nsight and individual experience are not so well known.[1] The
growth and development of this great movement, with its numerous
ramifications and differentiations, obviously cannot be told here, but
one or two specimen lines of the movement will be briefly studied for the
light they throw upon this general type of religion under consideration,
and for their specific influence {105} upon corresponding spiritual
movements in England and America.

The silent propagation and germination of religious ideas in lands far
away from their original habitat, their sudden appearance in a new spot
like an outbreak of contagion, are always mysterious and fascinating
subjects of research. Some chance talk with a disciple plants the seed,
or some stray book comes to the hand of a baffled seeker at the moment
when his soul is in a suggestible state, and lo! a new vision is created
and a new apostle of the movement is prepared, often so inwardly and
mysteriously that to himself he seems to be "an apostle not of men nor by
man." One of the earliest Dutch exponents and interpreters of this type
of spiritual religion which we have been studying as a by-product of the
Reformation in Germany, and one who became an apostle of it because at a
critical period of his life the seeds of it had fallen into his awakened
mind, was Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert.[2]

He was born in Amsterdam in 1522. He perfected himself as expert in
copper-plate engraving and etching, and intended to pursue a quiet career
in his adopted city of Haarlem, but he found himself disturbed with
"intimations clear of wider scope." A keen desire to go back to the
original sources of religious truth and to read the New Testament and the
Fathers in their own tongue induced him to learn Greek and Latin after he
was thirty years of age. He possessed excellent gifts and natural
abilities of mind, and he soon had an enviable reputation for skill and
learning. Like Sebastian Franck, whom he resembled in many points, he
was profoundly interested in history and in the stages of man's
historical development, and, like the former, he undertook the
translation of great masterpieces which expressed the ideas that
peculiarly suited his own temper of mind, such as Boethius' _Consolation
of Philosophy_; Cicero, _On Duties_; and Erasmus' _Paraphrases of the New
Testament_. He was throughout {106} his life deeply influenced by
Erasmus, and his writings show everywhere a very strong humanis