“It is understood, and he makes no mystery of it, that he inclines
     towards the vague and undecided doctrine of the Unitarians.”

What M. Groen’s idea of Unitarians is may be gathered from the statement about them which he gets from a letter of De Tocqueville.

“They are pure deists; they talk about the Bible, because they do not wish to shock too severely public opinion, which is prevailingly Christian.  They have a service on Sundays; I have been there.  At it they read verses from Dryden or other English poets on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  They deliver a discourse on some point of morality, and all is said.”

In point of fact the wave of protest which stormed the dikes of Dutch orthodoxy in the seventeenth century stole gently through the bars of New England Puritanism in the eighteenth.

“Though the large number,” says Mr. Bancroft, “still acknowledged the fixedness of the divine decrees, and the resistless certainty from all eternity of election and of reprobation, there were not wanting, even among the clergy, some who had modified the sternness of the ancient doctrine by making the self-direction of the active powers of man with freedom of inquiry and private judgment the central idea of a protest against Calvinism.”

Protestantism, cut loose from an infallible church, and drifting with currents it cannot resist, wakes up once or oftener in every century, to find itself in a new locality.  Then it rubs its eyes and wonders whether it has found its harbor or only lost its anchor.  There is no end to its disputes, for it has nothing but a fallible vote as authority for its oracles, and these appeal only to fallible interpreters.

It is as hard to contend in argument against “the oligarchy of heaven,” as Motley calls the Calvinistic party, as it was formerly to strive with them in arms.

To this “aristocracy of God’s elect” belonged the party which framed the declaration of the Synod of Dort; the party which under the forms of justice shed the blood of the great statesman who had served his country so long and so well.  To this chosen body belonged the late venerable and truly excellent as well as learned M. Groen van Prinsterer, and he exercised the usual right of examining in the light of his privileged position the views of a “liberal” and “rationalist” writer who goes to meeting on Sunday to hear verses from Dryden.  This does not diminish his claim for a fair reading of the “intimate correspondence,” which he considers Mr. Motley has not duly taken into account, and of the other letters to be found printed in his somewhat disjointed and fragmentary volume.