Matt recently linked this quotation posted in 2003.  His link to David Hall’s introduction is long gone, so I point out that it is still available.  Just in case anyone misses it, here is a quotation from the work Hall promoted:

But enough about the Catholics. To the Protestants had been committed the oracles of God: how did they preserve that precious heritage? The awakening was short-lived. After a mere forty years the Reformation had reached its zenith and the Catholic counteraction began its reconquest: many lands that had been illumined by the light of the Reformation were once more covered by the darkness of popery. And in the lands where the Reformation held the field the life of faith did not prosper: it almost dissolved itself in polemics, causing love to depart and faith to grow dull. Men clung to outward forms and held slavishly to a literal interpretation of the received standards. {175} A dead orthodoxy emerged. Truth was looked for only in the Confessions, as though the content of the symbol, down to the smallest detail, was the saving faith itself. God’s Word was replaced, supplanted, at best reduced to a storehouse of proof-texts. The hand of fellowship was extended, not on the Bible, but on the creeds; witness the spiteful treatment given Spener and Francke in Germany, Wesley and Whitefield in England, more than one teacher of the Moravian Brethren in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands, more than any other country, was chosen and set apart by the mercies of God to be a seat of Protestantism. Did zeal and love flag less quickly here than elsewhere? The endless stream of penitential homilies, almost from the day the Reformation began, testifies to our people?s chronic insensitivity to God?s promises and threats. And what to think of the state of our church and theology and national life at the beginning of the eighteenth century? I know our theologians displayed a wealth of learning and our people, especially the middle class, evinced a gratifying remnant of godliness and morality. Yet, when I look for the kind of faith that is like the all-pervading leaven, and consider whether it could have been expected to offer any real resistance to a false, seductive, popularized philosophy, then I believe the contrary is apparent. At least, when I think of the elaborate systems of church doctrine; of the hosts of discourses and tedious sermons; of the hair-splitting over words, whereby the power of the Word was so often made of none effect; of that ecclesiastical touchiness whereby the sacredness of Revelation was transferred to every jot and tittle of human conclusion and assumption; of the foolish excitement over secondary matters while being outflanked on all sides by the grossest fallacies — then I no longer detect in all those orthodox exertions and trappings the sword that is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart; then I fail to see in them the weapons of our apostolic warfare which in the hands of the Reformers, too, had proved mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. Then I no longer ask why skepticism and depravity gained the upper hand over many. Then I am not surprised that such orthodoxy, after ensconcing itself in the narrows of the ecclesiastical terrain, proved impotent in the days of peril even there.