Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/58

Rh a point, I think, that can now be regarded as finally settled—and Wessel Gausfoort, who was born at Groningen, and whose name is linked with that of Luther. To these we must add the illustrious name of Erasmus, who was regarded by the Groningen theologians as among their spiritual progenitors. There was not much of the mystic in the clear-eyed and mundane Erasmus, and he was only a boy of thirteen when he left the school of the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer. He was old enough, however, to carry away with him something of the spirit of the school, which comes out in the wish, expressed in later life, that ‘‘the dove of Christ, and not the owl of Minerva, would fly to us,” and also, possibly, in the method he advocated of presenting Christian truth: ‘‘Let Christ remain where He is, the centre, with certain circles about Him.”

The still, small voice of Dutch mysticism died away in the storm of the Reformation period. Still Hamerken’s book was never lost sight of. It was a favourite book with the Reformed schoolman Voetius in the seventeenth