After the death of Joanna Southcott, her followers refused to believe her dead, and consented to a postmortem examination of her body, only when decomposition had actually commenced. After her burial they formed themselves into a religious society which they called the Southcottian church, and professed to believe that she would rise from the dead and bring forth the promised Shiloh. SPINOZA (Baruch, his Hebrew name which he translated into Latin as Benedictus), 1632-1677. There can be no certainty with regard to the last hours of Spinoza. There was with him at the time of his death but one friend who refused to make any disclosure, and who chose to pass to his own grave in silent possession of the secret. Nevertheless a report prevailed, and was for a time believed, that Spinoza died in great fear and distress of mind, and that with his last breath he cried out: "_God have mercy upon me, and be gracious to me, a miserable sinner!_" Another report, equally without foundation, represented the great Dutch philosopher as resorting to suicide when he saw death drawing near. Spinoza is regarded as the ablest of modern pantheistic philosophers. Dugald Stewart goes so far as to call him an Atheist: "In no part of Spinoza's works has he avowed himself an Atheist; but it will not be disputed by those who comprehend the drift of his reasonings, that, in point of practical tendency, Atheism and Spinozism are one and the same." During his life he awakened in the minds of some of the ablest men of letters and religion a bitter hatred it is now difficult to understand. It is but fifty years ago that Karel Luinman, at that time minister of the Reformed church at Middleburg, said: "Spit on that grave--there lies Spinoza." Later Froude, Lewes and Maurice have described him as a calm, brave man who lived nobly, and confronted disease and death with a deeply religious faith. Coleridge pronounced the Pantheism of Spinoza preferable to modern Deism, which he held to be but "the hypocrisy of Materialism." Schleiermacher vindicated the memory of the great philosopher after the following fashion: "Offer up reverently with me a lock of hair to the manes of the rejected but holy Spinoza! The great Spirit of the Universe filled his soul; the Infinite to him was beginning and end; the Universal his sole and only love. Dwelling in holy innocence and deep humility among men, he saw himself mirrored in the eternal world, and the eternal world not all unworthily reflected back in him. Full of religion was he, full of the Holy Ghost; and therefore it is that he meets us standing alone in his age, raised above the profane multitude, master of his art, but without disciples and the citizen's rights." Probably the truth of the matter is that Spinoza was a man of pure, brave and simple life; of gentle disposition; and of rare philosophical abilities and attainments; but whose system, though possessed of much that is true and good, is yet essentially