33. The few who, in England or in the reformed churches upon the Continent, embraced these novel and heterodox opinions, as they were then accounted, within the sixteenth century, excited little attention in comparison with James Arminius, who became professor of theology at Leyden in 1604. The controversy ripened in a few years; it was intimately connected, not, of course, in its own nature, but by some of those collateral influences which have so often determined the opinions of mankind, with the political relations between the Dutch clergy and the States of Holland, as it was afterwards with the still less theological differences of that government with its Stadtholder; it appealed, on one side to reason, on the other to authority and to force; an unequal conflict, till posterity restore the balance. Arminius died in 1609; he has left works on the main topics of debate; but in theological literature, the great chief of the Arminian or Remonstrant church is Simon Episcopius. The principles of Episcopius are more widely removed from those of the Augustinian school than the five articles, so well known as the leading tenets of Arminius, and condemned at the synod of Dort. Of this famous assembly it is difficult to speak in a few words. The copious history of Brandt is perhaps the best authority; though we must own that the opposite party have a right to be heard. We are here, however, on merely literary ground, and the proceedings of ecclesiastical synods are not strictly within any province of literary history. |His writings.| 34. The works of Episcopius were collectively published in 1650, seven years after his death. They form two volumes in folio, and have been more than once reprinted. The most remarkable are the Confessio Remonstrantium, drawn up about 1624, the Apology for it against a censure of the opposite party, and what seems to have been a later work, and more celebrated, his Institutiones Theologicæ. These contain a new scheme of religion, compared with that of the established churches of Europe, and may justly be deemed the representative of the liberal or latitudinarian theology. For though the writings of Erasmus, Cassander, Castalio, and Acontius had tended to the same purpose, they were either too much weakened by the restraints of prudence, or too obscure and transitory, to draw much attention, or to carry any weight against the rigid and exclusive tenets which were sustained by power. |Their spirit and tendency.|