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Updated: May 19, 2025
As time passed on, the gratitude of ancient Germany to her great deliverer grew into adoration, and divine honours were paid for centuries to Arminius by every tribe of the Low Germanic division of the Teutonic races.
As for Arminius and Uytenbogaert, people had long told each other and firmly believed it, and were amazed when any incredulity was expressed in regard to it, that they were in regular and intimate correspondence with the Jesuits, that they had received large sums from Rome, and that both had been promised cardinals' hats.
The prince could not rise to the height on which his illustrious father had stood; and those about him, who encouraged him in his hostility to Catholicism, denounced Barneveld and Arminius as no better than traitors and atheists.
Arminius undertook the task, and attentively examined and weighed the arguments on each side; the result was, that he embraced the opinions which he had been called upon to confute, and even went further than the ministers of Delft. Upon this account, the friends of the rejected principles raised a great clamour against him; but were quieted by the intervention of the magistrates.
He had sung The Messiah and Arminius until they were a weariness to his flesh, and Hiawatha's call to Gitche Manito, the Mighty had become second nature to his tongue. He had moments of acute longing to astound his audience with a German student song, and, upon his off nights, he fell into the vaudeville habit. Not even his Puritanism could enjoy an unlimited diet of oratorio.
Arminius, a man of a frantic spirit, and a novice in affairs, assumed to himself the glory of another, for having by treachery surprised three legions, which expected no foe, and their leader, who feared no fraud; a base surprise, revenged since on Germany with heavy slaughters, and on Arminius himself with domestic infamy, while his wife and his son still bore the bonds of captivity.
The Remonstrance and Contra-Remonstrance, and the appointment of Conrad Vorstius, a more abominable heretic than Arminius, to the vacant chair of Arminius a step which drove Gomarus and the Gomarites to frenzy, although Gomarus and Vorstius remained private and intimate friends to the last are matters briefly to be mentioned on a later page.
Thus assailed, and dreading to see his bride torn from him by the officials of the foreign oppressor, Arminius delayed no longer, but bent all his energies to organize and execute a general insurrection of the great mass of his countrymen, who hitherto had submitted in sullen inertness to the Roman dominion.
Men who with William the Silent and Barneveld had indulged in the vision of religious equality as a possible result of so much fighting against the Holy Inquisition were perhaps to be disappointed. Preachers under the influence of the gentle Arminius having dared to refuse signing the Creed were to be dealt with. It was time to pass from censure to action. Heresy must be trampled down.
His views may have been more or less partial; Philip the Second may have deserved the pitying benevolence of poor Maximilian; Maurice may have wept as sincerely over the errors of Arminius as any one of "the crocodile crew that believe in election;" Barneveld and Grotius may have been on the road to Rome; none of these things seem probable, but if they were all proved true in opposition to his views, we should still have the long roll of glowing tapestry he has woven for us, with all its life-like portraits, its almost moving pageants, its sieges where we can see the artillery flashing, its battle-fields with their smoke and fire, pictures which cannot fade, and which will preserve his name interwoven with their own enduring colors.
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