to the former ecclesiastical “schoolmen,” it did prevent his frank realization of the eternal oneness of all being.  For it compelled him to retain belief in a Creator distinct in essence from Creation.  Such a belief Spinoza entirely rejected.  For though his “Natura Naturans,” or Nature Active, may in a manner be called the Creator of his “Natura Naturata,” or Nature Passive, these are consubstantial and co-eternal, neither being before or after the other.  Thus for him there was no beginning of the Universe and there could be no end.  There was no creation out of nothing, nor any omen of weariness, decay, or death in the eternal order.  He teaches us in effect to take the Universe as it is, and to pry into no supposed secrets of origin or end, an entirely gratuitous labour, imposed by illusions arising out of the continuous redistribution of parts of the Whole.  Instead of thus spending our mental energy for nought, he would have us regard the whole of Being as one Substance characterized by innumerable attributes, of which Extension and Thought alone come within our human cognizance; while each Attribute is subject to infinite Modes or modifications, which, in their effect on the two attributes known to us—­extension and thought—­constitute the universe of our experience.  That infinite and eternal Substance revealed by Attributes and their Modes is God, absolute in His perfections if He could be fully conceived and known in all His activities.  And even to our ignorance He is entrancing in His gradual self-revelation, as with our inadequate ideas we pursue the unattainable from glory to glory.

[Sidenote:  This View of the Universe applied to Psalm civ.]

This, then, is the first note we make of the gospel of Spinoza.  But if any one thinks that the sacred word “gospel” is here misused, and that such teaching is fatal to piety, let him turn to the 104th Psalm and read, from Spinoza’s point of view, the cosmic vision of the Hebrew seer.  True, we can think no longer of the supernatural carpenter who works on “the beams of his chambers” above, or of the mythical engineer who digs deep in the darkness to “lay the foundations of the earth.”  For that is poetry, appealing by concrete images to the emotions.  But it does not bind the intellect to a literal interpretation; and we are no longer tormented by vain efforts to reconcile with infinite impossibilities the half-human personality presented in poetic guise.  So that the vision of the seer is now the suggestion to us of an infinite and eternal Being, whose attributes by modification take the innumerable shapes of sun, moon, and stars, and mountains and river, and tree and flower, and bird and beast, and man.  And the winds that sweep and the floods that roll, and the rocky barriers that stand fast, and the rivers that wind among the hills, and the trees that flourish and the living societies that gather in fruitful places, the labourer in his vineyard, the sailor in his ship,