Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/36

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were coming to the birth with the new century growth—ideas that became more clearly deﬁned as time went on, and that have been ruling our thought down to the present time—ideas, I may add, that may possibly pass into the background before another century is out, when some new scientiﬁc conception, which has not yet emerged, may have become the dominant one and been turned on things in general. If, as Bilderdijk puts it, “a people is not a mere heap of souls upon a piece of land.” or again, if “In the Past lies To-day, and in what now is—-what shall be,” we can under- stand at least his antipathy to revolutionary ideas, his veneration for historical institutions, political and ecclesiastical, and his attachment, with certain reservations, to the National Church and her creed—with no reservation Whatever in respect to the characteristic doctrine of Predestination, which sees the Spring of the religious life in an Almighty POwer and not in individual volition. He had always a warm heart to what he called the Mother Church of Rome. Its main defect
 * 1) the ideas of organic unity and organic