Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/35

 24 THE REVOLUTION

before Swiss Evangelicalism assumed a very different shape from that in which it had arrived in the country, and this process of transformation into what became the Con- fessionial and Anti-revolutionary party I have now to try to explain. The poet Bilderdijk, who has been eulogised by Southey in lines that are now forgotten, is always spoken of as the Father of the Dutch Re’vez'l. As a student at Leiden he had been a friend of Van der Palm, but no two men could have been more unlike. Bilderdijk was always complaining. His ﬁrst wife was a monster— so he described her——fortunately, the second was a ministering angel. His domestic life has been very fully discussed in Dutch literature. It does not concern us here, however, and is not an edifying story. Among the many things he complained about was that he was always misunderstood, and especially that he was misunderstood if he was not misunderstood. I think we may at least partly understand his position and his inﬂuence on political and ecclesiastical life if we suppose that he was labouring with certain ideas that