SPINOZA: 1677 AND 1877. 219 



But the persecutions of the middle ages had produced on Judaism 

 the usual eflect of all persecution '. they had rendered minds narrow 

 and timid. A few years previously, at Amsterdam, the unfortunate 

 Uriel Acosta liad cruelly expiated certain doubts that fanaticism finds 

 as culpable as avowed incredulity. The boldness of the youno- Spi- 

 noza was still worse received ; he was anathematized, and had to sub- 

 rait to an excommunication that Ijc had not courted. A very old his- 

 tory this ! Religious communions, beneficent cradles of so much ear- 

 nestness and so much virtue, do not allow of any refusal to be shut up 

 exclusively within their embrace ; they claim to imprison forever the 

 life that had its beginnings within them; they brand as apostasy the 

 lawful emancipation of the mind that seeks to take its flight alone. 

 It is as thougli the e<^g should reproach, as ungrateful, the biid that 

 had escaped therefrom. The egg was necessary in its time ; when it 

 became a bondage, it iiad to be broken. A great marvel, truly, that 

 Erasmus of Rotterdam should feel himself cramped in his cell ; that 

 Luther should not prefer his monkish vows to that far holier vow 

 which man, by the very fact of his being, contracts with truth ! Had 

 Erasmus persisted in his monastic routine, or Luther gone on distrib- 

 uting indulgences, they would have been apostates indeed ! Spinoza 

 was tlie greatest of modern Jews, and Judaism exiled him. Nothing 

 more simple; it must have been so, it must be so ever. Finite sym- 

 bols, prisons of the infinite spirit, will eternally ])rotest against the 

 eflbrt of idealism to enlarge them. The spirit, on its side, struggles 

 eternally for more air and more light. Eighteen hundred and fifty 

 years ago the synagogue denounced as a seducer the one who was to 

 raise the maxims of the synagogue to unequaled glory. And the 

 Christian Church, how often has she not driven from her breast those 

 who should have been her chiefest honor ! In cases like these, our 

 duty is fulfilled if we retain a pious memory of the education our child- 

 hood received. Let the old Churches be free to brand with criminal- 

 ity those who quit them ; they shall not succeed in obtaining from us 

 any but grateful feelings, since, after all, the harm they are able to 

 do us is as nothing compared to the good they have done. 



II. 



Here, then, we have the excommunicated of the synagogue of 

 Amsterdam forced to create for himself a spiritual abode outside of 

 the home which rejected him. He had great sympathy with Chris- 

 tianity, but he dreaded all chains ; he did not embrace it. Descartes 

 had just renewed philosophy by his firm and sober rationalism. Des- 

 cartes was his master. Spinoza took up the problems where they had 

 been left by that great mind, bvat saw that, through fear of the Sor- 

 bonne, his theology had always remained somewhat arid. Oldenburg 

 asking him one .day what fault he could find with the philosophy of 

 Descartes and of Bacon, Spinoza replied that their chief fault lay in 



