, the
passionate opponent of the Puritans and of Maurice, the ardent
apologist of Barnevelt and the Arminians.

"It is understood, and he makes no mystery of it, that he inclines
towards the vague and undecided doctrine of the Unitarians."

What M. Groen's idea of Unitarians is may be gathered from the statement
about them which he gets from a letter of De Tocqueville.

"They are pure deists; they talk about the Bible, because they do
not wish to shock too severely public opinion, which is prevailingly
Christian. They have a service on Sundays; I have been there. At
it they read verses from Dryden or other English poets on the
existence of God and the immortality of the soul. They deliver a
discourse on some point of morality, and all is said."

In point of fact the wave of protest which stormed the dikes of Dutch
orthodoxy in the seventeenth century stole gently through the bars of New
England Puritanism in the eighteenth.

"Though the large number," says Mr. Bancroft, "still acknowledged the
fixedness of the divine decrees, and the resistless certainty from all
eternity of election and of reprobation, there were not wanting, even
among the clergy, some who had modified the sternness of the ancient
doctrine by making the self-direction of the active powers of man with
freedom of inquiry and private judgment the central idea of a protest
against Calvinism."

Protestantism, cut loose from an infallible church, and drifting with
currents it cannot resist, wakes up once or oftener in every century, to
find itself in a new locality. Then it rubs its eyes and wonders whether
it has found its harbor or only lost its anchor. There is no end to its
disputes, for it has nothing but a fallible vote as authority for its
oracles, and these appeal only to fallible interpreters.

It is as hard to contend in argument against "the oligarchy of heaven,"
as Motley calls the Calvinistic party, as it was formerly to strive with
them in arms.

To this "aristocracy of God's elect" belonged the party which framed the
declaration of the Synod of Dort; the party which under the forms of
justice shed the blood of the great statesman who had served his country
so long and so well. To this chosen body belonged the late venerable and
truly excellent as well as learned M. Groen van Prinsterer, and he
exercised the usual right of examining in the light of his privileged
position the views of a "liberal" and "rat