In the bottom of the box

It would just seem to me that the 17th-century French playwright, poet, and actor,Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, a man commonly called, simply, Moliere, wasn't particularly Reformed, nor did he want to be, nor was he expected to be. I'm thinking that during 19th century Dutch Reformed Holland, Moliere would be dismissed as a lightweight--the writer of comic sketches that tended to be, well, farcical, a funny bone without a body, someone probably left best unstudied simply because he was a man of "the theater," and Lord knows "the theater" was huge risk, a first step into sin.

So you can imagine my shock when I discovered this amazing twosome, Moliere and Racine, in the bottom of an old box of books, part of the library of Prof. G. K. Hemkes, a studied theologian from the early days of a tiny little denomination of nay-sayers, the Christian Reformed Church, a break-off of the much older Dutch Reformed Church.

Hemkes was my great-grandfather, long gone before I was born. Nobody I know knew him. My dad didn't and claimed he didn't know much about him either. Grandpa Schaap, who married his daughter, was gone by the time I was five or six. He died without calling me into his room to tell me stories; in fact, no uncles or aunts knew much about this Hemkes guy either. 

From what little I could glean from a few articles, he was a conservative in the wars of his time, most of which centered (as they still do) on the degree of worldliness Christians can risk by membership in any group other than their own hometown congregations. I suppose the easiest way of saying it is that Professor Hemkes tended to shun the outreach of this world. "Worldliness" was an iron hammer back then, and by all means you didn't want to be smashed by it, worldliness that is.

So, those books up there are the top of the page, seemingly unopened, were a shock when I found them. It never would have occurred to me that my conservative grandfather would have owned them, but own them he did.

I'm guessing that it's his handwriting, in his book, a collection of plays by Moliere, the jokester, that he might well be have bought from Mr. H. Bosma on October 12 of 1859. Back then, he was still in Holland, hadn't yet immigrated. 

I was non-plussed. My very conservative great-grandpa would have had on the shelves of his library the complete Moliere? There it was in my hands, along with a copy of the plays of Racine, yet another French playwright. 

Loved it. Not because it proved him a hypocrite--one could come to that conclusion; nor because it proved him a  man of this world, also possible. I loved it because Theatre complete De J. Racine and two volumes of Moliere (in French) suggested that Grandpa wasn't only someone who fought the good fight against worldliness. What I had in my hands suggested

that if he hated the theater, if he despised worldliness, at least he knew what he was talking about.

They're in the French language, of course, and published (Moliere at least) in Paris in 1858.