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IN THE summer of 1847 a company of immigrants from Holland settled in Marion county, Iowa, on the divide between the Des Moines and Skunk rivers. In their own country they had been persecuted on account of religion, being dissenters from the state Reformed church, and so they called their new home, Pella, the name meaning a place of refuge. Upon the seal of the new town they inscribed the words: In Deo Spes Nostra et Refugium, or, In God Our Hope and Refuge.
To speak of religious persecutions in Holland is almost to contradict history. Holland has been one of the cradles of religious liberty in Europe. The Pilgrim Fathers of American history found refuge there, although all the political power of England was used to dislodge them. And long before the pilgrimage at Leyden, triumphant over the cruel Spanish Inquisition and the combined Catholic powers on sea and land in the most tremendous struggle of Protestantism, Holland not only permitted Roman Catholics to live under her splendid republic, but decreed that no man should be molested on account of his religion. Under the same republic the Jews of Europe found protection. The Anabaptists, the most misunderstood and despised sect of the times, who were butchered in Luther's Germany, and drowned in contempt of their doctrine of rebaptism in Zwingli's Switzerland, in Holland were not molested. And when the Quakers were driven out of Massachusetts, the advice of old Amsterdam to New Amsterdam (now New York) was that "at least the consciences of men ought to be free."
But the Holland of 1840 was not the same as the Holland of 1640. The stadtholders had become kings. Religious toleration had become intolerance. A state supported clergy had gradually clothed religion with temporal power. Such power is always bigoted and cruel, no matter what its religious creed may be. But if government and church had undergone a change in Holland, the spirit of resistance to ecclesiastical dictation still lingered among the people. It was the folly of governments seeking to rule the consciences of men which was to be reenacted.
The botanist who studies plant life intelligently digs into the earth after the roots. The intelligent study of men and events exacts no less. Emerson's famous one hundred years for the training of a child may be extended to one thousand years in the making of a people. Encamped in the shadow of the Pyramids, Napoleon told his soldiers that forty centuries looked down upon them. Half as many centuries, not of sand and rock.\, but of blood and deeds, looked down on the Holland of 1840. Shakespeare speaks of "that day he [Caesar] overcame the Nervii," but Caesar himself wrote that to overcome them he had to kill them; and the remnant of them, because of their bravery, in the dawn of Dutch history, were made an exception in all Europe which he had conquered, paying no tribute except the tribute of blood. Eight centuries later, Charlemagne came as another