Justified True Belief

(●) The Dutch lawyer who gave Europe a law of war, and gave Christians one of the first cases for their faith built out of evidence a stranger could check. + Two very different rooms remember Hugo Grotius. In one, a law school teaches the opening lecture of any course on international law, and his name is the first on the board: he is the man who argued, in the middle of the bloodiest religious wars Europe had ever fought, that nations at war are still bound by a law they did not make and cannot repeal. In the other room, a Christian is trying to explain to a skeptical friend why anyone should believe the resurrection happened, and the shape of the answer being given, witnesses, motives, what people were willing to lose, goes back to a little book Grotius first wrote in Dutch verse for sailors. He belongs on a Christian apologetics shelf for that second reason above all. Christian defenses of the faith were usually written for people already inside the church, arguing from Scripture to Scripture. Grotius wrote for the man who did not grant the Bible anything, and he built his case the way a lawyer builds one, out of testimony, circumstance, and motive. Much of what the English evidential tradition later did, Joseph Butler and William Paley and their heirs, runs downstream of that decision. Here is the fact about him that readers tend to remember. He wrote the first draft of that little book in prison, sentenced to life for losing a church quarrel, and he got out of the prison by climbing into the chest his books were delivered in.

(●) 1583 AD: Born in Delft into a family of magistrates, and writing Latin verse while other boys learned their letters. + Huig de Groot was born in Delft on 10 April 1583, into the governing class of a young republic that was still fighting for its existence. His father Jan served as a burgomaster of the town, one of the handful of men who governed it, and as a curator of the new university at Leiden, which is to say one of its trustees, and he raised his eldest son on Latin the way another father might raise a boy on a trade. The family name was Latinized, as educated men’s names were, and Huig de Groot became Hugo Grotius. The Dutch Republic he was born into was barely older than he was. It had thrown off the rule of Catholic Spain, adopted a Reformed church, and made itself rich on shipping, all inside living memory, and it was still at war with Spain for most of his life. Reformed is the family word for the Protestant churches that took their theology from Calvin and Geneva, and in a Dutch town of that generation it meant the plain whitewashed church on the market square, stripped of its images and filled on Sunday with people whose parents had been Catholic. A boy of his class grew up expecting to serve that republic, and to argue about what its church should be. He was a prodigy of the kind that makes other parents uncomfortable. He entered the University of Leiden at about eleven, studying in the faculty of letters under Joseph Scaliger, the most formidable classical scholar in Europe, and at sixteen he published an edition of a late Roman author, Martianus Capella, with his own notes. Not long after, he edited the Greek astronomical poem of Aratus, the one Paul quotes a line of at Athens, and set Cicero’s and Germanicus’ Latin versions of it beside the Greek.

(●) 1598 AD: At fifteen he crossed to the French court, and came back with a doctorate in law. + In 1598 the leading statesman of Holland, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, took a diplomatic mission to the court of Henry IV of France, and brought the fifteen-year-old Grotius along. The king is said to have presented him to the court as "the miracle of Holland," a phrase that followed him for the rest of his life and that he was never entirely sorry to hear repeated. Before the party came home he had a law degree from the University of Orléans. Back in The Hague he was admitted to the bar in 1599 and began practicing, and in 1601 the States of Holland, the assembly of towns and nobles that governed the province, made him their official historiographer, the man paid to write the republic’s own account of its war of independence. He was eighteen. In the same year he published Adamus Exul, a Latin tragedy on the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden, which readers have argued ever since stands somewhere behind John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Oldenbarnevelt mattered enormously to him, and not only as a patron. The older man had built the republic’s constitutional settlement and believed the provinces, not the church assemblies and not the prince, held final authority. Grotius took that conviction as his own, and it eventually cost him everything he had.

