Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/25

14 information is usually given that the local ﬁre-hose is to be found within. Not far from the old church a modern ecclesiastical building is usually to be seen, perhaps the only asthetically unpleasing object in the whole landscape.

I soon learned that the old church was Herformd, and the new Gereformeerd, and that, while the two words have the same meaning, there was between them a great gulf ﬁxed. The fact that the founder of the latter denomination was a learned divine, who was then Prime Minister of Holland in a Coalition Government of Calvinists and Romanists, that he or his admirers boasted that he had exercised the Fata Morgana, as he terms it, of Modernism from Dutch theology, and that the same fate was already hanging over an ethical school of theology of which I knew at the time as little as I did of Dr Kuyper—all this was enough to excite one's curiosity. The tendency of a long residence in India, where Christianity appears visibly as minute spots against a vast background of Hinduism and Islamism, is perhaps to make one view it in what seem to be its simpler and