ABSTRACT
The manifesto and constitution adopted by the groupe tala at the beginning of the 1911-12 academic year was the product of a meeting which the group had called in order to settle the disputes of the previous year and to agree upon a program for the approaching one. Possibly in deference to the study-circle's dissident members it was agreed that the meeting would be both a strategy session and a religious retreat, and that to fulfill this latter end some ecclesiastical guidance would be necessary at least for this one occasion. Rejecting both the Protestant notion that the Church's authority is entirely unnecessary and the current integralist notion that it should be imposed "without argument", Veerkamp advocates a reconciliation between the Church's traditional authority and "the liberty of spirit which her maternal spirit cannot help but allow to her children".
