Sarpi at the end of his life wrote to Daniel Heinsius that he favored the Calvinist Contra-Remonstrants' side at the Synod of Dort. Yet, although Sarpi corresponded with James I of England and admired the English Book of Common Prayer, Catholic theologian Le Courayer in the 18th century wrote that Sarpi was no a Protestant, terming him, "Catholique en gros et quelque fois Protestant en détail" ("Catholic in general and sometimes Protestant in detail"). In the twentieth century William James Bouwsma found Sarpi to have been a philo-Protestant “whose religious ideas were nevertheless “consistent with Catholic orthodoxy”, and Eric Cochrane described him as deeply religious in the typical spirit of the Counter-Reformation. Corrado Vivanti saw Sarpi as a religious reformer who aspired toward an ecumenical church, and historian Diarmaid MacCulloch describes Sarpi as having moved away from dogmatic Christianity. On the other hand, in 1983 David Wootton made a startling case for Sarpi as a scientific materialist and thus as likely a "veiled" atheist who was "hostile to Christianity itself" and whose politics looked forward to a secular society unrealizable in his own time, a thesis that has won some acceptance. Jaska Kainulainen, on the other hand, asserts that the thesis that Sarpi was an atheist contradicts the historical record, observing that neither Sarpi's pronounced skepticism nor his pessimistic view of capabilities are incompatible with religious faith: