Abstract
Just over three months after Balthasar Bekker was excluded from the communion of the Dutch Reformed church an event, took place in Westminster, England, that bore ironic resemblance to Bekker’s experience in the spirit debate. The unhappy nobleman who died in Westminster on December 8th, 1692, had had the benefit, in his younger years, of an excellent education in religion and morality. He learned much faster than most boys of his age, becoming highly skilled in Latin and Greek by the age of 16, and he was zealous in the exercise of religion as well. He went on to university, where he stayed five years and again did very well. His friends considered him a blessing and the jewel of his family.
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References
Hermanus Witsius, Een Tweede Fra. Spira, Zijnde een Vreesselijck Exempel van een Atheist, welcke Verloochent hadde de Christelijcke Religie, en Stolle in Waanhoop in Westminster, de 8 December 1692. Als ook een brief van een atheist aan hem, en een Antwoordt dar op, door J.S., Leeraar van de Kerck van Engeland, die hem geduerigh bezocht heeft, duerende de geheele Sieckte (Goes, 1714), 6.
Theo Verbeek, “From ‘Learned Ignorance’ to Scepticism: Descartes and Calvinist Orthodoxy,” in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth und Eighteenth Centuries, ed. by Richard Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, 1993), 32–33; E.G.E. van der Wall, “Orthodoxy and Scepticism in the early Dutch Enlightenment,” in Popkin and Vanderjagt, 122–123, 131.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Fix, A. (1999). The Death of an Atheist. In: Fallen Angels. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idées, vol 165. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1531-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1531-7_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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