But the controversy that made the greatest noise, and produced the most remarkable effects, was that carried on between the Calvinists and Arminians. Jacobus Arminius, one of the professors of divinity at Leyden, disputing in his turn about the doctrine of predestination, advanced several things differing from the opinions of Calvin on this article, and was in a few months after warmly opposed by Gomarus his colleague, who held, that “It was appointed by an eternal decree of God, who amongst mankind shall be saved, and who shall be damned.” This was indeed the sentiment of most of the clergy of the United Provinces, who therefore endeavoured to run down Arminius and his doctrine with the greatest zeal, in their private conversations, public disputes, and in their very sermons to their congregations, charging him with innovations, and of being a follower of the ancient heretical monk Pelagius; whereas the government was more inclinable to Arminius’s scheme, as being less rigid in its nature, and more intelligible by the people, and endeavoured all they could to prevent these differences of the clergy from breaking out into an open quarrel, to the disturbance of the public peace. But the ministers of the predestinarian party would enter into no treaty for peace: the remonstrants were the objects of their furious zeal, whom they called mamelukes, devils, and plagues; animating the magistrates to extirpate and destroy them, and crying out from the pulpits, “We must go through thick and thin, without fearing to stick in the mire: we know what Elijah did to Baal’s priests.” And when the time drew near for the election of new magistrates, they prayed to God for such men, “as would be zealous even to blood, though it were to cost the whole trade of their cities.” They also accused them of keeping up a correspondence with the Jesuits and Spaniards, and of a design to betray their country to them.