Nodige bedenkingen op de niewe beweegingen, onlangs verwekt door den circulairen brief en andere middelen, tegen den auteur van 't boek de betoverde weereld

what a great riot is to be feared if he returns to the pulpit. If they must admit that the largest and best part of the city and the congregation is for me: see, they say, so much greater reason to prevent the evil from crawling further. If Socinians those who deny the divinity of Christ or Freethinkers those who reject traditional religious authority speak of me with modesty: see, they say, such people are the ones who hold with him. But if such a person shows himself against me: it is clear, they say, my teaching is so hideous that even the most wicked heretics loathe it. Whether others play the flute or sing songs of mourning, I have always done it with my Book. But what do I do now in truth, that people may say? In all this nothing at all; but that I teach the aforementioned lesson of Paul: Endure afflictions.

After I have suffered everything, yielded everything, kept silent about everything for a long time; it now becomes time, and the matter itself also requires it, that I speak from the heart, and set open the injustice that happens to me before all the world. Not that I want to bring up the matter from the beginning, or plead my right here, of which I would rather give up much: but only so, as the work now stands, to declare myself modestly upon it. For also that which I, concerning those first two Books of my work, had to report to the Reader, stands fully written in the Prefaces, dated the last of Hooimaand July and the 1st of Oogstmaand August, to be read there. The Acts of the Synod of North Holland, thereafter of the Church Council, and finally of the Classis of Amsterdam have followed upon that. Of the first and second I have nothing to say now: since it is only the third, namely the Classis, that has finished the matter. That I do not want to write against any of them appears from this, that I have submitted myself to the final resolution of the Classis. And since it (though of itself sufficiently entitled thereto) has continued the dealings of the Church Council, also by order of the Synod itself, from where it was left: so I could contradict neither of them, without also burdening the Classis. People shall not see me writing against what I do, nor doing against what I write. A subject of Church or State may keep his own thoughts free; but he is obliged, without speaking against it, to obediently suffer what the