Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/22

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AND THE REVEIL .,

theological world around them, they are not easily or quickly moved by influences from without. To illustrate this, I shall quote what Christiaan Sepp wrote ﬁfty years ago, in answer to the question, “ Is the translation of foreign works entirely favourable to the growth of theological science at home?" His answer is that it is not. Apart from the fact that to this learned divine a theologian without a knowledge of ancient and modern languages is like the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, he holds that every people has naturally its own individuality, and that every writer has something that hangs together with the people he belongs to, and that another people cannot assimilate, at least not proﬁtably. The scientiﬁc life of every people. he goes on to say, just like that of the individual man, as an organic development, the regular process of Which is really hindered by disturbances that come from without.

AnOther feature I shall notice before passing on 110 consider the actual movement of religious
 * Eought in l-lolland, is the close connection in


 * 3 utch mind between religious thought and