Challenging the Spirit of Modernity (Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology)

A Study of Groen van Prinsterer's Unbelief and Revolution

Harry Van Dyke

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781683593201
• eBook ISBN: 9781683593218
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

A revised edition of: Groen van Prinsterer's Lectures on unbelief and revolution. Jordan Station, Ont.: Wedge Pub. Foundation, 1989.

1

RESTORATION HOLLAND

Books, no less than people and ideas, must be judged in the light of their times. The reader of Unbelief and Revolution will want to be familiar with the main features of the days in which Groen van Prinsterer lived, labored and lectured. Now the immediate historical context of the work was Restoration Holland. In the history of the Netherlands, it should be borne in mind, the Restoration period stretches from 1813 to 1848. Unlike France, the Netherlands did not in 1830 undergo a political metamorphosis marking the end of an era. Holland did see the break-up that year of the “misalliance” with Belgium, devised by the Powers at the end of the Napoleonic era to serve as a buffer on France’s northern frontier. But its social and political structures continued well into the forties. Thus Restoration Holland did not make the transition to a more modern phase of national life until the revolution of 1848. Unbelief and Revolution, conceived during the Belgian Revolt and its aftermath, was born in the twilight years 1845–46, just before Holland saw the dawn of a new age.

Given this setting of the work, at least two trends are of paramount importance for understanding it. First, the 1840s mark the years when conservatism had spent itself and liberalism stood poised to assume leadership. Second, these were the years when the religious awakening of the earlier decades of the century came to maturity and entered a new phase of practical involvement in society. To acquire familiarity with the background against which the book must be read, therefore, it will be useful to outline the period’s main features as follows, in order of increasing complexity: the economic circumstances, the social conditions, the political framework, the intellectual climate, and the religious movements. The first four features are dealt with below, while the last is described in the next chapter.

ECONOMIC CIRCUMSTANCES

Economically, the Restoration years were trying times for Holland. Although the 1820s and 1830s had seen some revival of commerce and trade to pre-revolutionary levels, thanks in no small measure to personal initiatives of the energetic “merchant-king” William I, new developments had come to frustrate this economic restoration.

In 1815 the old staple trade had lain in ruins, never again to recover. The competition of American shipping and the port facilities of London and Hamburg seemed impossible to match, as did the quality and price of British manufactured goods in world markets. Holland’s only hope of counting again in the world economy was to recapture its transit trade at the gateway to the Continent.

Such recapture was no small challenge. Amsterdam, on the decline since 1780, had seen its commissions trade finally destroyed by Napoleon’s Continental System. Moreover, the port of Antwerp, closed to navigation since 1585, had been reopened in 1815 and had proved a significant rival to Amsterdam. This competition only increased after the Belgian troubles resulted in 1830 in the revolt and eventual secession of the southern provinces from the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Trade across the North Sea with England was only modestly restored to former levels after the Commercial Treaty of 1837 removed a number of mutual protectionist barriers.

Turning from the open sea to its hinterland, Holland saw its prospects of full restoration decreased there as well. A Rhine Navigation Treaty with Prussia had stabilized relations in 1834 but also confirmed the loss of Holland’s economic grip on this strategic waterway into the interior. The German Customs Union of 1831 further diminished Dutch trading opportunities in its immediate hinterland. Any strength it had recovered in transshipment traffic on the Rhine was seriously challenged when the construction of a railway linking Cologne to Antwerp was completed in 1843. Thus with the advent of the middle 1840s, Holland’s economic prospects seemed if anything to grow worse.1 By the middle of the decade the international downturn began to show its effects as well.

Holland’s fishing industry, meanwhile, showed a mixed picture. With the coming of international peace in 1815, the cod fishing off the coast of Iceland had been resumed but remained insignificant, while the once-thriving whaling industry around Spitsbergen never revived. The herring fisheries fared much better; remarkable increases in annual catches (and sales!) restored the industry to former levels.

In the countryside, Holland’s longstanding lead in advanced agriculture was still in evidence, but the depression of the 40s would hit hard here too. Nor was the old regime entirely gone; here and there manorial dues were still in force, road duty and compulsory use of the lord’s mill were not yet extinct, and a kind of poll tax still rested on the inhabitants of certain rural villages. It is unlikely, however, that these vestiges of an outmoded order of things were any longer real obstacles to commercial farming. More serious was the international economic slump.