(●) 1604 AD: A captured Portuguese merchantman handed him a question nobody had settled: who owns the sea. + In February 1603, in the strait off Singapore, a Dutch captain named Jacob van Heemskerck took the Santa Catarina, a Portuguese carrack loaded with Chinese silk and porcelain. A carrack was one of the tall, high-sided merchant ships built for the long runs to the Indies, with room in a single hull for a fortune, and this one was carrying one. When ship and cargo were auctioned in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1604 the gross proceeds came to more than three million guilders, roughly three hundred thousand pounds sterling, about twice the money investors had paid into the Dutch East India Company when it was founded two years before. And on the face of it the whole business was robbery. No court had recognized a war between the Netherlands and Portugal in those waters, so a Dutch captain emptying a Portuguese hold looked a good deal like any other man helping himself to what was not his. The Dutch East India Company needed a legal case, and its directors hired the twenty-one-year-old Grotius to write one. What he produced, over the next two years, was not a brief. It was a book, De Iure Praedae, "On the Law of Prize and Booty." A prize, in a lawyer’s vocabulary, is a ship and cargo taken at sea and kept lawfully rather than stolen, and the question in front of him was whether this one counted. He starts much further back than the strait of Singapore: with what a right is, where rights come from, and when private men may lawfully use force. The company never published it, and the manuscript sat unread until a bookseller’s catalogue turned it up in 1864. One chapter did get out. In 1609 the company had it printed on its own, anonymously and in a hurry, under the title Mare Liberum, "The Free Sea." Portugal and later England answered it in print, and the argument it started about whether the ocean can be owned ran for a century and shaped the law of the sea that shipping still runs on.

(●) 1613 AD: He took the losing side in his country’s religious quarrel, and it cost him his office, his property and his freedom. + The quarrel began about as small as a quarrel can begin, between two men who taught theology in the same faculty at Leiden and passed each other in the same corridor. Jacobus Arminius held that God’s election of a person to salvation takes account of that person’s faith, and that grace can be resisted; his colleague Franciscus Gomarus held the stricter Reformed line, that God’s choice rests on nothing in the person chosen and that the grace which saves is not in the end refused. After Arminius died in 1609 his followers put their case in a document called the Remonstrance. A remonstrance is a formal protest, and theirs set out five articles on which they asked the Dutch church to leave room for their reading. The name Remonstrants came from that document, and their opponents added a second one, Arminians, after the dead professor, which they themselves never accepted; both names stuck, and the Dutch Republic began tearing itself in half over them. Grotius was made advocate-fiscal of Holland in 1607, the province’s chief law officer, and pensionary of Rotterdam in 1613, the salaried lawyer who spoke for the city in the assembly of the province. That put him in the middle of the quarrel as a public man rather than a theologian. He sided with the Remonstrants, and more than that, he argued in Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas (1613) that the civil government, not a national church synod, had the right to settle what the church of a province would teach and tolerate. A synod is an assembly of the church’s own ministers and elders, meeting to decide what the church will hold, and who outranked whom, that assembly or the magistrates who held civil office in the towns and the provinces, is the political nerve of the whole story. In 1617 he published his one strictly doctrinal book, a defense of the atonement against the Italian anti-trinitarian Faustus Socinus. The atonement is the church’s account of how the death of Christ puts sinners right with God; Socinus denied both that God is three persons in one being and that the death of Christ paid any penalty for sin. Grotius wrote partly to show that a man could hold Arminian views on grace and still stand firmly against the real heresy. It did him no good. Prince Maurice of Nassau, the republic’s soldier and its most powerful man, threw his weight behind the Gomarists, and on 29 August 1618 he had Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius and a third ally arrested. The Synod of Dort met that winter and condemned the Remonstrants. Oldenbarnevelt, then seventy-one, was beheaded in May 1619; Grotius, thirty-six, was sentenced to prison for life and his property was confiscated.

(●) 1621 AD: After twenty-one months in a river fortress he went out through the gate in a chest of books. + On 6 June 1619 they put him in Loevestein, a fourteenth-century castle on the spit of land where two great rivers meet, and they let him have books. That was the concession that undid them. A chest of volumes came up from the town of Gorinchem and went back again every few weeks, and after a while the guards stopped opening it. His wife, Maria van Reigersberch, had chosen to be imprisoned with him, and she saw what the guards had stopped doing. On 22 March 1621 she packed her husband into the chest, told the soldiers it was full of Arminian books going back to town, and stayed behind to answer for it. Their maidservant, Elsje van Houwening, rode with the chest down the river to Gorinchem and got it to a friendly house, where Grotius climbed out, and from there he made his way to Antwerp and then to Paris. Maria was released some days later. More than one Dutch museum now displays a chest said to be the chest. Prison had not been idle. He had written, in Dutch verse so that ordinary sailors could carry it in their heads, a book of arguments for the Christian faith meant for men who would meet Muslims and pagans in distant ports and have nothing to say to them. He had also drafted an introduction to the law of Holland that Dutch lawyers used for the next two centuries. The verse book went to press in 1622 as Bewijs van den waren godsdienst, and five years later he recast it in Latin prose for the whole of Europe.

