Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/50

 AND THE REVEIL 39

which may be due to the fact that its chief author had been a pupil of Melanchthon. It was in use for a time in Scotland after the Reformation. It has always been a custom in Holland to make it the subject of a dis- course on Sundays at the afternoon service, and the custom is probably more widely observed at the present day than was the case some years ago.

The earliest subscription formula binding the teachers of the Church to the Formularies of Unity which I have brieﬂy described, or rather, as conceived by Groen’s party, to the Church as an institution doctrinally based upon the Formularies of Unity—~“they are not,” Groen said, “a rule of faith, but of preaching and teaching in church and school”; and Dr Kuyper says that “they have exclusively an ecclesiastical authority, and not the least authority over the conscience of the individual, which belongs to God’s Word alone "—was that which was adopted by the Synod of Dort. It required the candidate for the ministry to accept the formularies as, in all respects, in agreement with the Word of God. When the