He entered the college of St. Lawrence in Cologne, where he should have taken his Bachelor's and master's degrees, but was unable in conscience to take the required oath of obedience to the decrees of the Council of Trent.

[9] His parents not having much money, he went into practical affairs as a Purchaser for two years, where he learnt to serve the business and acquired skills in reckoning and in French and Italian.

He presented such arguments without endorsing them as points of belief, for example that the divine essence, if (considered as a body, in the broadest meaning of that term) it had extent and magnitude, could not also be infinite.

Similarly (regarding Predestination), whereas future outcomes were conditional upon elective actions in the present, the Deity given to managing human affairs must not also have full fore-knowledge of them: hence the divine will, though essential in itself, in its contingent or arbitrary operations might be mutable, and not uniform in its motions.

The appointment of Vorstius (a prerogative of the magistrates) gave the opponents of Arminius the opportunity to make a political intervention in the name of the defence of the Christian religion.

[22] His statements in the Tractatus led the Counter-Remonstrants to accuse him of sympathy for, and encouragement of, the loathed Socinian heterodoxy, a system questioning the Triune and eternal nature of God.

[27] For his part, Vorstius claimed he did not advocate such views, but found it necessary to explain them to students who came to him wishing to understand why teachers such as Sibrandus Lubbertus (Professor of Theology at the University of Franeker 1585–1625) were so agitated against them.

Oldenbarnevelt and Uytenbogaert, the leaders of the Remonstrants, were committed to the appointment of Vorstius, which would ensure that an exponent of the Arminian-Remonstrant point of view would continue to be heard at Leiden.

He lodged official protests with the states of Holland and West-Friesland, and attempted to bring the Anglicans into his cause by communicating with the Archbishop of Canterbury and other English divines, inviting the intervention of King James I of England.

In 1612 King James made public a substantial text embodying his various dealings with the United Provinces in the case of Vorstius over the preceding two years.

Which books, as soone as we had receiued, ... we stayed not one houre, but dispatched a letter presently to our Ambassadour resident with the States"[31] Through his ambassador Sir Ralph Winwood, James at once urged the States-General to expel Vorstius as a heretic.

He later sought to justify his intervention in this controversy in aliena republica as follows:"If the subject of Vorstius' Heresies had not been grounded upon Questions of a higher qualitie than the number and nature of the Sacraments, or the points of Iustification, of Merits, of Purgatorie, of the visible head of the Church, or any such matters, as are in controversie at this day betwixt the Papists and us; Nay more, if he had medled onely with the nature and works of GOD ad extra, (as the Schoolemen speake,) If hee had soared no higher pitch; we doe freely professe, that in that case we should never haue troubled ourselues with the businesse in such fashion, and with that fervencie as hitherto we haue done.

The response contained little to appease James, amounting rather to a resolve to conduct their own affairs without the intermeddling of a foreign nation in Dutch religious matters.

Stung by what he termed the "coldness" of the Assembly's reply, James (calling Vorstius a "Cockatrice egg"[34] and a "snake in the grass") responded that if they did not expel him, the amity between their countries was endangered.

[37] This correspondence between the two nations being made known to the world in 1612, James also recruited the ex-Catholic Richard Sheldon and the Catholic juror William Warmington to write against Vorstius.

Sarpi delivered a double-edged report, hitting at all reformers, with barely-veiled criticism of James's interventions and of his mixing of religious and political concerns.

[39] Vorstius responded to the English condemnations in his Christiana ac modesta responsio (1611),[41] but the States-General felt obliged to dismiss him, though continuing his salary, in 1612.

[49] King James I again applied considerable pressure through his delegates, and when it appeared that the synod did not intend to banish Vorstius he sent Sir Dudley Carleton in his name to the Prince of Orange in person to demand it.