“While this was passing he answered nothing, except this word: ‘In greater fear, perhaps, do you impose sentence upon me than I do receive it.’ So, taken away to prison by the governor’s lictors, he was allowed a fortnight in case he should wish to recant his errors; but in vain. Today he was led to the stake. When the image of our Saviour on the Cross was shown to him as he was about to die, he turned away his head and sullenly rejected it. In great misery he thus died, and is gone, I think, to tell in those other worlds of his imagining after what manner the men of Rome are wont to treat impious blasphemers....” * * * * * Surely, he came to that other world of his imagining. It is our world and he dwells among us. Little does he remember of the men of Rome, of their Illustrious Lordships of Venice, of all the toil and travail of that old life of his--hardly enough to fill an idle hour in the telling. But we know him easily for the unchanged soul he was. He is that one who came to us of a day and opened our eyes to new and troubling visions. “Now you are free,” he said, “be glad!” He is that same one who stole back another day and whispered, “But you are afraid! Remember your Father’s House, how safe it was and warm.” He may be there to close the eyes that have seen enough, with what counsel then, who can tell? But once he was fond of saying, “Not only he who wins deserves the laurels; but also he who dies no coward.” II BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 1632-1677 “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” These words which bring to a close Spinoza’s masterpiece “Ethics, after the manner of Geometry,” sum up the experience of a life as rare as it was difficult. But then, the things that make life difficult are so much a question of the nature that accepts or invites them! We may be sure that few, brought to the lap of Lachesis, would have the courage to pick therefrom Spinoza’s lot. To be born of exiled Jews, to be cast off by family and race as an offender against holy traditions, to live then in loneliness among Christians whose faith one does not accept, to die by inches at the age of forty-five,--even as lives go this would hardly be called an easy one. How seriously then must we take the sustaining power of a philosophy which enabled Spinoza, partly accepting, partly inviting his destiny, to lend it an aspect of calm beauty that touches our wonder! One is tempted to recall the unhappy Bruno; without, tossed and hunted; within, torn by a conflict between a new science at once grand and desolate, and a memory of things lovable but untrue. In him a lofty philosophy was to have quieted this struggle and consoled this isolation but did not, unless indeed it did at that last moment when he stood at his stake in the Field of Flowers.