814 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
ill the provinces of Holland and Friesland alone at thirty thousand, and this in 1546, ten years before the abdication, and five before the promulgation of the hideous edict of 1550." 1 Of the administration of the Duke of Alva, Motley says : " On his journey from the Netherlands, he is said to have boasted that he had caused eighteen thousand six hundred inhabitants of the provinces to be executed during the period of his government. The number of those who had perished by battle, siege, starvation, and massacre, defied computation. . . . After having accomplished the military enterprise [in Portugal] entrusted to him, he fell into a lingering fever, at the termination of which he was so much reduced that he was only kept alive by milk which he drank from a woman's breast. Such was the gentle second childhood of the man who had almost literally been drinking blood for seventy years. He died on the 12th of December, 1582." 2
The Bible, with the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, was the spiritual guide of the Protestants, and inspired them with that heroic courage which triumphed over the despotism of Spain, and raised Holland to an extraordinary degree of political, commercial, and literary eminence.^
1 J. L. Motley, The Bise of the Dutch Bepuhlic, vol. I. p. 114.
2 Ibid. vol. II. 497. Comp, the description of Alva's cruelties and the sufferings of the Protestants under his reign of terror on pp. 503 sq., and B. ter Haar's History of the Reformation (German translation from the Dutch), II. 86 sqq. and 127 sqq.
^ Motley, who was a Unitarian, does at least this justice to the practical effects of Calvinism in Holland and elsewhere : " The doctrine of predestination, the consciousness of being chosen soldiers of Christ, inspired those Puritans who founded the commonwealths of England, of Holland, and of America with a contempt of toil, danger, and death which enabled them to accomplish things almost supernatural. No uncouthness of phraseology, no unlovely austerity of deportment, could, except to vulgar minds, make that sublime enthusiasm ridiculous, which on either side the ocean ever confronted tyranny with dauntless front, and welcomed death on battlefield, scaffold, or rack with perfect composure. The early Puritan at least believed. The very intensity of his belief made him — all unconsciously to himself, and narrowed
§ 162. Calvin's influence upon the churches. 815
The Belgic Confession of 1561 was prepared by Guido de Bres, and revised by Francis Junius, a student of Calvin. It became the recognized symbol of the Reformed Churches of Holland and Belgium.
In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Arminianism rose as a necessary and wholesome reaction against scholastic Calvinism, but was defeated in the Synod of Dort, 1619, which adopted the five knotty canons of unconditional predestination, limited atonement, total depravity, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of saints. The Dutch Reformed Church in the United States still holds to the Canons of Dort. But Arminianism, although temporarily expelled, was allowed to return to Holland after the death of Maurice, and gradually pervaded the national Church. It largely entered the Church of England under the Stuarts. It assumed new vigor through the great IMethodist Revival, which made it a converting and missionary agency in both hemispheres, and the most formidable rival of Calvinism in the Anglo-American Churches. A greater man and more abundant in self-den}dng and fruitful apostolic labors has not risen in the Protestant churches since the death of Calvin than John Wesley, whose " parish was the world." But he was aided in the great Anglo- American Revival by George Whitefield, who was both a Calvinist and a true evangelist.
Calvinism emphasizes divine sovereignty and free grace ; Arminianism emphasizes human responsibility. The one restricts the saving grace to the elect : the other extends it to all men on the condition of faith. Both are right in what they assert ; both are wrong in what they deny. If one important truth is pressed to the exclusion of another truth of equal importance, it becomes an error, and loses its hold upon the conscience.
as was his view of his position — the great instrument by which the widest human liberty was to be gained for all mankind." History of the United Netherlands, vol. IV. 548.