We ought not to wonder that in many parts of Spinoza's writings we find the word "God" treated in a less coherent manner than would be possible under the definition given in his "Ethics," and for these reasons:--Spinoza, from his cradle upwards, had been surrounded with books and traditions sanctified by the past, and impressed on his willing mind by his family, his tutors, and the heads of his church; a mind like his gathered all that was given, even more quickly than it was offered, still craving for more--"more light"--"more light"--and at last light came bursting on the young thinker like a lightning flash at dark midnight, revealing his mind in chains, which had been cast round him in his nursery, his school, his college, his synagogue. By a mighty effort he burst these chains, and walked forth a free man, despite the entreaties of his family, the reasonings of the rabbis, the knife of the fanatic, the curse of his church, and the edict of the state. But should it be a matter of surprise to us that some of the links of those broken chains should still hang on the young philosopher, and, seeming to be a part of himself, almost imperceptibly incline to old ways of thinking, and to old modes of utterance of those thoughts! Wonder not that a few links bang about him, but rather that he ever succeeded in breaking those chains at all. Spinoza, after his secession from his synagogue, became logically an Atheist; education and early impressions enlarged this into a less clearly-defined Pantheism; but the logic comes to us naked, disrobed of all by which it might have been surrounded in Spinoza's mind. If that logic be correct, then all the theologies of the world are false. We have presented it to the reader to judge of for himself. Many men have written against it; of these some have misunderstood, some have misrepresented, some have failed, and few have left us a proof that they had endeavored to deal with Spinoza on his own ground. Maccall says, "In the glorious throng of heroic names, there are few nobler than Spinoza's. Apart altogether from the estimate we may form of his philosophy, there is something unspeakably interesting in the life and the character of the man. In his metaphysical system there are two things exceedingly distinct. There is, first, the immense and prodigious, but terrible mathematical skeleton, which his subtle intellect binds up and throws as calmly into space as we drop a pebble into the water, and whose bones, striking against the wreck of all that is sacred in belief, or bold in speculation, rattle a wild response to our wildest phantasies, and drive us almost to think in despair that thinking is madness; and there is, secondly, the divinest vision of the infinite, and the divinest incense which the intuition of the infinite ever yet poured forth at the altar of creation."