(●) 1625 AD: An exile without a country published the book that gave Europe a law of war. + He arrived in Paris a fugitive with no income, and lived on a pension from Louis XIII that arrived late when it arrived at all. There, in about a year of writing, he finished De Iure Belli ac Pacis, "On the Law of War and Peace," and a Paris press published it in 1625. The timing is the thing to hold on to. The Thirty Years’ War was seven years old and had another twenty-three to run. Whole regions of Germany were being emptied, and Christians were doing it to Christians over the sacraments. Grotius wrote that he had watched the Christian world make war with a lack of restraint that would have embarrassed barbarians, and he set out to prove that even in war some things are simply not allowed, to anyone, ever, whatever their cause. The book made him famous across Europe almost at once. In 1631 he risked a return to Holland, hoping the old sentence had faded; it had not, and within months a reward was posted for his arrest and he fled again, this time to Hamburg. He never lived in his own country again.

(●) 1634 AD: Sweden made him its ambassador to France, and eleven years later a shipwreck killed him among strangers. + In 1634 the Swedish chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, who was running the war and the kingdom for the child queen Christina, offered the exiled Dutchman the Swedish embassy in Paris. Grotius took it, presented his credentials early in 1635, and held the post for the ten years that were left to him. He was not an easy diplomat. He was proud, he quarrelled about precedence, which meant who was received first and seated nearest the king and was no small thing at that court but the public measure of what a kingdom counted for, and Cardinal Richelieu found him tiresome. He stayed in place all the same, through the hardest years of the war. The work he cared about most in those years was not diplomatic. He wrote enormous commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, notable for reading each text first for what it plainly meant to the people who first heard it, and he wrote tract after tract pleading for the divided churches of Europe to find terms they could live under together. That last project earned him suspicion from every direction: Reformed critics such as André Rivet accused him of drifting toward Rome, and he answered them with a sharpness he did not always earn. In 1645 Queen Christina called him to Stockholm and released him from her service. He sailed for Germany in August, ran into a storm, and came ashore on the Pomeranian coast. A farm cart carried him overland to Rostock, soaked and exhausted, and there he asked for a minister and got a Lutheran pastor named Johann Quistorp. He died around midnight on 28 August 1645, at sixty-two. A story traced back to Quistorp and repeated ever since gives his last words as a verdict on his own life: by undertaking many things, he had accomplished nothing. Whether he said it cannot now be established, but everyone who has told his story has wanted it to be true. His body was carried home to Delft and buried in the Nieuwe Kerk.

What He Taught

(T1) Nations at war are bound by a law they did not make, and it would keep some of its force even if there were no God. + Two children in a playground who have never read a rule book will still tell you that taking a smaller child’s lunch is wrong, and they will say it with confidence, as though they were reporting something rather than deciding it. That instinct, worked out carefully and applied to kings, is what the older writers called natural law: a standard of right and wrong that holds because of what human beings are, so that it is discovered rather than enacted, and no parliament can repeal it. Grotius did not invent the idea. Thomas Aquinas had it, the Roman jurists had it, and Paul appeals to it when he says that Gentiles who never received the law of Moses nonetheless "by nature do what the law requires" and are "a law to themselves" (Romans 2:14). What Grotius did was aim it at the one place everyone assumed it did not reach. War, the common wisdom ran, is where law stops and necessity takes over. He answered that a war can be begun justly or unjustly, and that even a just war can be fought in ways that are forbidden, and he spent three books saying exactly which ways. Then he added the sentence that has been fought over ever since. What he had argued, he wrote, would keep some of its force even if we were to grant something that cannot be granted without the utmost wickedness: that there is no God. Read slowly, the remark is not a declaration of independence from God. It is a lawyer’s move, and an old one, running back through the medieval schoolmen, the theologians who taught in the universities of the Middle Ages and who had tried the same impossible supposition long before he did. He is telling a Catholic prince and a Lutheran prince and a Calvinist prince that they cannot escape the law of war by disagreeing about theology, because the obligation does not depend on their agreeing. In the sentences that follow he says that the very opposite of atheism has been implanted in us by reason and by unbroken tradition, and that we must without exception render obedience to God as our Creator. Still, later readers have taken the aside further than he took it, and the question of whether he left the door ajar is a real one.

