that they might propagate their species, be attended with such savagery? This story about Spinoza is told by Dr. Colerus, the Lutheran divine who afterwards became his biographer. Naturally Colerus misunderstood Spinoza’s scientific enthusiasm, and equally naturally Spinoza, being accused of atheism, was also accused of cruelty as monstrous as that of Domitian in his most palmy days. An atheist in the seventeenth century was known to be capable of all. There is really little more to tell about the short life of Spinoza. He was offered a post at the University of Heidelberg as professor of philosophy, but politely declined on the score of his health. Probably he did so really because he did not care to set himself in a position where a turn of the wheel of war might put him at the mercy of the hounds of the Inquisition, with their burnings and tortures and _auto da fe’s_ and religious wars. The real call to join his spirit with that of the Immanent God came when he was forty-two years old in 1674. However deeply a man may speculate upon “God, Man, and his well-being”—to name only one of his works—the tubercle bacillus takes no heed of motives, and will ever be ready to attack him if he denies himself food and fresh air. Thus it was that his friends of The Hague went quietly to church one afternoon, doubtless thinking nothing of the troublesome cough from which he had suffered for so long; and that when they returned they did not hear his cheerful voice, for he was lying dead at his spectacle grinding. He had a short life; we can sum it up in a few words: Spinoza was a good man and he died poor. When they came to look into his effects they found nothing but a very little money, just enough to satisfy his creditors; the tools of his trade and a few lenses, which were afterwards sold as being of great intrinsic value because he had ground them so well. It was many years before the real worth of the little Hebrew began to dawn upon the world; and then it was not the doctors nor the scientific men to whom it appealed but the poets, for like all true poets he was a mystic. During the eighteenth century, until the French Revolution began to free men’s minds, he was looked upon as an atheist, and even the good-natured Hume, possibly ironically, spoke of his hideous atheistical doctrine. But the poets, in the ecstasy of joy that accompanied the liberation of mankind, saw far otherwise. Goethe begun to understand him, and Novalis, the German hymn-writer, spoke famously of him as a “God-intoxicated man”; a man drunk with the intellectual love of God. Indeed, the very word “love” is too carnal a term to apply to Spinoza’s philosophy. It was probably some such feeling that led people to hesitate deeply before changing the ancient terms “Faith, Hope, and Charity” into “Faith, Hope, and Love,” although Spinoza in his mysticism, and our modern mystic, Professor Freud,[27] would have approved it.