As a result of the Settlement of 1815, Holland’s colonies were only partially restored; England returned Surinam in the West and the Indonesian Archipelago in the East, but retained Ceylon and the Cape. For a long time the British continued to dominate trade in the Indies, thanks to their superior cottons and linens. It was to take several decades before the independent but inexperienced Dutch merchants could make inroads in an area monopolized till 1795 by the now defunct East India Company. To stimulate overseas trade, the king, in addition to setting up agencies in the newly opened Latin American countries, took the initiative in 1824 of founding the Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappij, a shareholding company designed to serve commercial companies with information and loans but also to develop its own trade with new areas. The semi-public trading house developed a modest trade in tea with Canton, but when the Company entered on the market of the Indies it soon discovered that here it faced the same problems as the private firms: tough foreign competition. This led the company to try to meet the British competition head-on by developing domestic calicot manufacture, first in Flanders and, after the separation, in Holland’s cities. Small factories were set up in Haarlem, Leyden and other places, later also in the eastern region of Twente after the Company’s director De Clercq, in a meeting with Thomas Ainsworth, had been convinced of the viability of basing textile manufacture on local cottage industry using the flying shuttle.2 Also, once the Cultivation System was introduced in the Indies, ensuring annual quotas of specified products to be grown by the natives, the Company was given a major role in shipping these goods to Europe and selling them there for the benefit of the state treasury. Not until 1840 did Holland regain its place as the leading market in at least one tropical product, coffee, a position she would hold till the 1870s. The recovery of shipbuilding, another of the Company’s goals, was even slower. The craft had all but died out and foreigners had to be brought in. Shipowners reappeared in modest numbers. The Company guaranteed shipment, and through careful management which included the keeping of waiting lists of ships to be chartered, it was instrumental in gaining for Holland’s merchant navy fourth place by 1850, behind the British, American and French.3

Throughout this period, Holland was still in the stage of early capitalism. Although the king had helped found the Nederlandsche Bank in Amsterdam for the purpose of stimulating credit as well as providing domestic commerce with (paper) means of exchange, the first purpose remained largely dormant as business and industry preferred the traditional method of funding new ventures exclusively with private capital. The limited liability company was rarely used. A contemporary observer, Potgieter, complained that Holland’s commercial class remained stuck in its eighteenth-century rut and was “suffocating and wasting away in its stuffy counting-houses.”4

Potgieter implied that those with capital to risk for gain were without initiative or enterprise. That judgment may be too harsh, for they also had to do without any incentive. Low returns discouraged investment, for example, in industrial ventures. Dutch industry was simply unable to be very competitive in the face of relatively costly production factors. Coal, to name one such factor, had to be imported, and transportation costs were high. Thus not just lack of enterprising spirit or capital investment but also structural factors help account for the country’s industrial retardation.5

Holland’s infrastructure, to look at another factor, was still very primitive by the 1840s. The major cities and towns were not connected by cobbled roads till about 1848, while railroads took even longer to develop into a network: Amsterdam was connected south-westward with Haarlem (’39), The Hague (’43) and Rotterdam (’47), and south-eastward with Utrecht (’43) and Arnhem (’45), the crucial link with the German Rhinelands having to wait till 1856.6 Much of the country would have remained isolated were it not for the age-old line service by stagecoach and tow-barge. The latter still handled most of the traffic in freight; even at that, a Dutch journal for political economy declared as late as 1846 that economically the most important domestic communication link was the footpath.7

Canal construction was easier in boggy Holland. Here, too, the head of state took energetic initiatives, often investing large private fortunes. Canals that linked provincial towns to nearby rivers, and canals that bypassed unnavigable stretches in the interior and chronically shifting sandbanks in the coastal water of the delta area did much to open backward regions, and gave both Amsterdam and Rotterdam more reliable links to the sea.

