He has left a name in history that will not fade. His people cast him out, Christianity rejected him, but he has found a wider fellowship, he belongs to all mankind. Great hearts have throbbed responsive to his teachings and many a sorrowful soul has owned the restful influence of his words. He was a helper of mankind. Not surely because he solved the ultimate problems of existence--what mortal ever will--but because he was wise in the secret of the heart, because he taught men to appease their fretful passions in the aspect of the infinite laws in which we live and are. Sacred is the hour in which we read his Ethics. From the heat and glare of life we enter into its precincts as into the cool interior of some hallowed temple of religion. But no idol stands there; the spirit of truth alone presides and sanctifies the place and us. The great men of the past we will reverence. They are mile-stones on the highway of humanity, types of the Infinite, that has dawned in human breasts. Such an one was he of whom I have spoken. And more and more as the light increases among men will all that was good and great in him shine forth to irradiate their path. And as we stand here to-day on this day of remembrance to recall his teachings and his example, so when other centuries shall have elapsed, the memory of Spinoza will still live, posterity will still own him, and distant generations will name him anew: Benedictus--Blessed! IX. THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTIANITY {A discourse delivered on Sunday, December 31, 1876.} "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil, for verily I say unto you till heaven and earth pass away one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled." "Resist not evil, * * * bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you." In these sayings of Jesus the key note of early Christianity is struck. It was not a revolt against Judaism, it was but a reiterated assertion of what other and older Prophets of the Hebrews had so often and so fervently preached. The law was to remain intact, but the spiritual law was meant, the deeper law of conscience that underlies the forms of legislation and the symbols of external worship. There is a rare and gracious quality in the personality of Jesus as described in the Gospels, which has exercised its charm upon the most heterogeneous nations and periods of history wide apart in the order of time and of culture.