“People have often pretended to find in my writings the deplorable influence of an extreme Calvinism.  The Puritans of the seventeenth century are my fellow-religionists.  I am a sectarian and not an historian.”

It is plain enough to any impartial reader that there are at least plausible grounds for this accusation against Mr. Motley’s critic.  And on a careful examination of the formidable volume, it becomes obvious that Mr. Motley has presented a view of the events and the personages of the stormy epoch with which he is dealing, which leaves a battle-ground yet to be fought over by those who come after him.  The dispute is not and cannot be settled.

The end of all religious discussion has come when one of the parties claims that it is thinking or acting under immediate Divine guidance.  “It is God’s affair, and his honor is touched,” says William Lewis to Prince Maurice.  Mr. Motley’s critic is not less confident in claiming the Almighty as on the side of his own views.  Let him state his own ground of departure:—­

“To show the difference, let me rather say the contrast, between the point of view of Mr. Motley and my own, between the Unitarian and the Evangelical belief.  I am issue of Calvin, child of the Awakening (reveil).  Faithful to the device of the Reformers:  Justification by faith alone, and the Word of God endures eternally.  I consider history from the point of view of Merle d’Aubigne, Chalmers, Guizot.  I desire to be disciple and witness of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.”

He is therefore of necessity antagonistic to a writer whom he describes in such words as these:—­

   “Mr. Motley is liberal and rationalist.

   “He becomes, in attacking the principle of the Reformation, the
   passionate opponent of the Puritans and of Maurice, the ardent
   apologist of Barnevelt and the Arminians.

   “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.”