After Novalis came Coleridge and Wordsworth; and thenceforward Spinoza’s fame began rapidly to extend, until it has influenced the whole of modern thought. Benjamin Jowett, in one of his biological sermons delivered in Edinburgh, the home of Calvinism, spoke of him as one of the best men who ever lived, and compared his life to that of John Bunyan, sorrowfully admitting that the tinker would probably have burnt the spectacle-grinder if they could have met. Like Jowett, Dean Inge also has been touched by the wonder of Baruch the Jew. “Beatitudo non est premium virtutis, sed ipsa virtus,” said Spinoza. “Heaven,” repeats Dean Inge, “is not the _reward_ of virtue; it is virtue itself.” And again speaking of Spinoza, he says, “No thoroughgoing rationalist philosophy can explain the working of a mind in love.” Accepting as proved that Spinoza’s philosophy has enormously influenced the modern world, let us consider what it really is. Spinoza’s pantheism does not consist, as so many amiable spiritualists seem to think, of a kindly God of mystic light, surrounded by a fluttering crowd of disembodied spirits with a general atmosphere of worship throughout the universe. It is a highly mystical and rather stern philosophy which leads to surprising results and best explains the known facts of life. God is infinite, with attributes of extension and thought; therefore He must embrace all good and all evil. As He is infinite He must be coterminous with the universe in which there can be nothing else but God. In fact, God is reality. God is the universe. Christ, in Spinoza’s view, is a mystical conception Who includes all the gentleness, all the wisdom, all the loving-kindness, of the world. He is the method by which God communicated His will to man. Putting it briefly, Spinoza was a complete monist, who made no distinction whatever between spirit and matter. The further we extend scientific inquiry the more we confirm Spinoza’s views of the universe. Nebulæ have been discovered whose light takes a million years to reach the earth; so also did Spinoza account for the existence of evil in the world, that it could only exist because God allowed it, and as we cannot understand why God should allow it, the natural corollary must be that it is a part of Himself. As his fellow-Jew Heine said: “All our modern philosophers, perhaps unconsciously to themselves, see through the glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground.”