13. The appearance in 1678 of a Dutch treatise "against all sorts of atheists," [645] and in 1681, at Amsterdam, of an attack in French on Spinoza's Scriptural criticism, [646] points to a movement outside of the clerical and scholarly class. All along, indeed, the atmosphere of the Arminian or "Remonstrant" School in Holland must have been fairly liberal. [647] Already in 1685 Locke's friend Le Clerc had taken up the position of Hobbes and Spinoza and Simon on the Pentateuch in his Sentimens de quelques théologiens de Hollande (translated into English and published in 1690 as "Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures"). [648] And although Le Clerc always remained something of a Scripturalist, and refused to go the way of Spinoza, he had courage enough to revive an ancient heresy by urging, in his commentary on the fourth Gospel (1701), that "the Logos" should be rendered "Reason"--an idea which he probably derived from the Unitarian Zwicker without realizing how far it could take him. His ultimate recantation, on the subject of the authorship of the Pentateuch, served only to weaken his credit with freethinkers, and came too late to arrest the intellectual movement which he had forwarded.
A rationalizing spirit had now begun to spread widely in Holland; and within twenty years of Spinoza's death there had arisen a Dutch sect, led by Pontiaan van Hattem, a pastor at Philipsland, which blended Spinozism with evangelicalism in such a way as to incur the anathema of the Church. [649] In the time of the English Civil War the fear of the opponents of the new multitude of sects was that England should become "another Amsterdam." [650] This very multiplicity tended to promote doubt; and in 1713 we find Anthony Collins [651] pointing to Holland as a country where freedom to think has undermined superstition to a remarkable degree. During his stay, in the previous generation, Locke had found a measure of liberal theology, in harmony with his own; but in those days downright heresy was still dangerous. Deurhoff (d. 1717), who translated Descartes and was accused of Spinozism, though he strongly attacked it, [652] had at one time to fly Holland, though by his writings he founded a pantheistic sect known as Deurhovians; and Balthasar Bekker, a Cartesian, persecuted first for Socinianism, incurred so much odium by publishing in 1691 a treatise denying the reality of witchcraft that he had to give up his office as a preacher.