Note 108 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

Hardly more fortunate was the earlier course of things intellectual after the Reformation in the Netherlands, where by the fifteenth century remarkable progress had been made alike in science and the arts, and where Erasmus acquired his culture and did his service to culture’s cause. The fact that Protestantism had to fight for its life against Philip was of course not the fault of the Protestants; and to that ruinous struggle is to be attributed the arrest of the civilization of Flanders. But it lay in the nature of the Protestant impulse that, apart from the classical culture which in Holland was virtually a successful industry, providing editions for all Europe, it should turn all intellectual life for generations into vain controversy. The struggle between reform and popery was followed by the struggle between Calvinism and Arminianism; and the second was no less bitter if less bloody than the first,108 the religious strife passing into civil feud.