tice is the rarest and highest quality of human nature; as one who
knows that humbly to express gratitude for justice received is to do
reverence to the noblest faculty of man.

Fate rather than disposition tore Manasseh from his study to plead
before the English Parliament. Baruch Spinoza was spared such
distraction. Into his self-contained life the affairs of the world
could effect no entry. It is not quite certain whether Spinoza was born
in Amsterdam. He must, at all events, have come there in his early
youth. He may have been a pupil of Manasseh, but his mind was nurtured
on the philosophical treatises of Maimonides and Crescas. His thought
became sceptical, and though he was "intoxicated with a sense of God,"
he had no love for any positive religion. He learned Latin, and found
new avenues opened to him in the writings of Descartes. His associations
with the representatives of the Cartesian philosophy and his own
indifference to ceremonial observances brought him into collision with
the Synagogue, and, in 1656, during the absence of Manasseh in England,
Spinoza was excommunicated by the Amsterdam Rabbis. Spinoza was too
strong to seek the weak revenge of an abjuration of Judaism. He went on
quietly earning a living as a maker of lenses; he refused a
professorship, preferring, like Maimonides before him, to rely on other
than literary pursuits as a means of livelihood.

In 1670 Spinoza finished his "Theologico-Political Tractate," in which
some bitterness against the Synagogue is apparent. His attack on the
Bible is crude, but the fundamental principles of modern criticism are
here anticipated. The main importance of the "Tractate" lay in the
doctrine that the state has full rights over the individual, except in
relation to freedom of thought and free expression of thought. These are
rights which no human being can alienate to the state. Of Spinoza's
greatest work, the "Ethics," it need only be said that it was one of the
most stimulating works of modern times. A child of Judaism and of
Cartesianism, Spinoza won a front place among the great teachers of
mankind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MANASSEH BEN ISRAEL.

Graetz.--V, 2.

H. Adler.--_Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of
England_, Vol. I, p. 25.

Kayserling.--_Miscellany of the Society of Hebrew Literature_,
Vol. I.

Lady Magnus.--_Jewish Portraits_, p. 109.

English translations of works, _Vindiciae Judeorum_, _Hope of Israel_,
_The Concili