fore first established his right in the civil courts, and then gave the whole estate to the sisters, to be divided between them. Self-possession and bravery were natural to him. On one occasion he was summoned away from his chamber by the great Condé, then in Holland with a French army. For this act he was suspected of some secret sympathy with the enemies of his country; and upon his return, an infuriated mob was speedily gathered about his lodgings. The owner of the house, dreading the ruin which threatened him, entreated Spinoza to take himself out of the way as quickly as possible. "Fear nothing," was the quiet reply; "I will go out and meet them." Accordingly, instead of running away and hiding, he did go out, greatly to the relief of his host; and the mob, overawed by his calm and fearless demeanor, stole away from him, afraid to touch a hair of his head. He scorned the least overreaching or unfair dealing. Being asked once to take the chair of philosophy at Heidelberg, he declined; for he knew that the theology there taught, if it did not give way, would soon bring him into open conflict with his associates. He would not even make converts to his own views at the expense of the orthodox party. Nor was he less independent than magnanimous. would not put himself in the way of temptation, which might lead him to change his views, or become the tool of another man. He was offered a pension, if he would engage to dedicate his next work to Louis XIV. But he proudly refused, saying that he had "no intention of dedicating anything to that monarch." Such was the favor that sought him, and his way of meeting it; and that, too, while his poverty was all the time extreme. One day he He His poverty. a would have no food but a dish of soup costing three halfpence, and a pot of beer worth three farthings. Another day he would be content with " basin of gruel, with some butter and raisins, which cost him twopence halfpenny." "And," says pastor Colerus, who gathered these facts about Spinoza while occupying the same lodgings which had been the philosopher's, "although often invited to dinner, he preferred the scanty meal that he found at home, to dining sumptuously at the expense of another." His patience. 1 It is said that in all his lifetime, after coming to years of discretion, he was never heard to murmur or complain. Silent, thoughtful, smiling, ever patient and ever toiling, he lived on in his solitary chamber. Nor was he too poor to indulge the kindliness of his nature now and then, by giving away something for the relief of the destitute. The mistress of the house in which he lodged was, together with her husband, a firm believer in the Christian religion; and when she came to him, as she repeatedly did, asking him to explain his reli His tolerance. "Your gious views, so that she might know them and judge for herself, he mildly parried her request, urging her to be content with her present faith. religion is a good religion," said he; "you have no occasion to look after another; neither need you doubt of your eternal welfare so as, along with your pious observances, you continue to lead a life of peace in charity with all." It will be seen here that Spinoza, according to the doctrine of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, places religion in outward forms chiefly, which one-may adopt or lay 2 aside at pleasure, his real character being a thing which they do not affect in any case. This extreme tolerance, and making man's eternal safety depend on the common moral virtues, is significant. It shows the small practical value which Spinoza attached to his own, or to any, conclusions of the intellect. All that is necessary in every case, as he seems to teach, is, that one's views be purely his own; not learned from any other person, but reached by an independent course of study. This, certainly, is a tolerance so large, that to see wherein it is not simply indifference to truth, must be hard for most minds. Imagine Jesus of Nazareth, at the well in Samaria, telling the woman who asked him about his religion, to be content with the faith in which she had been brought up! It is the tendency of a great truth, when one has embraced it, to make him a missionary. Just in proportion as he values it he feels bound to proclaim it, and to bring other men into it. We see this inspiration of truth nobly shown in the martyr, changed to a demon in the persecutor, manifested with heavenly beauty in Him who went about teaching among the villages of Galilee. Does not this want of moral earnestness in Spinoza indicate that he studied and wrote not to instruct, so much as to please himself and puzzle mankind? The supposition that he found a certain secret enjoyment in confusing men's thoughts and bewildering them with his subtle paradoxes, would fall in with some of His easy his well-known habits. "His only relaxations," events. says Mr. Lewes, "were his pipe, receiving visitors, chatting to the people of his house, and watching spiders fight. This last amusement would make the tears roll views of all down his cheek with laughter." Willis, noticing the fact about the spiders, is anxious to prevent the suspicion of a wanton cruelty which it tends to awaken; and he suggests that it was not the battles, but the loves of the venomous insects, which so greatly amused the philosopher. The tradition that Spinoza kept a colony of spiders in his room, and that he fed them with flies, after the manner of the Roman theatre, where Christians were thrown to the lions, cannot be thus explained away. This pastime seems to have afforded quite as much pleasure as the other. Mr. Willis may discredit it, and Lewes pass it by silently; but a more sensitive writer has said, "I could never understand the mirth, the 'laughter' which Spinoza is said to have indulged in, when witnessing the contest between the spider and the fly. I can comprehend that so abstract a philosopher would have risen above our natural repugnance, and surveyed even calmly an instance of a general and a wise law of nature, life surrendered to support other and generally higher life, but why should. the death of the poor fly have occasioned laughter?"1 The disturbed author would have hardly started this query, had he duly considered what was the essence of Spinoza's doctrine. He should have known that the "abstract philosopher" was entirely consistent with his theory, in laughing at the struggles of the victim; for the grand lesson which his whole system impresses is, the right of power to triumph over weakness. Vagueness of ancient writers. Thus lived and died Benedict Spinoza, the father of Modern Pantheism. Perhaps it would not be far out of the way to say that he was the 1 Thorndale. father of all pantheism, if we mean by that term only such systems, of the same nature as his, as have a logical completeness and have been clearly reported to us. The signs of agreement with him which we find in ancient thought are often more or less vague and uncertain. As there were reformers before the Reformation, so there may have been Spinozists before Spinoza. There is at least a pantheistic flavor, in some parts of ancient philosophy, which demands our attention; but the result, at the best, does not promise to be such as would repay an exhaustive treatment. There are, in the New Testament, words and phrases which a pantheist might use. Yet no candid scholar would affirm that pantheism is meant, where we read that "Christ is all and in all," that "whosoever is joined unto the Lord is one spirit," that "the Father dwelleth in us and we in him." If we use an exegesis which saves such passages as these from pantheism, which condemns nothing in the Fourth Gospel, nothing in the Epistles of Paul, nothing in the words of Christ himself, to that category, why not make a similar allowance in the study of uninspired writers? Indeed, there are modern. writers, both of prose and poetry, who have spoken here and there in the forms of pantheism, yet whose words spoken in other places make it certain that the universe and God were not to them one and the same thing. Take, for instance, the lines of Pope, in his Essay on Man: "All are but parts of one stupendous whole, That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees, |