Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/52

 AND THE REVEIL 4:

would be equivalent to the old, while it was evident that it was meant to have a more liberal signiﬁcation. The former party retorted that the theory of the latter imputed disingenuous— ness to the framers of the formula, and cast a. slur on their memory. One of these veterans, however, Donker Curtius, who was still alive and could “mind the biggin o’t”—very much alive as De Cock and his dissentient followers found to their cost—stoutly maintained the Qualenus reading. Heringa of Utrecht, a man of great weight in the counsels of the Church, tried to steer a middle course. Exegetically he felt bound to adopt the Quiet reading, but with the proviso that it was to be understood only of the substance of the doctrine. His usual sound judgment, however, failed him when he took the matter in hand himself, and his proposal, in 1835, to adopt a formula which should safeguard the “characteristic doctrine ” of the formularies was unanimously rejected by the Synod. Whether Professor Troeltzch is exactly right in describing predestination, in a recent study of Calvinism, as “its famous central dogma," viewed as a doctrinal system,