Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/48

 AND THE REVEIL 3,7

De Cock's and his predecessor in this parish, wrote to him: “De Cock! De Cock! how deeply, deeply hast thou fallen, and how dark are the ways of Providence : to think that such a doctrine should be preached to a congregation that once was mine! ” Another obvious point in which the two Confessions differ is the presence in the Westminster and the absence from the Dutch of the covenant idea, an idea which entered deeply into old Scottish theology and acted forcibly on Scottish history. There are traces of it in the Dutch liturgy, which is an abridgment of that of Johannes a Lasco, who was a friend of Ballinger. Covenant theology seems to have been making consider- able way in Holland after the predestination question had been settled. There was much intercourse in the seventeenth century, com- mercial as well as intellectual, between Scotland and Holland. I once heard a minister from Fife at an ecclesiastical gathering in Amster— dam claiming an interest in Holland on the ground that it had made a big hole in his Parish, the stones which were used in building the Stadhuis, which is now the Royal Palace,