KUYPER, ki'per, ABRAHAM ( 1837—). A Dutch statesman and theologian, born in Maass this and educated at Leyden. Ilis father was a pastor of the Reformed Church; the son received a difficult country charge at Beest in 1863, and five years afterwards went to Utrecht, where he began his struggle for the independence of the Reformed Church. In 1870 he became pastor. in Amsterdam, of the largest congregation in Hol land. There he became more and more engrossed in politics. He became editor of Dr Standaard in 1872: and in this conservative secular journal, as well as in his religions organ, the Hcraut, opposed 'modernism,' which he considered an en emy of Christianity, or, in his own phrase, of Calvinism. Thus he became the logical political successor of Groen van Prinsterer, and was elected to Parliament in 1874, but was forced to resign soon afterwards. His political purposes were sketched in nos Program (1879), where he urged a double system of representation, indi vidual and ecirporate, less centralization of gov ernment. a large degree of local control even in
the colonies, and a reformed system of taxation. In ISSO he established the Free University of Amsterdam, and in IS86 definitely broke with the National Church. and formed the Free Re formed Church. He returned to Parliament in 1897, carried through the great Conservative and Clerical alliance between Calvinist and Catholic parties, and in 1901, as leader of this fusion, formed a Cabinet in which he took the portfolio of the Interior. Knyper is well known in America as a strongly Calvinistic theologian. his En cyclopaIlia of ,8acrcd Theology (1898) and his works on Calvinism and on the Holy Spirit were translated into English by De Vries. In Church history his important work is an edition of the Polish reformer ,Tohn 1 Lasso (1866).