SPINOZA : 1677 AND 1877. 229 



Deep, assuredly, are the wounds of our age, and cruel are its per- 

 plexities. It can never be with impunity that so many problems pre- 

 sent themselves all at once before the elements for solving them are 

 in our possession. It is not we who have shattered that paradise of 

 crystal, with its silver and azure gleams, by which so many eyes have 

 been ravished and consoled. But there it is in fragments ; what is 

 shattered is shattered, and never will an earnest spirit undertake the 

 puerile task of bringing back ignorance destroyed or restoring illu- 

 sions dispelled. The populations of great towns have almost every- 

 where lost faith in the supernatural ; were we to sacrifice our convic- 

 tions and our sincerity in an attempt to give it them back, we shoidd 

 not succeed. But the supernatural, as formerly understood, is not the 

 ideal. 



The cause of the supernatural is compromised, the cause of the 

 ideal is untouched ; it ever will be. The ideal remains the soid of the 

 world, the permanent God, the primordial, efficient, and Final Cause of 

 this universe. This is the basis of eternal religion. We, no more 

 than Spinoza, need, in order to adore God, miracles or self-interested 

 prayers. So long as there be in the human heart one fibre to vibrate 

 at the sound of what is true, just, and honest ; so long as the instinc- 

 tively pure prefer purity to life ; so long as there be found friends of 

 truth ready to sacrifice their repose to science ; friends of goodness to 

 devote themselves to useful and holy works of mercy; woman-hearts 

 to love whatever is worthy, beautiful, and pure ; artists to render it 

 by sound, and color, and inspired accents so long will God live in 

 us. It could only be when egoism, meanness of soul, narrowness of 

 mind, indifierence to knowledge, contempt for human rights, oblivion 

 of what is great and noble, invaded the world it could only be then 

 that God would cease to be in humanity. But far from us thoughts 

 like these ! 



Our aspirations, our sufferings, our very faults and rashness, are 

 the proof that the ideal lives in us. Yes, human life is still something 

 divine ! Our apparent negations are often merely the scruples of timid 

 minds that fear to overpass the limits of their knowledge. They are 

 a worthier homage to the Divinity than the hypocritical adoration of 

 a spirit of routine. God is still in us ; believe it. God is in us ! Est 

 Deus in vohis. 



Let us all unite in bending before the great and illustrious thinker 

 who, two hundred years ago, proved better than any other, both by the 

 examples of his life and by the power, still fresh and young, of his 

 works, how much there is of spiritual joy and holy unction in thoughts 

 like these. Let us, with Schleiermacher, pay the homage of the best 

 we can do to the ashes of the holy and misunderstood Spinoza : 



" The sublime spirit of the world penetrated him ; the infinite was his begin- 

 ning and bis end ; the universal his only and eternal love. Living in holy inno- 

 cence and profound humility, he contemplated himself in the eternal world, and 



