IAGenWeb - Marion County |
    |
Image of page online.
conquering Caesar, but he consented that it should be written in the statute books that "the Frisians shall be free as long as the wind blows out of the clouds and the world stands." After another like interval, we find the descendants of the Nervii and the Frisians pouring out their blood as freely as water to resist the political power of Spain and the ecclesiastical power of Rome. In that struggle William the Silent became the type of the moral hero for all time. And there was another William, the husband of Mary, who went to England to save Protestantism there, with whom the Dutch were willing to die in the last ditch, and under whom they cut their dikes and gave their farms and cities to the sea rather than to the French.
All through European history the blood of these stubborn adherents of right and righteousness runs as a thread of scarlet and their love of liberty as a thread of gold. Sir Philip Sidney, "the flower of chivalry," who, for the love of God and his fellow-men, fought in the armies of the Netherlands, returned to England to tell Queen Elizabeth that "the spirit of the Dutch is the spirit of God and is invincible." This same spirit, I like to think, reappeared in the men and women who early in the thirties revolted against the state church in Holland, seven hundred of whom came to Pella in 1847.
The Pella pilgrims in Holland believed in the complete separation of church and state. They were opposed to the established church because, in their opinion, it had become an institution of form, instead of being an expression of faith. They were separatists as the English pilgrims had been under Robinson and Brewster. The difference is mainly that between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In creed they were adherents of the doctrine of which John Calvin was a later expounder. In faith and in history the Protestants of Holland, which term includes practically all Hollanders, are associated with the Waldenses of Switzerland, the Huguenots of France, the Puritans of England and the Covenanters of Scotland.
Of those who found refuge in Pella some had been in prison, and many had been fined-and all of them had been harassed by populace and by soldiers. Prominent among the persecuted dissenters was Rev. Henry Peter Scholte, or Dominie Scholte. He was born in Amsterdam, October 25, 1805, and died in Pella, August 15, 1868. While a student at Leyden he took a part in suppressing the Belgian revolution. As a minister of the established church he soon fell into disfavor because of his disregard of ritualism and even authority. He declared church organizations to be of little importance and said he was "prevented from clothing his faith in the straight-jacket of ecclesiastical formalism." For various breaches he was at first suspended and afterwards arrested. Under a clause in the Code Napoleon the government denied the right of the dissenters to assemble in companies of more than nineteen persons. Mr. Scholte's was made a test case. The trial, at Appingadam, became one of the celebrated causes of the day. Some of those who were present--it was in 1834--are still living in Pella and remember vividly the crowd in and about the court house. As a result of the trial Dominie Scholte was imprisoned for three weeks. "This may have a very gloomy outlook to you," he said to those who came to sympathize with him, "but to me the outlook is glorious, indeed."
In the history of these people we come now to more than ten years of disturbed worship. Denied admittance to the regular churches they held their religious services in dwelling houses, in barns, under hay sheds, or under the open