2i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pense being unknowa to them, they dreamed of the realization of the 

 ideal upon this earth, and at no distant period. It was a Jew, Isaiah, 

 who, seven hundred and fifty years before Jesus Christ, dared affirm 

 that sacrifices are of little importance, and that one thing only is 

 needful : purity of heart and hands. Tlien, when earthly events seemed 

 irremediably to contradict such bright Utopias, Israel can change fi'ont 

 in a way unparalleled. 



Transporting into the domain of pure idealism that kingdom of 

 God with which earth proves incompatible, one moiety of its children 

 founds Christianity, the other carries on, through the tortures of the 

 middle ages, that imperturbable protest : " Hear, O Israel ! the Lord 

 thy God is one ; holy is his name." This potent tradition of idealism 

 and hope against all hope this religion, able to obtain from its ad- 

 herents the most heroic sacrifices, though it be not of its essence to 

 promise them any certainty beyond this life this was the healthy and 

 bracing medium in which Spinoza developed himself. His education 

 was at first entirely Hebraic ; the great literature of Israel was his 

 earliest, and, in point of fact, his perpetual instructress was the medi- 

 tation of all his life. 



As generally happens, Hebrew literature, in assuming the char- 

 acter of a sacred book, had become the subject of a conventional exe- 

 gesis, much less intent upon explaining the old texts according to the 

 meaning in their authors' minds than on finding in them aliment for 

 the moral and religious wants of the day. The penetrating mind of 

 the young Spinoza soon discerned all the defects of the exegesis of the 

 synagogue ; the Bible, as taught him, was disfigured by the accumu- 

 lated perversions of more than 2,000 years. He determined to pierce 

 beyond these. He was, indeed, essentially at one with the true fathers 

 of Judaism, and especially with that great Maimonides, who found a 

 way of introducing into Judaism the most daring speculations of phi- 

 losophy. He foresaw with wondrous sagacity the great results of the 

 critical exegesis destined, 125 years later, to afibrd the true meaning 

 of the noblest productions of Hebrew genius. Was this to destroy 

 the Bible ? Has that admirable literature lost by being understood 

 in its real aspect rather than relegated outside of the common laws of 

 humanity? Certainly not. The truths revealed by science invariably 

 surpass the dreams that science dispels. The world of Laplace ex- 

 ceeds in beauty, I imagine, that of a Cosmas Indicopleustes, who 

 pictured the universe to himself as a casket, on the lid of which the 

 stars glide along in grooves at a few leagues from us. In the same 

 way, the Bible is more beautiful when we have learned to see therein 

 ranged in order on a canvas of a thousand years each aspiration, 

 each sigh, each prayer of the most exalted religious consciousness that 

 ever existed, than when we force ourselves to view it as a book unlike 

 any other, composed, preserved, interpreted in direct opposition to all 

 the ordinary rules of the human intellect. 