A special problem, of course, was the eternal struggle against the water. There always seemed to be too much water in the sea, during winter storms; too much water in the great rivers from the south, during spring thaw; too much water in the many inland lakes, at any season. Disastrous floods covered large areas in 1820 and 1825. When the waters receded, dykes were repaired and raised, and ancient schemes were revived and new plans laid for ambitious reclamation and drainage projects. Before these works could be tackled, however, the strong powers of the centralist government in Restoration Holland had to be enlisted to coordinate—or override—the jealously guarded jurisdictions of local polder boards, waterships, dyke watch committees, and even city councils who defended their hoary fishing rights and water tolls dating from the Middle Ages.

For all these reasons, industrialization was very slow in coming to an undeveloped country like Holland, even though its king had observed early in his reign with prophetic foresight: “The time of merchant shipping as the nation’s chief occupation is over; our national prosperity can only be regained by systematic industrialization.”8 William did what he could. He prescribed made-in-Holland textiles for the armed forces, the court, state orphanages, etc. He established a fund for loans and subsidies to industry. He helped organize exhibitions. He sent an envoy to England to study the iron industry. He invested in ventures large and small, becoming one of the major shareholders of John Cockerill’s empire.9 Yet by the time the international exhibition was organized in the Crystal Palace in 1851, Holland’s entry still made a very poor showing.10 Less than a quarter of her labor force was at that time involved in industrial occupations (as compared to 50% in agriculture).11

For the longest time, industrial production continued to rest on cottage industry and small workshops. Large factories were still rare in the 1840s and seldom employed more than 100 hands; only a few of the largest plants ranged between 200 to 600 workers.12 Prior to the fifties, steam engines were the exception; machines ran on power provided by women, children and horses.13 The country’s lack of coal mines of any size made the cost of other sources of energy prohibitive for many years to come.

SOCIAL CONDITIONS

The working classes of this society led a harsh, dreary and precarious existence. Eager to escape sinking away into the dismal ranks of the paupers, one was happy with a subsistence wage. Massive unemployment was chronic and the proportion of the population living off public relief rose from 13% in 1841 to 27% in 1850.14 Indirect taxes on all necessaries did little to help the plight of the thousands upon thousands who lived on the fringe of society.

Public relief was tied to residence requirements. If one failed to meet them, he could turn to the church, but deacons were often parsimonious and their inquisitorial methods humiliating.15 Then there was organized charity and philanthrophy, the pride of the self-satisfied bourgeoisie and the condescending aristocracy, but the shame of the workingman who had lost his job. Failing all that, he and his dependants could join the throng of beggars and occasionally participate in looting during hunger riots, or else they could slink away into their humble home and slowly starve. The situation reached its lowest point during the notorious potato famine in the mid-forties.

To help remedy the hopeless situation, the enlightened physiocrat Johannes van den Bosch founded labor colonies in the eastern provinces, where urban paupers and their families were resettled to work the land, dig peat, and prepare the heaths and moors for cultivation. After a decade and a half of barely breaking even, the venture faced bankruptcy. The introduction to the area of textile manufacturing provided some relief, but by the time Van den Bosch died, in 1844, the future of his experiments was still problematic.

Not only the economic livelihood but also the physical health of the working classes left much to be desired. Their diet became increasingly one-sided. Except for pork, meat was rarely on the table.16 As elsewhere, the potato was increasingly replacing wheat bread until it became the main—and sometimes only—course at all meals, washed down with weak tea or surrogate coffee. Serious malnutrition, going back a number of generations and aggravated by child labor, began in these decades to exact its toll. The home of the average workingman was less likely to be a clean-scrubbed city house or green-bordered country cottage than an ill-lit and ill-ventilated one-room tenement dwelling; and his place of work was more likely to be low-ceilinged and damp than bright and airy. His general health hardly improved when the more expensive beer and ale were gradually displaced as the popular drink by unwholesome gin distilled from potatoes. Finall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the New Edition
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Restoration Holland
• Chapter 2: Religious Awakening
• Chapter 3: Groen Van Prinsterer
• Chapter 4: Purpose of the Lectures
• Chapter 5: Prototypes and Paraphrases
• Chapter 6: Sources
• Chapter 7: Audience
• Chapter 8: Style
• Chapter 9: Argument
• Chapter 10: Editions
• Chapter 11: The First and Second Editions Compared
• Chapter 12: Translations
• Chapter 13: Controversial Issues
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Scripture References