Every man who is born into this world is either a Greek or a Jew. Spinoza was both. His teaching may be described as a recapitulation of the world’s thought. Hellenic rationalism and Hebrew mysticism found in his work an organic union. Briefly stated, the lesson which the Jewish sage taught the Western mind, like all great lessons, was a very simple one: that man is not the centre of creation; that the universe is a bigger affair than the earth; and that man holds an exceedingly small place even on this small atom of a planet. Old Europe was gradually growing to the suspicion that one book did not contain the whole of God’s truth between its covers--that it did not constitute a final manifestation of the will of God. She was now to hear, much to her astonishment and indignation, that the human race did not engross the whole attention of Providence. It was an elementary lesson enough; but it came as a revelation even to minds like Lessing’s and Goethe’s. It was a salutary lesson, too; but it was too new to be recognised as such. Man is a creature of conceit; the _Tractatus_ would teach him humility. Therefore, the Synagogue anathematized it, Synodical wisdom condemned it, the States-general interdicted it, the Catholic Church placed it upon the Index: they all execrated it; none of them understood it. Posterity has embraced it. To-day who would be a thinker must in mental attitude, if not in doctrine, be a Spinozist.[125] CHAPTER XVII IN ENGLAND AFTER THE EXPULSION THE banishment of the Jews from England by Edward I., in 1290, was not quite so thorough as is popularly supposed to have been. A small section of the community remained behind, or returned, under the disguise of Lombards. This remnant, according to Jewish tradition, was finally driven out in 1358; but there is on record a petition to the Good Parliament which shows that, even after that date, some of them continued to lead a masked kind of existence in England. The same inference is to be drawn from the fact that the House for Jewish Converts, built by Henry III. in the thirteenth century, continued in existence till the seventeenth. Broadly speaking, however, Edward’s expulsion cleared England of Jews. But, while removing the objects of Christian hatred, it did not diminish the hatred itself. Although the “unclean and perfidious” race had, to all intents and purposes, vanished from men’s eyes, the legend of their wickedness and misanthropy lingered in tradition and was consecrated by literature. In the middle of the ensuing century we find Gower, the poet, representing a Jew as saying: “I am a Jewe, and by my lawe I shal to no man be felawe To keepe him trouth in word ne dede.”[126]