wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good and goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant as to forfeit those graces which are promised not to clearness of intellect, but to purity of heart.  In Spinoza’s own beautiful language,—­“justitia et caritas unicum et certissimum verae fidei Catholicae signurn est, et veri Spiritus sancti fructus:  et ubicumque haec reperiuntur, ibi Christus re verg est, et ubicumque haec desunt deest Christus.  Solo namque Christi Spiritu duci possumus in amorem justitiae et caritatis.”  We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system of thought preposterous and even pernicious, but we cannot refuse him the respect which is the right of all sincere and honourable men.  We will say, indeed, as much as this, that wherever and on whatever questions good men are found ranged on opposite sides, one of three alternatives is always true:—­either that the points of disagreement are purely speculative and of no moral importance, or that there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same thing is meant under difference of words, or else that the real truth is something different from what is held by any of the disputants, and that each is representing some important element which the other ignores or forgets.  In either case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose it with success.  Spinoza’s influence over European thought is too great to be denied or set aside, and if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether, we cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or misrepresentation—­a most obvious truism, which no one now living will deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to produce some effects upon the popular judgment.

Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form which as yet it has assumed.  Whatever may have been the case with his disciples, in the author of this system there was no unwillingness to look closely at it, or follow it out to its conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to Spinoza, at least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself thoroughly understood—­a merit in which it cannot be said that his followers have imitated him—­Pantheism, as it is known in England, being a very synonym of vagueness and mysticism.

The fact is, that both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really was.  The Herder and Schleiermacher school have claimed him as a Christian—­a position which no little disguise was necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have called him an Atheist —­which is still more extravagant; and even a man like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a Colt trunkner