Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/47

 36 THE REVOLUTION

texture of the Westminster Confession. There may, however, be a certain advantage in having a thing that, as the Westminster Confession puts it, “is to be handled with special prudence and care,” tied up, as it were, in a separate parcel and marked dangerous, as we do with gunpowder and poison. The Dort decrees never seem to have been regarded as having quite the same authority in Holland as the Confession and the Catechism. They did not fully satisfy the leading Dutch theologians of the time, who, including the president of the Synod, were Supralapsarians. In the life of Hendrik de Cock, who became a zealot for sound doctrine and was the leader of a seces- sion that took place in 1835, it is stated—it illustrates the attitude of the Church to its doctrine about the time of the rise of the Gronigen School—that he was about ten years a clergyman before he had even seen the Dort Canons, a copy of which he found by chance in the house of one of his parishioners, and was deeply impressed by it. On hearing of this, Hofstede de Groot, the founder of the Groningen School, who had been a University friend of