A study of Spinoza [microform

Preface To The Second Edition

In preparing a reissue of this volume I have taken careful account of every criticism, private or published, which promised me help in ren¬ dering it more accurate and complete. A few corrections have consequently been introduced into the Biography. But I have not seen reason to modify any of the interpretations which repeated study and long reflection had led me to put upon the Philosophy.

I hope that the Index of Subjects and Index of References now added will be acceptable, the one to the literary reader, the other to the student of Spinoza’s writings, in his compari¬ son of related passages and his determination of doubtful doctrine.

London, May 19, 1883.

Preface To The First Edition

I should hardly have undertaken to write this little book, had I foreseen the appearance of Mr. F. Pollock’s comprehensive and masterly volume on the same subject. Happily the contrasted scale of the two saves me from the danger of comparison ; while a sufficient raison d’Stre may be found for both in the different points of view which they carry with them through criticisms seldom much at variance.

From some want of skill in compressed expo¬ sition, I could not bring my account of Spinoza within the limits prescribed for the volumes in Professor Knight’s “Philosophical Classics,” for which series it was intended. As it has there¬ fore to appear on its own account, I have tried to give it greater completeness by adding a chapter on the biblical criticism contained in the Tractatus Theologieo-Politieus.

Preface

viii

The recent appearance of Yan Yloten and Land’s authoritative edition of Spinoza’s extant writings has enabled me to concentrate upon it most of the references which else would have been dispersed over many separate works. It is true that only the first volume has as yet been published. But, through the ready kindness of Dr. Land, I have been furnished with the nume¬ rical arrangement of the Correspondence in the second volume; so that it is only for the Memoir by Coler that I have been still obliged to refer to Paulus’s edition.

I am indebted to the kindness and special learning of Mr. Joseph Jacobs for an introduction to some of the critical writings which have been useful to me, particularly those of Joel, Yan der Linde, and Land; and sincerely thank him for thus enlarging my acquaintance with the more recent Spinozistic literature.

Hearing from my friend, Mr. Serjeant Simon, M.P., that the Library at Wolfenbiittel contained a fine oil portrait of Spinoza, I obtained permis¬ sion, through the kind intervention of Mr. James Sime, to have a photographic negative of it sent over for reproduction in suitable size for this

PEEFACE.

IX volume. It is a pleasure to record ray warm acknowledgments to the Librarian, Dr. 0. yon Heinemann, for bis courteous response to my application. Tbe engraving prefixed to some copies of tbe Opera Postbuma, 1677, was taken from this portrait; not, it will be seen, with any eminent success.

London, July 27, 1882.

CHAPTER I. Logical Theory

I. Assumptions

II. Nature of Definition

III. Articulation of Conceptions .

IV. First Order of Ideas—Imagination

V. Second Order of Ideas—Reasoning

VI. Third Order of Ideas—Intuition

VII. Judgment and Intellect

VIII. The Geometrical Method .

h

106-166

108-114

115-124

124-130

131-147

147-152

152-159

159-161

161-166 xii

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER II. Metaphysical System

I. Substantive Existence

II. Attributes ....

III. Modes ....

1. Eternal Modes

2. Finite Modes .

IY. Privations of tbe Finite

V. Individual Beings .

2. Things ....

VI. Natura Naturans and Natura Naturata

PAGES

167- 226

212- 224

CHAPTER III. Ethical Doctrine

I. Necessity and Freedom ....

II. Determining Factors of Experience

III. Primary Feelings .....

iy. Derivative Feelings . . .

1. Conditional on Inadequate Ideas

A. Imagination, as Conservative

B. Imagination as Sympathetic

C. Imagination as subject to Association of

Ideas .....

227-301

227-234

234-239

240-242

242- 275

248-250

D. Imagination as modified by Time-associa¬

tions .....

E. Imagination under Illusory Beliefs

2. Conditional on Rational Ideas

3. Conditional on Intuitive Ideas

y. Ethical yalues of the Orders of Feeling VI. Ethical Dynamics .....