(Q) "What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him." + Source: Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace, Prolegomena 11 (Kelsey translation, Carnegie edition, 1925). The famous etiamsi daremus, from the Latin for "even if we should grant." The sentences that follow it insist that the very opposite has been implanted in us by reason and by unbroken tradition, and that we must without exception render obedience to God as our Creator, to whom we owe all that we are and have.

(T2) The sea belongs to nobody, because no one can take hold of it and no one is diminished by sharing it. + Fence off a field and you have changed something: the grass you grow is grass nobody else can eat. Fence off the air above the field and you have changed nothing at all, because your neighbour breathing does not leave you less to breathe, and because there is no fence that will hold it. Grotius put the ocean in the second category rather than the first, and that was the whole argument. Property, he held, begins with occupation: a thing becomes yours when you take it and hold it in a way that excludes others, which is why a field can be owned and a river running through a country can be claimed by that country. The open sea fails both halves of the test. It is too vast to be held, and its two great uses, sailing across it and fishing in it, do not use it up. A Portuguese claim to own the route to the Indies was therefore not a strong claim badly enforced. It was a claim about something that cannot be owned by anybody. Underneath sat a theological premise he stated plainly in the first chapter. God distributed the world’s goods unevenly on purpose, spices in one place and timber in another and skilled hands in a third, so that nations would need each other and friendship would grow out of the needing. A power that closes the sea is not merely breaking a commercial rule; it is frustrating an arrangement God made for human fellowship. Modern readers should notice the awkward fact that he was arguing this on retainer for a trading company whose own conduct in the Indies would soon be no gentler than Portugal’s. The argument outlived the client.

(Q) "Every nation is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it." + Source: Hugo Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas, chapter 1 (Magoffin translation, Carnegie edition, 1916). The axiom the little book is built on, laid down at the head of its first chapter. Grotius immediately grounds it in providence: God did not supply every place with everything, so that some peoples would excel in one art and some in another, and human friendships would be born out of mutual need.

(T3) The resurrection can be argued to an outsider by the ordinary rules for weighing testimony. + Think about how you decide whether a stranger’s account is true. You ask whether there were other witnesses, whether they could have checked each other, and above all what the teller stood to gain. A man who tells you a story that costs him his job, his family and eventually his life is not impossible to disbelieve, but he has removed the easiest reason for doubting him. That is the whole method of Grotius’ little book on the truth of the Christian religion, and the method is what made it travel. He wrote it for Dutch sailors who would be in Aleppo or Java arguing with men who granted the Bible no authority whatever, so he could not start where Christian writers usually started. He begins instead with what a reasonable person can be brought to grant about God from the world itself, moves to what can be established about Jesus of Nazareth from the ordinary historical record, and only then, in the third book, argues that the Scriptures are trustworthy. The order is reversed on purpose, and that reversal is why the book matters. His handling of the resurrection is the clearest case. The first Christians did not merely report that Jesus rose; they claimed to have seen him, and they named more witnesses than a liar would ever dare name, including the more than five hundred at one time that Paul mentions while pointing out that most of them were still alive and could be asked. Then Grotius goes after motive, one avenue at a time. Honour was in the gift of the Jewish and Roman authorities who despised them. Riches ran the other way, since the profession regularly cost men their property. Even fame was not available, since nobody outside their own small circle admired them. He is not claiming the argument compels belief. He is claiming it puts the burden where an honest inquirer has to carry it.

(Q) "Now it is not usual for those who speak untruths, to appeal to so many witnesses. Nor is it possible so many men should agree to bear a false testimony. And if there had been no other witnesses, but those twelve known first propagators of the Christian doctrine, it had been sufficient. Nobody has any ill design for nothing." + Source: Hugo Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion, Book II, section 6 (John Clarke translation; capitalization modernized). He has just cited the five hundred witnesses of 1 Corinthians 15:6, and is about to work through the possible motives one by one: honour, riches, and fame, and then the hardship, hunger, beatings and imprisonment that preaching actually brought the apostles instead.

