15. From the year 1640 his course seems to have been accelerated; he intimates no disapprobation of those who went over to Rome; he found, as he tells us, that whatever was generally received in the church of Rome, had the authority of those Greek and Latin fathers, whose communion no one would have refused; and at length, in a remarkable letter to Wytenbogart, bearing date in 1644, he puts it as worthy to be considered, whether it would not be more reasonable for private men who find the most essential doctrines in a church of an universal hierarchy and a legitimate succession, to wave their differences with it for the sake of peace, by putting the best interpretations they can, only keeping silence on their own opinions, than that the Catholic church should accommodate itself to the separate judgment of such men. Grotius had already ceased to speak of the Arminians as if he was one of themselves, though with much respect for some of their leaders. 16. Upon a dispassionate examination of all these testimonies, we can hardly deem it an uncertain question whether Grotius, if his life had been prolonged, would have taken the easy leap that still remained; and there is some positive evidence of his design to do so. But, dying on a journey and in a protestant country, this avowed declaration was never made. Fortunately indeed for his glory, since his new friends would speedily have put his conversion to the proof, and his latter years might have been spent, like those of Lipsius, in defending legendary miracles, or in waging war against the honoured dead of the Reformation. He did not sufficiently remember that a silent neutrality is never indulged to a suspicious proselyte.