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