Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/23

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12 THE REVOLUTION

the Church. In their highest flights—and sometimes from the point of view of traditional theology they fly pretty high—they keep the church steeple in sight. The great lesson, La Saussaye says, that Clarisse taught him when he was a student at Leiden was that the theologian was the servant of the Church, and that the object of his science was the Church of Christ. And in 1868, on the occasion of the Tercentenary of the Synod of Wezel, in an address on the connection between German and Dutch theology, he says that while the former can enrich the latter with its scientific results, Dutch theology has something to offer in return in regard to what is distinctively ecclesiastical. A further illustration of the same tendency may be seen, 1 think, in the fact that when the Modernist movement rose to its height in the sixties of last century, the question resolved itself into the hotly discussed ecclesiastical question, “Shall they stay, or must they go?” From the nature of the case, therefore, it will be necessary in these lectures to deal largely with the question of Church and Doctrine, or rather to see how