shaken may remain." No doubt Sir Frederic Pollock is quite
right in declaring that Spinoza would have been the very last man to
desire any one to become a Spinozist. But that is quite consistent with
the inspired Pantheist's infinite longing to see all men blessed by that
inward peace which he proved, by his own heroic experience, to be
identical with the self-control conferred and maintained by devout
contemplation of God's all-comprehensive Being and our place therein.
If, then, I regard purity as the best symbol of such a moral ideal, it
is because the word connotes, together with freedom from discordant
passion, a frankly unconstrained recognition of the simplicity of our
relation to God. For surely when once the self has made the great
surrender, and becomes content to be nothing, that in St. Paul's words,
"God may be all in all," the whole problem of life is infinitely
simplified, in the sense that no farther degree of simplification is
possible. Because all contradictions of pain and evil and sorrow are
dissolved in that act of surrender. We must, indeed, recognize that to
our "inadequate ideas" the time often seems "out of joint." But we need
not, with Hamlet, cry out on an impossible "spite." For when once it is
heartily and loyally realized that not our partial likings, but the
eternal harmony of the Whole, is the glory of God, we already anticipate
the peace of absorption in the Infinite.

[Sidenote: Love.]

Nor is this moral ideal without a sacred passion; at least to ordinary
men; though it must be confessed that Spinoza, in the stillness of his
sacred peace, ignored the word. But he still held that the larger our
view of the Universe and of our communion therewith, the more we have of
God in us and the more do we realize an "intellectual love" towards Him.
That this in his case was no barren sentiment, but a genuine moral
inspiration, was proved by his life; for truly "he endured as seeing Him
who is invisible." And it was not by faculties wholly wanting to smaller
men that he did this. For though his intellect was in some respects
almost beyond compare, it was rather by his self-subordinating
contemplation that he was kept at peace. Indeed, he knew far less of the
extended universe than our men of science do, and his doctrines of mind
and thought are, by indisputable authorities, regarded as imperfect. But
imagining what God must be, could we have an adequate idea not only of
His Being--which Spinoza th