Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/39

 28 THE REVOLUTION

the English name “meetings,” and at these Schemes were discussed for enforcing doc- trinal purity in the Church and for securing Christian education in the schools; those of a devotional nature were distinguished as reunions. Literary art in Holland has always, I think, lagged behind the art of painting, except perhaps when Vondel and Rembrandt in the early seventeenth century stood supreme each in his own art ; but the description by Alard Pierson, who had been brought up in this circle, of a meeting in a room in the “Amsterdam Arms,” and of a rézzmbn in an old Amsterdam mansion, is quite equal to a portrait group by Frans Hals or to an interior by Terborch. Groen was a scholarly man, and his favourite author was Plato. The opening question of the Laws, “Tell me, stranger, is God or man supposed to be the author of your laws?” is one that goes to the root of his thought. “My principles,” he says in the History of unconditional subjection to God as He has revealed Himself in the Holy Scriptures. All history teaches us that for ruler and
 * 1) 26 Father/and, “can all be reduced to an