce of State and Church to be achieved as the final consummation of the great revolution.

Meantime it was almost inevitable that the privileged and richly endowed church, with ecclesiastical armies and arsenals vastly superior to anything which its antagonist could improvise, should more than hold its own.
At the outset of the epoch which now occupies our attention, Europe was in a state of exhaustion and longing for repose.

Spain had submitted to the humiliation of a treaty of truce with its rebellious subjects which was substantially a recognition of their independence.