(T4) At the cross God acted as a ruler upholding his law, not as a creditor collecting a debt. + A judge who lets a guilty man walk out of the courtroom because the man apologized has not been merciful; she has damaged the law. The next defendant, and everyone watching, has learned that the sentence printed in the statute book is negotiable. But suppose the judge could pardon the man in a way that made the law more feared rather than less. That, roughly, is the problem Grotius set himself and the solution he proposed. The book was a reply to Faustus Socinus, an Italian who had settled in Poland and argued that the whole idea of Christ dying in our place is incoherent. Socinus reasoned like this: a debt is either paid or forgiven, and it cannot be both. If Christ paid our penalty in full, then God did not forgive us, he was simply paid by somebody else; and if God forgave us, then no payment was needed. God, on this view, could simply pardon sinners, and the cross must mean something other than a penalty borne. Grotius answered by changing the category. God in this matter is not a private creditor to whom a debt is owed and who may waive it as he likes. He is a ruler, and punishment is an act of rule, the prerogative of a father in a family, a king in a state, God in the universe. A ruler has something a creditor does not have: a law to maintain and a public whose respect for that law is part of what he is responsible for. So God may indeed relax the strict letter of the sentence against the sinner, but not silently and not for free. He does it through a public act so costly that the law is honoured in the very moment it is set aside, "so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26). Because it makes the cross an act of God’s government of the world, later writers named this the governmental theory of the atonement. Grotius himself thought he was defending the church’s ordinary teaching, not replacing it, and the title he gave the book says so.

(Q) "In all this subject God must be treated as a Ruler. For to inflict punishment, or to liberate any one from punishment whom you can punish (which the Scripture calls justifying), is only the prerogative of the ruler as such, primarily and per se; as, for example, of a father in a family, of a king in a state, of God in the universe." + Source: Hugo Grotius, A Defence of the Catholic Faith concerning the Satisfaction of Christ, against Faustus Socinus, chapter 2 (Foster translation, Andover, 1889). The hinge of the whole book, set down in its second chapter before any of Socinus’ objections are answered. Satisfaction, the word in his title, is the old theological term for whatever it is that the death of Christ does to meet the claim of justice against sinners; Grotius is defending the thing itself and arguing about how it works. "Per se" is the Latin for "in itself," meaning that punishing belongs to a ruler by the very nature of the office rather than by anyone’s permission.

(Q) "Throughout the Christian world I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barbarous races should be ashamed of; I observed that men rush to arms for slight causes, or no cause at all, and that when arms have once been taken up there is no longer any respect for law, divine or human." + Source: Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace, Prolegomena 28 (Kelsey translation, Carnegie edition, 1925). His own account of why he wrote the book, given in the preface. It is worth remembering that he was describing wars fought between Christians over Christian doctrine, and that he was writing as a man whose own side in such a quarrel had put him in a fortress for life.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His little book of evidences went everywhere, and taught the English-speaking church how to argue with an outsider. + Of everything Grotius wrote, the work that travelled furthest was the shortest. De Veritate Religionis Christianae was reprinted for two centuries, set as a text at Oxford and Cambridge, and carried by missionaries who wanted something they could hand to an educated non-Christian. Symon Patrick, later bishop of Ely, put it into English in 1680 and added a seventh book of his own; John Clarke’s translation went through edition after edition; and in 1660 the great Oxford orientalist Edward Pococke translated it into Arabic for use in the East, with Persian and other versions following. What it taught by example was an order of argument. Do not begin by assuming the book you are trying to commend. Begin with what an honest stranger already grants, and work forward. Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion in 1736 and William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity in 1794 are doing recognizably the same thing on a larger scale, and the family resemblance is not an accident: the English evidential school grew up in libraries where Grotius was a set text. The habit has never gone away. When a modern defender of the faith argues that the apostles were in a position to know whether they had seen a risen man, and that nobody in the empire had anything to gain by saying so, the moves are Grotius’ moves, three and a half centuries on.

