Yet it is the chronicle of Christendom during one of the most important and fateful epochs of modern history.

No man can thoroughly understand the complication and precession of phenomena attending the disastrous dawn of the renewed war, on an even more awful scale than the original conflict in the Netherlands, without studying the correspondence of Barneveld.

The history of Europe is there.

The fate of Christendom is there.

The conflict of elements, the crash of contending forms of religion and of nationalities, is pictured there in vivid if homely colours.