Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/232

Rh of the court to which he was accredited, and frittered away his influence in disputes about precedence, which seem little worthy of his reputation.

In 1645 he demanded and obtained his recall. He was received at Stockholm with all the honours due to him. But neither the climate nor the tone of the court suited him, and he demanded permission to leave. He was driven by a storm on the coast near Dantzic. He got as far as Rostock, where he found himself very ill. Stockman, a Scotch physician who was sent for, thought it was only weakness, and that rest would restore the patient. But Grotius sank rapidly, and died on 29th August 1645.

Grotius was a man of varied interests and accomplishments, combining a wide circle of general knowledge with a profound study of one branch of law, History, theology, jurisprudence, politics, classics, poetry,—all these fields he cultivated, and has left numerous works in each kind.

His commentaries on the Scriptures were the first application on an extensive scale of the principle affirmed by Scaliger, that, namely, of interpretation by the rules of grammar without dogmatic assumptions. Grotius's philological skill, however, was not sufficient to enable him to work up to this ideal.

As in many other points Grotius inevitably recalls to us Erasmus, so he does in his attitude towards the great schism. Grotius was indeed a man of profound religious sentiment, which Erasmus was not : but he had an indifference to dogma equal to that of Erasmus, although his disregard sprang from another source. Erasmus felt the contempt of a man of letters for the barbarous dissonance of the monkish wrangle. Grotius was animated by an ardent desire for peace and concord. He thought that a basis for reconciliation of Protestant and Catholic might be found in a common piety, combined with reticence upon discrepancies of doctrinal statement. His De veritate religionis Christianæ (1627), a presentment of the evidences, is so written as to form a code of common Christianity, irrespective of sect. The little treatise diffused itself rapidly over Christendom, gaining rather than losing popularity in the 18th century. It became the classical manual of apologetics in Protestant colleges, and was translated for missionary purposes into Arabic (by Pococke, 1660), Persian, Chinese, &amp;lt;kc. His Via et votum ad pacem ecdesiasticam (1642) was a detailed proposal of a scheme of accommodation. Of course, like all men of moderate and mediating views, he was charged by both sides with vacillation. An Amsterdam minister, James Laurent, published his Grotius papizans (1642), and it was continually being announced from Paris that Grotius had &quot; gone over.&quot; Hallam, who has collected all the passages from Grotius's letters in which the prejudices and narrow tenets of the Reformed clergy are condemned, thought he had a "bias towards popery" (Lit. of Europe, ii. 312). The true interpretation of Grotius's mind appears to be an indifference to dogmatic propositions, produced by a profound sentiment of piety. He rose above the separatist bigotry of the vulgar theologian, but did not ascend into that philosophical region in which dogma is transcended and dissolved. He approached parties as a statesman approaches them, as facts which have to be dealt with, and governed, not suppressed in the interests of some one of their number.

His editions and translations of the classics were either juvenile exercises prescribed by Scaliger, or &quot; lusus poetici,&quot; the amusement of vacant hours. Grotius read the classics as a humanist, for the sake of their contents, not as a professional scholar.

His Annals of the Low Countries was begun as an official duty while he held the appointment of historiographer, and was being continued and retouched by him to the last. It was not published till 1657, by his sons Peter and Cornelius. But the high reputation which Grotius attained in his lifetime, though it rests in part, like that of Erasmus, on the diversity of his accomplishments and the comprehensiveness of his literary view, had also a scientific basis in a professional specialty. Grotius was a great jurist, and his De jure belli et pads (Paris, 1625), though not by any means the first attempt in modern times to ascertain the principles of jurisprudence, went far more fundamentally into the discussion than anyone had done before him. The title of the work was so far misleading that the jus belli was a very small part of his comprehensive scheme. In his treatment of this narrower question he had the works of Albericus Gentilis (1588) and Ayala (1597) before him, and has acknowledged his obligations to them. But it is in the larger questions to which he opened the way that the merit of Grotius consists. His was the first attempt to obtain a principle of right, and a basis for society and government, outside the church or the Bible. The distinction between religion on the one hand and law and morality on the other is not indeed clearly conceived by Grotius, but he wrestles with it in such a way as to make it easy for those who followed him to seize it. The law of nature is unalterable ; God Himself cannot alter it any more than He can alter a mathematical axiom. This law has its source in the nature of man as a social being; it would be valid even were there no God, or if God did not interfere in the government of the world. These positions, though Grotius's religious temper did not allow him to rely unreservedly upon them, yet, even in the partial application they find in his book, entitle him to the honour of being held the founder of the modern science of the law of nature and nations. The De jure exerted little influence on the practice of belligerents, yet its publication was an epoch in the science. &quot; The elegance of his diction,&quot; says Blunt- schli, &quot;the pearls from classical antiquity with which he adorned his pages, the temper of humanity which pervaded his argument, his effort to mitigate the horrors of the Thirty Years War in the midst of which he wrote, and the warmth of his general sympathy for a moral as opposed to a material order, enlisted men's hearts on the side of his reasoning, while the deficiencies of his doctrine were not as yet detected.&quot; These defects are probably now, at 250 years distance of time, more palpable than the merits of the work. But only in the heat and impertinence of irresponsible periodical criticism could it be said, as De Quincey has said, that the book is equally divided between &quot; empty truisms and time-serving Dutch falsehoods.&quot; For a saner judgment and a brief abstract of the contents of the De jure, the reader is referred to Bluntschli, Geschickte des all/jemeinen Staatsrechts (Munich, 1864). A fuller ana lysis, and some notice of the predecessors of Grotius, will be found in Hely, Etude sur ledroit de la guerre de Grotius (Paris, 1875). The writer, however, with the usual unacquaintance of Frenchmen with everything which goes on outside France, has never heard of the Dejure prædæ, published in 1868. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii. p. 543, has an abstract done with his usual conscientious pains. Dugald Stewart (Collected Works, i. 370) has dwelt upon the confusion and defects of Grotius's theory. Mackintosh (Miscell. Works, p. 166) has defended Grotius, affirming that his work &quot; is perhaps the most complete that the world has yet owed, at so early a stage in the progress of any science, to the genius and learning of one man.&quot;

The chief writings of Grotius have been named in the course of our article. For a complete bibliography of his works, published and unpublished, the reader is referred to Lehmann, Hugonis Grotii manes vindicati, Delft, 1727, which also contains a full biography. Of this Latin life De Burigny published a réchauffée in French, 2 vols. 8vo, Paris, 1752. Other lives are:—Van Brandt, Historie van het Leven H. de Groot, 2 vols. 8vo, Dordrecht, 1727; Von Luden, Hugo Grotius nach seinen Schicksalen und}}