VII. The Mind’s “ Eternal Part ”

250- 251

CONTENTS.

xiii

Political Doctrine

CHAPTER

IV.

PAGES

. 302-326

I. Origin of the State .

. 303-305

II. Rights of the Supreme Power

.

III. Monarchy .

.

.

. 308-314

IV. Aristocracy .

.

. 315-323

V. Democracy .

•

•

‘ . 323-326

Religion

CHAPTER

V.

. 327-350

Biblical Theology .

CHAPTER

VI.

. 351-371

379-393

SPINOZA.

PAET I. —LIFE.

CHAPTER L

TEARS WITHIN ISRAEL— 1632-1656.

On the Hcmtgracht at Amsterdam may still be seen the house of Michael d’Espinoza, the tradesman, in which his son Baruch was bom, on the 24th of November 1632. The event was doubtless piously acknowledged at the neighbouring Portuguese synagogue; from their connection with which the family, though probably Spanish, was supposed to have come from the western side of the Peninsula. To the history of an Israelitish household and the special genius of its members, few things are less material than its native land. The Jew, in himself the most exclusive of mankind, has been turned, by the cruel reaction of events, into the most cosmopolitan. The world, impatient of a select and stereotyped race, has for ages compelled him to be ever on the move; to lodge anywhere and settle nowhere; to learn all languages and bear all climes; to take up and to lay down the usages and interests of every

SPINOZA : HIS LIFE.

PAET I.

people with which he mingles. Externally flexible to each variety of civilisation, he inwardly appropriates the features of none; so that his characteristics, deter¬ mined mainly by inheritance, have only the faintest local colouring; and to know his country gives you hardly any preconception of himself.

Some factors, however, in the thought and character of Spinoza were certainly supplied by the home of his ancestors and the vicissitudes of Europe during the two preceding centuries. Spain has been called the Paradise of Jews: and if we looked no farther than the Moslem kingdom of Grenada, the phrase might be excused. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they found there a legal protection and religious sympathy which Christendom refused them: their industry was welcomed; their gains respected; their worship and their schools unmolested. It is no wonder that they flocked with eagerness to so rare a shelter; that in its genial air their intellectual activity expanded, and pressed into the new fields of poetry, science, and philosophy, to which they were invited by the Arabian literature and the libraries of Cordova and Grenada. The tolerant influence was felt throughout the whole Peninsula. The wealth and energy of the Jews were too valuable to impoverished nobles and helpless princes to be surrendered to Moorish use: in spite of clerical hatred and persecuting laws, the grandees and rulers of Leon and Castile contrived to commit their exchequer to Jewish financiers and their health to Jewish physi¬ cians, and to sell protection to Jewish residents, op the

Chap. I. Family Befoee Emigration

plea that, as infidels, these people were not subjects of the State, but personal slaves of the territorial lord. Whether under the pretence of servitude or the reality of liberty, the family of Israel rapidly grew in num¬ bers, opulence, and culture: nor do the ages of their dispersion show a more brilliant period than that which in Spain preceded the expulsion of the Moors. Kodriguez de Castro compiles from it a list, by no means complete, of more than a hundred rabbinical writers, in Spanish, in Arabic, in Hebrew, on mathematics, astronomy, and medicine; on grammar, literature, and history; on morals and philosophy ;—a memorial, no doubt, mainly of forgotten labours, but dignified by the names of Maimonides, the Kimchis, Chasdai Kreskas, and Isaac Abarbanel. 1

It was an interlude of treacherous repose; which only gathered and decorated more and nobler victims Jot the sacrifice. The sovereigns (Ferdinand and Isa¬ bella) who drove out the Moors set up the Spanish Inquisition, and commissioned Torquemada, Deza, and Lucero, with the appliances of confiscation and the rack, of banishment and the stake, to make good Catholics of all the Jews. The faithful fled: the faithless succumbed, and transferred their moral taint from the synagogue to the church: the weak feigned conversion, but held to their first love, though under a disguise sometimes maintained to the third generation. It is impossible for whole multitudes to live out a lie

1 Bibliotheca Espanola, tom. i,, as cited and supplemented by J. M. Jost in his Gesehichte der Israelites 7ter Theil, pp. 436-441.

