26 THE REVOLUTION
in his eyes lay in its not accepting the doctrine of Irresistible Grace, while the main fault in his own Church was, as he supposed, that it looked on the Sacraments too much in the light of signs and seals. Whatever the prevalent view may have been at this time in the Dutch Church in regard to the Sacraments, the doctrine of the Reformed Church seems to be high enough to cover any views on Baptismal Regeneration and the Real Presence that a thinker and poet like Bilderdijk was likely to cherish. His doctrinal position had certain points of resemblance to that of his countryman Jansen. While Jansenism, I may here remark, which a distinguished French critic, M. Faguet, has described as “the last effort made by intellectual France to be seriously religious,” is now represented in France, according to a recent editor of Pascal, by two hundred families in a single parish in Paris and by a small religious fraternity, in Holland it still counts about twenty-five congregations, and has recently shown some signs of renewed life. It has not been without a certain influence on Dutch religious thought.
