and no one attempted to molest him. He came out every day to make
his modest purchases, and of an evening he would take a walk in some
unfrequented spot. He was of a serious but not melancholy cast of
countenance, and with more of an amiable than morose expression. Later
in life when I read Colerus's _Life of Spinoza_, I at once saw that
as a child I had had before my eyes the very image of the holy man of
Amsterdam. He was left to follow his own courses, and was even treated
with respect. His resigned and affable airs seemed like a glimpse from
another world. People did not understand him, but they felt that he
possessed higher qualities to which they paid implicit homage.

He never went to church, and avoided any occasion of having to
make external display of religious belief. The clergy were very
unfavourable to him and though they did not denounce him from the
pulpit, as he had never given any cause for scandal, his name was
always mentioned with repugnance. A peculiar incident occurred to fan
this animosity into a flame, and to involve the aged recluse in an
atmosphere of ghostly terror. He possessed a very large library,
consisting of works belonging to the eighteenth century. All those
philosophical treatises which have exercised a wider influence than
Luther and Calvin were to be found in it, and the old bookworm knew
them by heart, and eked out a living by lending them to some of
his neighbours. The clergy looked upon this as the abomination of
desolation, and strictly forbade their flocks to borrow these books.
System's lodging was looked upon as a receptacle for every kind of
impiety.

I, as a matter of course, looked upon him and his books in the
same light, and it was only when my ideas upon philosophy were well
consolidated that I came to understand that I had been fortunate
enough during my youth to contemplate a truly wise man. I had no
difficulty in reconstructing his ideas by piecing together a few words
which at the time had appeared to me unintelligible, but which I had
remembered. God, in his eyes, was the order of nature, from which all
things proceed, and he would not brook contradiction upon this point.
He loved humanity as representing reason, and he hated superstition as
the negation of reason. Although he had not the poetic afflatus which
the nineteenth century has given to these great truths, System, I feel
sure, had very high and far-reaching views. He was quite in the right.
So far from