ETURN FROM IT?

_The Spiritual Guide_ of Molinos appeared at Rome in 1675. The way
having been prepared for twenty years by different publications of the
same tendency, highly approved of by the inquisitors of Rome and Spain,
this book had a success unparalleled in the age; in twelve years it was
translated and reprinted twenty times.

We must not be surprised that this guide to annihilation, this method
to die, was received so greedily. There was then throughout Europe a
general feeling of wearisomeness. That century, still far from its
close, already panted for repose. This appears to be the case by its
own doctrines. Cartesianism, which gave it an impulse, became inactive
and contemplative in Mallebranche (1674). Spinosa, as early as 1670,
had declared the immobility of God, man, and the world, in the unity of
substance. And in 1676, Hobbes gave his theory of political fatalism.

Spinosa, Hobbes, and Molinos--death, everywhere, in metaphysics,
politics, and morality! What a dismal chorus! They are of one mind
without knowing each other or forming any compact; they seem, however,
to shout to each other from one extremity of Europe to the other!

Poor human liberty has nothing left but the choice of its suicide;
either to be hurled by logic in the North into the bottomless pit of
Spinosa, or to be lulled in the South by the sweet voice of Molinos,
into a death-like and eternal slumber.

The age is, however, as yet in all its brilliancy and triumph. Some
time must pass away before these discouraging and deadly thoughts pass
from theory to practice, and politics become infected with this moral
languor.

It is a delicate and interesting moment in every existence, that middle
term between the period of increasing vigour and that of old age, when,
retaining its brilliancy, it loses its strength, and decay
imperceptibly begins. In the month of August the trees have all their
leaves, but soon they change colour, many a one grows pale, and in
their splendid summer robe you have a presentiment of their autumnal
decline.

For some time an impure and feverish wind had blown from the South,
both from Italy and Spain: Italy was already too lifeless, too deeply
entombed to be able to produce even a doctrine of death. It was a
Spaniard, established at Rome and imbued with Italian languor, who
invented this theory and drew it forth into practice. Still it was
necessary for his disciples to oblige him to write an