Now William was engaged in a strange sort of debate. King Philip, aided and abetted by the Pope, was trying to rid the world of the enemy of the human race (to wit, his own enemy, William) by a standing offer of twenty-five thousand golden ducats and a patent of nobility and forgiveness of all sins to whomsoever would go to Holland and murder the arch-heretic. William, who had already lived through five attempts upon his life, felt it his duty to refute the arguments of good King Philip in a series of pamphlets and Coornhert assisted him. That the house of Habsburg, for whom these arguments were intended, should thereby be converted to tolerance was of course an idle hope. But as all the world was watching the duel between William and Philip, those little pamphlets were translated and read everywhere and they caused a healthy discussion of many subjects that people had never before dared to mention above a whisper. Unfortunately the debates did not last very long. On the ninth of July of the year 1584 a young French Catholic gained that reward of twenty-five thousand ducats and six years later Coornhert died before he had been able to finish the translation of the works of Erasmus into the Dutch vernacular. As for the next twenty years, they were so full of the noise of battle that even the fulminations of the different theologians went unheard. And when finally the enemy had been driven from the territory of the new republic, there was no William to take hold of internal affairs and three score sects and denominations, who had been forced into temporary but unnatural friendship by the presence of a large number of Spanish mercenaries, flew at each other’s throats. Of course, they had to have a pretext for their quarrel but who ever heard of a theologian without a grievance? In the University of Leiden there were two professors who disagreed. That was nothing either new or unusual. But these two professors disagreed upon the question of the freedom of the will and that was a very serious matter. At once the delighted populace took a hand in the discussion and within less than a month the entire country was divided into two hostile camps. On the one side, the friends of Arminius. On the other, the followers of Gomarus. The latter, although born of Dutch parents, had lived all his life in Germany and was a brilliant product of the Teuton system of pedagogy. He possessed immense learning combined with a total absence of ordinary horse-sense. His mind was versed in the mysteries of Hebrew prosody but his heart beat according to the rules of the Aramaic syntax.