A revised and updated version of
Abraham Kuyper: An Annotated Bibliography 1857-2010 by Tjitze Kuipers (2011)
You can buy a printed edition of this book on the site of the publisher.
1874
The title of this address was taken from G. Groen van Prinsterer (cf. Nederlandsche Gedachten, series 2, IV, no. 26, October 22, 1873, p. 203, and no. 50, March 19, 1874, p. 399). The speaker’s point of departure is that it was not the French Revolution and its principle of popular sovereignty but the Reformation and its respect for the sovereignty of God that had brought true freedom to the masses. The historical course of the “red thread” of freedom is traced from Geneva, through the Netherlands and England, to the United States and evaluated in a reverse historical order. The lecture begins with the United States (section 1), goes back to seventeenth-century England (section 2), then to sixteenth-century France and the Huguenots (section 3), and ends with Beza and Calvin (section 4). According to Kuyper, what came to pass in the United States had already been sketched out by Beza and Calvin.
In a prefatory remark, the author expressly declares that he had delivered this lecture far prior to his electoral campaign and that therefore it should not be looked upon as a political manifesto for his activities in the Second Chamber.
Ten pages of notes are added to this edition. The second printing appeared fourteen days after the first.
Kuyper had already delivered the lecture to the students of the University of Utrecht, the city of his previous pastorate, in November 1873. He also delivered it to his alma mater, the University of Leiden, on March 4, 1874, and to the students of the Theological Seminary of Kampen on March 24. He continued to lecture before popular audiences in several cities, including Gouda, which had elected Kuyper to the Second Chamber (see 1874.03). Kuyper returned to Leiden on November 4, 1874 at the request of the Debating Society of Minerva to participate in a debate about this address. The debate concluded with a second round on November 16. The student Th. Heemskerk, subsequently prime minister (1908–1913), served as his opponent in both debates.