The United Provinces were no sooner constituted than, notwithstanding the Protestant principle of the liberty of free inquiry, they obeyed that instinct which impels all governments to religious unity--Spain was outdone in the refinement of punishments which they invented to use against the Catholics who refused to change their faith (Fig. 339). Nor was it against the Catholics only that the Protestant Inquisition exercised its rigorous authority. In countries where Calvinists and Lutherans were brought into juxtaposition, religious persecution broke out between the various reformed Churches, always, too, under the instinctive influence that religious unity was necessary to ensure the stability of the State. A distinguished writer, Menzel, in his “New History of the Germans since the Reformation,” gives some very interesting details concerning this internecine struggle. At the end of the sixteenth century, when, at the death of the Elector of Saxony, Christian I., on September 25th, 1591, the government of Saxony fell into the hands of Duke William of Altenburg, who was a rigid Lutheran, the Calvinist party in Germany thought that the golden age was about to return. Chancellor Crell, who in Christian’s lifetime had treated the Lutherans with slight show of mercy, was cast into prison, together with Gunderman, a Leipsic preacher. After five months’ incarceration, the latter signed the “Formula of Concord,” in order that he might be able to visit his wife, whom he had left _enceinte_, but he had no sooner appended his signature than he was told that she had hung herself in a fit of despair. The unfortunate man went out of his mind. Other preachers were treated with almost equal severity; and at Leipsic, in 1593, the Lutheran party set fire to the houses of the Calvinists, who had to fly from the city to escape assassination. Such was also the case in Silesia. Upon the 22nd of September, 1601, Chancellor Crell was condemned to death, after having been kept ten years in prison, and he was beheaded on the 10th of October.