Note 111 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

The wonder is that the chaos of dispute and dogmatic tinkering which followed did not more rapidly disintegrate faith. Calvinists sought modifications under stress of dialectic, like their predecessors; and the high “Supralapsarian” doctrine—the theory of the certain regeneration or “perseverance” of “the saints”—shaded into “the Creabilitarian opinion”111 and yet another; while the “Sublapsarian” view claimed also to safeguard predestination. So long as men remained in the primary Protestant temper, convinced that they possessed in their Bibles an infallible revelation, such strife could but generate new passion, even as it had done on the other irrational problem of the eucharist. For men of sane and peaceful disposition, the only modes of peace were resignation and doubt; and in the case of the doubters the first intellectual movements would be either back towards Rome112 or further on towards deism. The former course would be taken by some who had winced under the jeers of the Catholics; the latter by the hardier spirits who judged Catholicism for themselves. As most of the fighting had been primed by and transacted over texts, the surrender of the belief in an inspired scripture greatly reduced the friction; and in Holland as elsewhere deism would be thus spontaneously generated in the Protestant atmosphere. A few went even further. “I have no doubt that many persons have secretly revolted from the Reformed Church to the Papists,” wrote Uitenbogaert to Vorstius in 1613. “I firmly believe,” he added, “that Atheism is creeping by degrees into the minds of some.”113