When you had read the first sentence five or six times over and looked up "Subject" and "Object" and "Phenomenal," you could see fairly well what it meant. Whatever else God might be, he was not what they said, something separate and outside things, something that made your mind uncomfortable when you tried to think about it. "This universe, material and mental, is nothing but the spectacle of the thoughts of God." You might have known it would be like that. The universe, going on inside God, as your thoughts go on inside you; the universe, so close to God that nothing could be closer. The meaning got plainer and plainer. There was Spinoza. ("Spinning--Spinoza.") The Encyclopaedia man said that the Jewish priests offered him a bribe of two thousand florins to take back what he had said about God; and when he refused to take back a word of it, they cursed him and drove him out of their synagogue. Spinoza said, "There is no substance but God, nor can any other be conceived." And the Encyclopaedia man explained it. "God, as the infinite substance, with its infinity of attributes is the _natura naturans_. As the infinity of modes under which his attributes are manifested, he is the _natura naturata_." Nature naturing would be the cause, and Nature natured would be the effect. God was both. "God is the immanent"--indwelling--"but not the transient cause of all things" ... "Thought and Extension are attributes of the one absolute substance which is God, evolving themselves in two parallel streams, so to speak, of which each separate body and spirit are but the waves. Body and Soul are apparently two, but really one and they have no independent existence: They are parts of God.... Were our knowledge of God capable of present completeness we might attain to perfect happiness but such is not possible. Out of the infinity of his attributes only two, Thought and Extension, are accessible to us while the modes of these attributes, being essentially infinite, escape our grasp." So this was the truth about God. In spite of the queer words it was very simple. Much simpler than the Trinity. God was not three incomprehensible Persons rolled into one, not Jesus, not Jehovah, not the Father creating the world in six days out of nothing, and muddling it, and coming down from heaven into it as his own son to make the best of a bad job. He was what you had felt and thought him to be as soon as you could think about him at all. The God of Baruch Spinoza was the God you had wanted, the only sort of God you cared to think about. Thinking about him--after the Christian God--was like coming out of a small dark room into an immense open space filled with happy light.