's acknowledged merit, the
government took his part, and at his death, paid his salary to his
family. Voltaire said of him: "He was a very good man, a great enemy of
the devil and of an eternal hell.... I am persuaded that if there ever
existed a devil, and he had read Bekker's _World Bewitched_, he would
never have forgiven the author for having so prodigiously insulted him."
In the library at Utrecht there are ten quarto volumes containing
reviews of this book, in which Bekker's personal appearance, said to
have been very unprepossessing, receives a goodly portion of the
censure. His body was believed by his contemporaries to be a most
excellent portrait of the devil himself.

Professor Roell, of Franeker University, started from the Cocceian
principle of freedom of thought. In his inaugural address, he announced
it as his opinion, that Scriptures cannot be interpreted in any safe way
except by the dictates of reason; that reason is the grand instrument by
which we arrive at a knowledge of all truth; and that it is the great
authority for the determination of all theoretical and practical
religion. This author is best known to theologians by his ideas on the
sonship of Christ. He held that Christ could not be a son, for then
there would be a time when he came into being from nonentity. The term
"son" could not signify unity of essence with the Father. "Brother"
would be a more correct word. The only sense in which Christ could be
son was as the divine ambassador. These assumptions brought upon Roell
the charge that he was a Socinian and an Arminian. His principal
opponent was Vitringa.

Rationalistic tendencies increased in both number and force in
proportion as the church decreased in the zeal which it had possessed at
the close of the Cocceian and Voetian controversy by virtue of the
immigration of the exiled Huguenots of France.

Van Os, of Zwolle, attacked the accepted covenantal theory, and the
doctrine of immediate imputation. The latter was a mere scholastic
opinion, not accepted among the doctrines of the church, but yet
maintained by the people as a requisite of orthodoxy. Having gone thus
far, Van Os proceeded to deny a form of infralapsarianism, which was
termed "justification from eternity." Many prominent but bigoted minds,
having long entertained these ultra ideas he was endeavoring to refute,
and some having gone so far as to attempt their introduction into a
revised edition of the confession of fait