To the intense disgust of the local clergy, not less than six private carriages belonging to prominent members of the court followed the “atheist” to his grave. And when two hundred years later a statue was unveiled to his memory, the police reserves had to be called out to protect the participants in this solemn celebration against the fury of a rowdy crowd of ardent Calvinists. So much for the man. What about his influence? Was he merely another of those industrious philosophers who fill endless books with endless theories and speak a language which drove even Omar Khayyam to an expression of exasperated annoyance? No, he was not. Neither did he accomplish his results by the brilliancy of his wit or the plausible truth of his theories. Spinoza was great mainly by force of his courage. He belonged to a race that knew only one law, a set of hard and fast rules laid down for all times in the dim ages of a long forgotten past, a system of spiritual tyranny created for the benefit of a class of professional priests who had taken it upon themselves to interpret this sacred code. He lived in a world in which the idea of intellectual freedom was almost synonymous with political anarchy. He knew that his system of logic must offend both Jews and Gentiles. But he never wavered. He approached all problems as universal problems. He regarded them without exception as the manifestation of an omnipresent will and believed them to be the expression of an ultimate reality which would hold good on Doomsday as it had held good at the hour of creation. And in this way he greatly contributed to the cause of human tolerance. Like Descartes before him, Spinoza discarded the narrow boundaries laid down by the older forms of religion and boldly built himself a new system of thought based upon the rocks of a million stars. By so doing he made man what man had not been since the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans, a true citizen of the universe. CHAPTER XXII THE NEW ZION There was little reason to fear that the works of Spinoza would ever be popular. They were as amusing as a text-book on trigonometry and few people ever get beyond the first two or three sentences of any given chapter. It took a different sort of man to spread the new ideas among the mass of the people. In France the enthusiasm for private speculation and investigation had come to an end as soon as the country had been turned into an absolute monarchy. In Germany the poverty and the horror which had followed in the wake of the Thirty Years War had killed all personal initiative for at least two hundred years. During the second half of the seventeenth century, therefore, England was the only one among the larger countries of Europe where further progress along the lines of independent thought was still possible and the prolonged quarrel between the Crown and Parliament was adding an element of instability which proved to be of great help to the cause of personal freedom.