Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/38

 AND THE REVEIL 27

The Groningen theologians, as we shall see in our next lecture, express their indebtedness to it in framing their theory of the Church. It had so much that Was good in it and so much better than in much that followed it, that one may hope that it—or something like it—is not doomed to become extinct.

When Bilderdijk returned from exile in England and Germany he gave private lectures at Leiden in law and history, and gathered a group of disciples about him. Among them was the jewish poet Da Costa, who, as he puts it, was brought by Bilderdijk to “the Christ whom his fathers had crucified," and Groen van Prinsterer, a jurist, historian, and statesman. In Groen both the aspects of the Rana"! which I have indicated, the foreign and the national, were combined, although, as might be expected, not very successfully. In doctrine he leaned more to the Swiss evangelical type than to that of Bilderdijk, but he may be said to have been the founder of the Confessional and Anti- l‘evolutionary party, and during his lifetime he was its acknowledged leader. The more Secular gatherings of the party were called by