Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/33

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22 THE REVOLUTION

that each went back in a way to earlier phases of the national religious life. One, which is always described by the foreign name, the Re’vez'Z—in which the leading spirits were chiefly jurists and men of letters—was at first a purely religious movement, but it soon passed into a question of Church and Doctrine, and ultimately deeply affected the development of theology all through the century. “From the day of Pentecost downwards,” Dr Rainy’s biographer has remarked, “revivals of religion, as a matter of history, have had far more influence on the theology of the Church than historians of dogma have recognised.” With- out the movement known in Holland as the Re’zxez‘l the whole course of religious thought in that country, and indeed of political thought and action, would have been different. The other movement was mainly, but not entirely, a theological movement, and had its centre in the University of Groningen. Although, as I have said, Holland is not easily moved by influences from without, the first movement, as the name indicates, had a foreign source. It had its origin in a religious awakening in