“_Aug. 28._ I was brought acquainted with a Burgundian Jew who had married an apostate Kentish woman. I asked him divers questions; he told me, amongst other things, that the world should never end, that our souls transmigrated, and that even those of the most holy persons did pennance in the bodies of bruits after death, and so he interpreted the banishment and salvage life of Nebucodnezer; that all the Jews should rise again, and be lead to Jerusalem.... He showed me severall bookes of their devotion, which he had translated into English for the instruction of his wife; he told me that when the Messias came, all the ships, barkes, and vessels of Holland should, by the powere of certain strange whirle-winds be loosed from their ankers and transported in a moment to all the desolat ports and havens throughout the world wherever the dispersion was, to convey their breathren and tribes to the Holy Citty; with other such like stuff. He was a merry drunken fellow.” It was the age of Messianic dreams. Oppression had kindled the longing for deliverance, and the Jews all over Europe were eagerly looking to the advent of the Redeemer: an expectation which in the minds of the untutored and the enthusiastic took strange shapes. But even then there were Jews affected by other than Messianic chimeras. In the Dutch synagogue which Evelyn visited on that Saturday in August 1641, he may perhaps have seen a boy; a wide-eyed, thoughtful little Hebrew of some nine years of age. Evelyn would have fixed his intelligent gaze upon that child’s face, had he had any means of divining that the diminutive Hebrew body before him clothed a soul destined to open new doors of light to Christian Europe. The boy was Baruch Spinoza, born on the 24th of November, 1632, of parents who, for their faith, had given up wealth and a happy home in sunny Spain, and had sought freedom on the foggy shores of the North Sea. Rabbinical lore was young Spinoza’s first study; mediaeval Hebrew wisdom, largely made up of Messianic and Cabbalistic mists, his next; to be followed by the profane philosophy of Descartes: altogether a singular blend of mental nutriment, yet all assimilated and transformed by young Baruch’s brain; a multitude of diverse guides, yet all leading the original mind the same way--not quite their way. Study bred independent thought, and independent thought translated itself into independent action. Baruch ceased to frequent the synagogue; for the synagogue had ceased to supply him with the food for which his soul craved. ♦1656♦ A bribe of 1,000 florins a year was offered by the Rabbis, but was firmly rejected; excommunication followed, and curses many and minute, not unaccompanied by an attempt at assassination; but they were serenely disregarded. Baruch was not Uriel. For answer he translated himself into Benedictus, and the name was not a misnomer; for he was soon to become known as one of the kindliest of men, as well as one of the