and planted the Dutch flag on shores not then traced
on any map of the world; her manufacturers supplied all markets with the
fruit of their labor and ingenuity; her soldiers were a match for any
European force; her De Ruyters and Van Tromps knew how to contend with
the Blakes of England; her William of Orange, whom she gave to her
British neighbor, made as good a ruler as ever lived in Whitehall; her
scientific men founded the systems which have continued in use to the
present time; her philosophers revolutionized the thinking of the
civilized world; her universities were the seat of the most thorough
humanistic researches of the age; her painters founded new schools of
art, and vied with the Italian masters; her theologians gave rise to
controversies which brought all churches and their champions within the
scene of conflict; and her pulpit orators acquired a celebrity which, in
spite of the inflexibility of the language, was second only to that
enjoyed by the most renowned preachers of France and Great Britain.

After Holland had fallen a victim to her political partisanship, she
gradually disappeared from public observation. Her greatness in the past
would have been well nigh forgotten if Prescott and Motley had not
recalled it. But the judgment of the world concerning her, in her
present state, is not more flattering than that of the author of
_Hudibras_, who, in addition to venting his spleen against the people,
employs his wit upon the irrational land, calling it,

"A country that draws fifty feet of water,
In which men live as in the hold of nature;
And when the sea does in upon them break,
And drowns a province, does but spring a leak."

But while the political status of Holland has been inferior and
unobserved during the last century and a half, her important theological
and religious career,--covering a much longer period than that,--is a
theme of deep interest to every student of the history of the church.

Rationalism arose in Holland by means of some agencies similar to those
which had produced it in Germany. The previous disputes and barren
ministrations of the clergy made the soil ready for any theological
error that might urge its claims with force. But the repulsive
technicalities of Germany were not equally prevalent in Holland, and
scholasticism refused to affiliate with the Reformed much longer than
with the Lutheran church.

But when the synod of Dort, which held its sessi