It gives me the greatest pleasure to respond to the request of my friend, the Rev. J. Hendrik de Vries, — to whom a debt of gratitude is due from us all for putting into English a section of this valuable treatise, — that I should in a few words introduce its author to his American audience. It is not often that an opportunity falls to one to make known a thinker of Dr. Kuyper’s quality to a new circle of readers; and I count it a high honor to have been given this privilege. For many years now Dr. Kuyper has exercised a very remarkable influence in his own country. As leader and organizer of the Anti-revolutionary party, and chief editor of its organ, De Standaard, a newspaper which, we are told by good authority, occupies not only “a place of honor, but the place of honor among Dutch dailies”;1 as founder, defender, and developer of the Free University of Amsterdam, through which the people of the Netherlands are receiving an object lesson of the possibility and quality of higher education conducted on Christian and Reformed foundations, free from interference from the State; as consistent advocate in the Church of freedom of conscience, confessional rights, and the principles of that Reformed religion to which the Dutch people owe all that has made them great, and strenuous promoter of the great end of bringing all who love those principles together into one powerful communion, free to confess and live the religion of their hearts; as a religious teacher whose instructions in his weekly journal, De Heraut, are the food of hundreds of hungry souls, whose prelections in the Free University are building up a race of theologians imbued with the historical no less than the systematic spirit, and to whose writings men of all parties look for light and inspiration; in fine, as a force in Church and State in whose arm those who share his fundamental principles trust with a well-founded hope of victory, Dr. Kuyper is probably to-day the most considerable figure in both political and ecclesiastical Holland. As long as thirteen years ago Dr. Johannes Gloël, looking in upon the Church life of Holland from without, thought it not too much to say that Dr. Kuyper’s was the best known name in the land;2 and though in the interval friends have been lost, yet doubtless also friends have been made, and assuredly the sharp conflicts which have marked these years have not lessened the conspicuousness of the central figure in them all. It is certainly high time that we should make the acquaintance of such a man in America. The present volume will, naturally, reveal him to us on one side only of his multiform activity. It is a fragment of his scientific theological work which it gives us; indeed, to speak literally, it is only a fragment of one of his theological works, though possibly thus far his most considerable contribution to theological science. But the reader will not fail to perceive, even in this fragment, evidence of those qualities which have made its author the leader of men which he is, — the depth of his insight, the breadth of his outlook, the thoroughness of his method, the comprehensiveness of his survey, the intensity of his conviction, the eloquence of his language, the directness of his style, the pith and wealth of his illustrations, the force, completeness, winningness of his presentation.
For anything like a complete estimate of Dr. Kuyper’s powers and performance there would be needed a tolerably thorough acquaintance with the whole political and religious life of Holland during the last third of the nineteenth century. It would even be something of a task to undertake a study of his mind and work in his literary product, which has grown to a very considerable voluminousness, and touches upon nearly the whole circle of civil and ecclesiastical interests of the present-day Netherlands. All that exists is a rather superficial and not very correct sketch of his life and opinions from the pen of Jhr. Mr. Witsius H. de Savornin Lohman.3 It was written, unhappily, nearly ten years ago, and Dr. Kuyper has not ceased to live and move in the meanwhile; and its greater part is devoted, naturally, to an account of Dr. Kuyper’s political program as leader of the Anti-revolutionary party. It may be supplemented, however, from the theological side from the sympathetic and very informing account to be found in Dr. Hermann Bavinck’s paper on Recent Dogmatic Thought in the Netherlands, which appeared a few years ago in the pages of The Presbyterian and Reformed Review.4 With this there may profitably be compared, by those who like to hear both sides of a question, the series of papers on The Netherlandish Reformed Church of the Present by Professor H. G. Klein of Utrecht, which are buried in the columns of a Reformed journal which used to be published in Austria,5 while Dr. Kuyper himself has lifted the veil from many of his earlier experiences in a delightful booklet which he appropriately calls Confidences.6 With these references I may exonerate myself from attempting more here than to suggest the outlines of his work on the theological side.