(†) His account of the cross became the standard Arminian and Wesleyan answer, and the spine of New England theology. + The 1617 book against Socinus had a slower start and a longer reach. On the European continent it landed in the middle of the Arminian controversy and was mostly read as a party document. In England it found better soil: it was reprinted at Oxford in 1636, translated into English in 1692, and taken up by writers who wanted an account of the atonement that did not run through unconditional election, the teaching that God’s choice of whom to save rests on nothing whatever in the person chosen. Two lines carried it. The first runs through the Wesleyans. Richard Watson, whose Theological Institutes (1823 to 1829) served Methodism as its systematic theology for a generation, set out the atonement under the principles of God’s moral government, exactly the frame Grotius had supplied, and cited the book against Socinus by name. The second runs through New England. Jonathan Edwards the younger, son of the great Edwards, made moral government the starting point of his own account: where there are moral creatures there must be moral government, where there is government there must be a penalty, and a penalty never inflicted is no penalty at all. Through him the Grotian frame became the common property of the New England theology and, later, of revivalists such as Charles Finney. It is worth being clear about why so many found it attractive. It preserves something Christians must not lose, that God’s forgiveness is not a shrug, that the cross is public and costly and says something true about how seriously God takes sin. Christians who reject it as an account of the atonement can still take that much from it.

(†) He gave Christian Europe a way to speak about restraining war that outlasted its divisions. + The generation that came after him treated De Iure Belli ac Pacis as a founding text, and it was being read across Europe while the peace that ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 was still being negotiated. Samuel Pufendorf built a system on it, and the long argument about what nations owe each other in wartime, running down through the Hague and Geneva conventions to the laws of armed conflict that militaries train on today, took its modern shape inside his covers. For Christian readers the interesting question has always been what kind of achievement that is. Grotius did his work by drawing on what Paul calls the knowledge of God that is plain to everyone from the things that have been made (Romans 1:19-20), the knowledge theologians name general revelation: what any human being can know of God through creation and conscience, without a Bible. That is exactly the right tool for the job he had, because a rule that binds a Catholic emperor and a Lutheran king and a Muslim sultan alike cannot rest on a text only one of them accepts. It is also a tool with a known limit, and the church has argued about it ever since. General revelation can establish that murdering prisoners is wrong. It cannot tell you that the God who forbids it became a prisoner himself. Grotius knew the difference; the books he wrote on the two subjects are different books. Whether the later habit of treating the law of nations as a free-standing science, with the theology quietly dropped, is his doing or his readers’, is a fair question that honest people answer both ways.

(†) Where his own work falls short: a penalty God can relax, a magistrate set over the church, and a defense of the faith thinned on purpose. + Three criticisms are aimed at what Grotius himself wrote, and all three were made in his own century. - The atonement. To answer Socinus, Grotius made the penalty against sin something God may relax as ruler. But Scripture’s language is not that of a sentence commuted. "But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities" (Isaiah 53:5), and "For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3:18). On the natural reading, Christ bears the actual penalty in the place of actual sinners, rather than suffering something else that serves the same public purpose. John Owen pressed it against the Grotian account within a decade of Grotius’ death, in his dissertation on divine justice, and it remains the standing Reformed objection: a cross that displays God’s seriousness about sin without paying for it leaves the sinner’s guilt unaccounted for. Christians disagree here, and some hold the governmental account as a true thing said alongside substitution rather than instead of it, which is not what Grotius argued but is not foreign to him either. - The church under the magistrate. In De Imperio Summarum Potestatum circa Sacra he gave the civil sovereign, meaning whoever holds the ruling power in a state, a prince in one country and an assembly of citizens in another, authority over the church’s public worship, teaching and discipline. His motive was decent, since he had watched synods tear a country apart and wanted someone above the quarrel. But the cure hands Christ’s church to the state, and Reformed, Roman Catholic and Anabaptist readers have all said so, each from their own side. A prince who can settle what a church teaches can settle it wrongly, as Grotius of all men had reason to know: it was the prince who put him in Loevestein. - An apologetic thinned on purpose. De Veritate argues for the truth of the Christian religion while deliberately leaving out the Trinity and saying very little about the atonement, on the ground that a case made to outsiders should not begin with what Christians dispute among themselves. As strategy it is defensible. As a portrait of the faith it is thin, and thin in a way his contemporaries noticed: he was accused of Socinian sympathies in his lifetime, which was unfair given that he wrote a book against Socinus, but the accusation had a foothold precisely because his public case for Christianity left so much of Christianity out. None of this is a verdict on the man. He was a lawyer by training who wrote theology in prison and exile, and he was trying, at genuine cost, to find ground on which Christians who were killing each other might stand together. The criticisms are the price of that attempt, and he would have recognized every one of them.