On the 21st of February, 1677, there died in a small house in the Hague a man whose greatness could not be measured, says his biographer, until humanity had moved to the proper prospective point at the distance of more than a century. The view enlarged as time rolled on, as it does to men climbing high mountains; in 1877, the world agrees to number him among the undoubted sons of genius, and benefactors of mankind. His admirers erect a monument to his memory just two hundred years after his death in the same city where he was persecuted, excommunicated, and his works destroyed. His name was Spinoza. Modest, and pure, and upright, he had the misfortune to live two hundred years before his age, and to put forth fruits of genius which his fellows could not comprehend, and so they stamped him and them into dust as being unorthodox. Two centuries of progress have brought the world up to where Spinoza died, and it builds him a monument. At last, his work is seen. The Earl of Murray, Lord Regent of Scotland, was not esteemed a great man in his day. His behavior was modest, his abilities were apparently but moderate, and for more than two hundred years he has figured in history as an ordinary man, overlaid by the more violent and intriguing spirits of his time, and his character obscured and distorted by the glamour which surrounds the name of his beauteous but abandoned sister and murderess, Queen Mary. And yet when two centuries afterwards the spirit of philosophic history comes to trace cause and effect, and to show the result of his life's work upon Protestant Christianity, and what he contributed to the domination of the English-speaking races, we agree at once with Mr. Froude that he was in truth one of the best and greatest of men, a benefactor of mankind. And so it may be said of Bunyan, of Wesley, and of many more, whose beginnings were esteemed but of small account, but whose fame has continually grown brighter and brighter, as the world has been forced to see how wisely they builded.