Bonaventure married the daughter of a zealous Calvinist preacher, and he himself remained until his death an important lay member of the Council of the Ancients of the Walloon Church, a council which was charged not only with the government of the Church itself, but with a large measure of responsibility in connection with both the spiritual and the civil administration of the community. The intellectual ferment of which the bitter theological controversies that raged about the name and the doctrines of Arminius were an evidence (or a result), stimulated the production of books and furthered the habit of reading among many classes of the people to whom printed matter had previously been comparatively unfamiliar. The period immediately succeeding the Synod of Dort witnessed an enormous increase in the list of publications by Dutch writers. The views of the Remonstrants and of their opponents the Contra-Remonstrants on the famous five points of predestination, redemption, depravity, conversion, and perseverance, required for their adequate setting forth a long series both of folios and of pamphlets. On these and other grounds, the year 1618 proved to be an exceptionally favourable period for the beginning of a great publishing concern, and the two Elzevirs showed themselves fully capable of taking advantage effectively of the opportunity. The printing-office in Leyden appears to have been completely organised early in the year 1618. Its first immediate director was Isaac, the grandson of Louis. In 1625, he retired from the concern, leaving both the printing and the publishing business in the hands of his uncle Bonaventure and his brother Abraham. The year 1626 is considered by Willems to have marked the most brilliant period in the long record of the House, although in later years a longer series of important works was produced. The productions of the Elzevir Press during the next two or three years were in part devoted to the theology of the period (such as the acts of the National Synod), but were principally represented by the great editions of the classics for which the Elzevir imprint will always remain famous. In 1625, the Elzevirs took over the printing-office of Erpenius, who was at the time the only printer in the Netherlands, and one of the few in Europe, who possessed any Oriental fonts. In 1629, they initiated with _Horace_ and _Ovid_ the series of Latin classics in sixteenmo, a form which followed very fairly the proportions of the famous series of Aldus. In 1641, they began, with the issue of _The Cid_, a series of contemporary French drama, and in 1642, with the works of Regnier, a series of the chief monuments of French literature.