support their contention that the Belgic Confession should be signed by all preachers and teachers, and that the points in dispute did affect fundamental questions, considering where the emphasis lay in the theology of the Reformed Church in the United Provinces. It was idle for the Arminians to claim victories at Alkmaar, Utrecht and Rotterdam if they depended chiefly on the support of the secular arm. Popular opinion was against them. North Holland outside Alkmaar was almost solidly Contra-Remonstrant, and it included the growing commercial capital of the provinces, the rich and influential city of Amsterdam. In South Holland the Arminians were on firmer ground, as they had a majority in Rotterdam and Gouda, and good strategic positions in Leiden and at the Hague; but Dordrecht, Delft and the country districts would not receive them. Utrecht was probably their strongest province, and they had a good deal of influence in South Gelderland and Overyssel. In the other provinces there was the sternest opposition to their innovations. The sailors of Zeeland, intensest of patriots and Protestants, regarded the Arminians as a new sect of Papists. North Gelderland and Friesland were not more hopeful, while the attitude of Groningen can be judged from the fact that in 1614 it established its own University with Gomarus as a professor in order to guard itself against the dangerous theology of Leiden.1 theology of Leiden.1 We shall find the provinces uniting again this year in the demand for a National Synod, and Barnevelt, in a moment of bewilderment, suggesting that the solution of the problem may be that each province should fix its own religion.2 The Constitution of the United Provinces was very peculiar, and the rights of each Provincial Assembly very marked, but religion was the cement of the whole building, and the continued existence of the Republic depended upon unity. The wisest statesmen found

1 Rogge, Joh. W ten., II, 124–27, 46 n. Donteclock says it was impossible to find a single Arminian in Amsterdam; cf. Brandt, Hist. of Ref., II, 103.

2 Baudart, Memoryen, I, 94.

their powers taxed to the utmost by this intractable question. The time of popular success for Arminianism had not yet arrived. A far more hopeful incident was that Tilenus, professor of Sedan, attacked the views of Arminius on Free Will and Predestination this year, and found the reply of Corvinus his own complete refutation. Like Arminius himself, he had the honesty to admit his change of view.1 The Remonstrants had the promise of the future, and were to gain their victories by quiet encroachments among the teachers of the Protestant nations. For the moment they had suffered a serious reverse by their blunder in inviting Conrad Vorstius to be the successor of Arminius at the University of Leiden.

1 Trigland, p. 612; Brandt, Hist. of Ref., II, 137.

CHAPTER VI

CONRAD VORSTIUS AND LEIDEN UNIVERSITY

KONRAD VON DER VORST was born at Cologne on July 19th, 1569. His father was a Roman Catholic merchant of that city, and he himself, as the youngest of a family of ten children, was intended for the priesthood. He was trained at Dusseldorf and Aachen, and then at the Collegium Laurentianum at Cologne, to which he went at the age of seventeen. As he stumbled at the decrees of the Council of Trent, he returned to business for two years, but was sent back to theology by a visit of the Reformer, John Badius, to Cologne. He then came under the influence of the leading theologians of the Reformed Churches, and studied under Piscator at Herborn, Paraeus at Heidelberg and Beza at Geneva; he also spent some time at the University of Basel. He was then called by that stout Protestant, Count Arnold of Bentheim, to be Professor in Theology at his little academy of Steinfurt. The county of Bentheim lay just over the German side of the frontier from the province of Overyssel, to the south of what was afterwards the Kingdom of Hanover. It was not an imposing appointment to which Vorstius went in 1596, even though the dignity of Court Chaplain was given to him a few years later. Still it was a quiet place of service for a diligent student, and he refused calls to wider service to Saumur, Marburg, Hanau, and even to Poland.1 The seventeenth-century theologian was

more of an international character than his successor of to-day for two reasons: in the first place, because of the universal use of Latin; and secondly, because the Wars of Religion strengthened the ties which bound men together by creed rather than by nation. The call of Vorstius 1 See Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.

to Poland was, however, something of a scandal, for it was to the Socinian Academy at Lublin that he was invited. He declined it because he was no Socinian, though he was well read in their literature; nevertheless, his enemies remembered this bad mark against his name. It was not the only blot on the scutcheon. As early as June 1598 he received an affectionate letter from his old tutor Paraeus, in which certain theses which he had defended were declared to be "as like to Socinianism as an egg to an egg." In his reply Vorstius denied the charge, defending his theses at length and claiming the right to discuss theological questions without using the exact phrases of Luther, Calvin and Melanchthon. He preferred with Zanchius to drink the old wine of the Fathers. The positions that were objected to were a declaration that Christ did not suffer the pangs of eternal death, and another to the effect that God could forgive sins without any sacrificial expiation. This involved a long correspondence between Vorstius, and professors both at Heidelberg and Basel, into which Count Arnold was drawn. In the end the Count advised Vorstius to appear before the Heidelberg professors and find a way of reconciliation. A conference was therefore held in September 1599, at which Vorstius was told that he had given too much attention to the teaching of Socinus, and was inclined to follow subtle disputes rather than to keep to the simplicity of the Gospel. He agreed to avoid these views in future, and to keep to the teaching of the Heidelberg Catechism.3 After this a period of peace followed, but it was clear that the reputation of Vorstius was growing in orthodox circles by the invitations he received to chairs of theology in academies of the Reformed Churches. Year by year he discussed a series of theses on the existence and attributes of God which were eventually published at Steinfurt in 1610 under the title Tractatus Theologicus

1 Epist. Præst. Vir., No. 27.

2 Ibid., No. 28.

• Trigland, pp. 581-2; Baudart, Memoryen, I, 40-42, 71-7. See Epist. Præst. Vir., Nos. 29 to 35.

de Deo. The dedication to the Landgrave Maurice of Hesse is dated March 20th, 1606, and the first discussion on the existence of God took place on March 9th, 1598, with Henry Rosaeus as respondent. The tenth and last debate on the Affections of the Deity took place on January 23rd, 1602. The dates are of importance, as this was the volume that roused the wrath of King James I and was the chief stumbling-block in the way of the professor as he moved from Germany to the United Provinces. His method will be found to be much less expository and more scholastic than that of Arminius. Fanciful and speculative, we find him a more interesting writer than the solid Dutchman, with a less obvious saturation of careful Biblical knowledge. At one point we seem back with the medieval schoolmen in discussions on the Omnipresence of God, as to whether it involves that the Deity is present in drops of water, grains of sand, the hairs of the head, in atoms, in devils or filthy latrines.1 Again he becomes more practical and discusses the meaning of the divine attributes in the person of Jesus. Here we seem to find the influence of more recent discussions in Lutheran circles where the attempt had been made to preserve the absolute attributes of the Deity in the Person of Christ by means of the doctrine of the Communicatio idiomatum, by which what was denied of the human nature of Christ could be affirmed of His divine nature. There was at least sufficient ingenuity in the volume to make it possible for the enemies of Vorstius to declare that he had taught that God was neither omnipotent, omnipresent nor omniscient, indeed had a corporeal presence, and that the professor's whole attitude to "Jesus of Nazareth " looked in the Socinian direction. All these charges he declared to be false, but they had not yet been brought forward when his name was mentioned as a possible successor to Arminius.

1 Cf. Oratio Apologetica, p. 18; de Deo, pp. 210-12.

See A. B. Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, pp. 84-114, for summaries of teaching of Martin Chemnitz; cf. Brunswick and John Brentz of Würtemberg; Vorst., de Deo, pp. 250–60,