Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/21

 IO THE REVOLUTION

is not to their taste. They like to see things clearly, and to see them as they are—at least. as they seem to be to men of sound understanding, “We are a people of dykes and dams," a Dutch writer said recently, “ both as to our land and our mental life." And Dr Kuyper’s often-quoted saying about the danger of “blurring the boundary lines " is characteristically Dutch. It might seem that such a type of mind is perhaps not the best ﬁtted to deal with such a subject as religion, but if we are to treat theology as science, and accept the old saying that quz‘ bane dzktz’nguz't éem- dorel—a favourite maxim of theirs—much, I believe, can be learned from a people who have a remarkable gift of making distinctions, wrought into their nature, possibly, by many centuries of unre~ laxing toil in making and holding that distinction between land and sea, which to them is a matter of life and death. Another feature, not unconnected with what i have been saying, that has affected the development of theology in Holland, is that, while not uninterested in what is going on in the