A HISTORY OF UNITARIANISM - Starr King School for the Ministry

youth who gathered there for study. 10 Though by profession a jurist, and by
occupation a distinguished publicist, he was also deeply interested in religious
questions, and in the Protestant world was as famed for his theological writings
as in the secular world for his classical work, D Jure Belli et Pacis (1625),
which won him lasting renown as the founder of international law. Indeed for
some time he seemed to take more interest in religious questions than in legal
ones. He had long been saturated with the thought of Socinus in some of its
phases, through the latter’s controversy with Palaeologus, 11 although unaware
of the authorship of that anonymous work; and he had more lately come into
contact with Socinus’s theology in his work De Jesu Christo Servatore, and
had undertaken to controvert it in a work of his own, 12 which though it was
widely circulated was allowed even by the orthodox to be a rather ineffective
performance. 13 He had long before declared the Polish Brethren to be unworthy
even of the name of heretics, being not very different from Mohammedans, 14
and was the most distinguished opponent of Socinianism in Holland; and in this
and a later work he had spoken of the doctrine of Socinus as the worst of
heresies. Grotius’s work was at length answered (though not until six years
later, when he was now in exile) by Crellius 15 in a work so marked by both
thorough scholarship and moderation of tone as to win the respect of Grotius,
who did not venture to reply to it, though other writers carried on an active
controversy over it—the so-called Satisfaction controversy. 16
Grotius became in time familiar with various Socinian writings which
Ruar had recommended to him, calling his attention to some views of the
Polish Brethren which corresponded with those held by the Remonstrants; 17
and both Ruar and the students in Paris supplied him with many of the Raków
prints as they appeared. Hence his opinions and judgments were gradually
modified; and as his interest in unity among the different confessions increased,