For Religion and Liberty

Abstract

From the beginning of the resistance and the revolt, two causes had been inextricably tangled in their origins and their course. One was religion, which meant the place of Calvinists and other Protestants in society and the state; the other was liberty, which meant not only the rights and privileges of local and provincial authorities, but also those which belonged to each man individually against the intrusions of the new governments no less than those of the old authorities. The debates and struggles which marked the interrelationship of religion and liberty in these decades of Netherlands history already carried much of the burden of the passions and the ambiguous, or multiple, meanings which these large words were to bear in later times and in other lands down to our own day.