Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/49

 38 THE REVOLUTION

having been quarried there in Covenanting times. In the famous Glasgow Assembly of 1638, the ﬁrst Professor of Divinity in this University favoured the members with a summary of Covenant theology imported from Holland, which seems to have made a deep impression on them, the Moderator thanking God that a threatening heresy had now been nipped in the bud. In Holland the idea was never quite so popular as in Scotland. It was associated there with what was regarded as the latitudinarian system of Cocceius.

The Heidelberg Catechism, the third Formu- lary of Unity, is an exposition of the Apostles' Creed, the doctrine of the Sacraments, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer; and if the object of a catechism, as Dr Kuyper puts it, is to make our children pious Christians and not little theologians, its compilers have certainly kept this end in view. Its doctrine agrees in every respect with that of the Con- fession, which had a French source; but it is marked by a distinctly milder tone than that of most summaries of Reformed doctrine,