SPINOZA : HIS LIFE.

Part I

and look like innocents : and it was from tliese “ New- Christians,” whose steps were dogged by the spies of the Inquisition, that regiments of prisoners were brought to the bar and hurried to the dungeon and the fire; more than 2000 perishing at the stake in the province of Seville within a single year. 1 In Portugal, these cruelties began later and remained lighter. 2 But throughout the Peninsula no Israelite could either reside in the country without renouncing his religion, or quit it without forfeiting the chief portion of his goods. So long as the two monarchies were separate, some hope might be found in flight across the border ; for at the hour when persecution was awake in the one, it might be asleep in the other. But during the union of the crowns under the three Philips, the monotony of tyranny left no relief from despair.

Happily for the world that tyranny tried its strength upon a very different land, occupied by a race in itself of tougher fibre, and recently quickened by fresh reli¬ gious faith and an imperative consciousness of inde¬ pendent moral life. The experiment, pursued through decades of agony, was doomed to defeat. In the Low Countries, the rack broke its victims by thousands ; but was itself broken and destroyed by an indomitable people. For eighty years (1567-1647), with the ex¬ ception of a twelve years’ truce (1609-1621), they sustained the war which threw off the yoke of Spain. Early in that long struggle,—in 1579,—while as yet

1 Jost, Geschichte der Isr., yii. p. 77. s Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, ix. 246-263.

CHAP. I.

ESCAPE FROM PERSECUTION.

there was no talk of political separation,—the Northern Provinces had agreed, in the “Union of Utrecht,” that every citizen “ should remain free in his religion, and that no man should he molested or questioned on the subject of divine worship.” 1 Was ever north-wind so refreshing as that which bore these words to the skulk¬ ing and hunted heretics of Spain? It was not long before this vision of religious peace began now and then to freight an unnoticed ship with fugitives from the Tagus or the Douro to the Ehine. The first Jewish colonists sailed from Oporto, probably in 1593, and after various adventures settled in Amsterdam; but, as their reversion from Catholicism exposed them to suspicion, no right of public worship was conceded to them till 1598, when a room was fitted up for them as a synagogue in the house of Samuel Pallache, the Jewish ambassador from the kingdom of Morocco. On the death of Pallache, six years after, this provisional arrangement ceased, and the first synagogue was built, to which the family of Spinoza was attached, and of which the teacher of his boyhood, Saul Levi Morteira, was sole president from 1616 to 1639, and then till 1660 as colleague with two other Eabbis from later congregations amalgamated with his own. 2

Whether Michael d’Espinoza was among the young

1 Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, part vi. ch. i. sub fine.

2 The earliest accounts of the Jewish settlement in Amsterdam are not perfectly consistent. For a critical notice of them, see Graetz, ix. Note 10. Comp, his narrative, ix. pp. 513-517, with Jost’s Geschichte des Judenthums, 3te Abth. pp. 197-199, where the consul receives the name Pacheco*

SPINOZA: HIS LIFE.

PART I.

people in that first emigrant ship is not know. But the family connection with the oldest synagogue renders it highly probable; the second synagogue being the chief receptacle of later arrivals, especially of Spanish refugees. The name of the family pretty clearly refers it to the province of Leon, which contains no fewer than five tows bearing (with distinctive additions) the name Espinoza. Lying in different directions round the city of Burgos,—a considerable Jewish centre, 1 — and being not remote from the frontiers of Portugal, these places are among the most likely sources of early escape by the western sea. An incidental evidence of this, with a still closer definition of locality, is fur¬ nished by the fact that at Espinoza de los Monteros (about 50 miles north of Burgos) the Jews, in return for protection once afforded them, paid to the rangers of the district an annual tax of 12 old maravedis on every copy of the Law in their synagogues. 2 Here probably was Michael's early home; and the Amster¬ dam tradition that he was Portuguese is sufficiently explained by his port of embarkation and the prevail¬ ing complexion of his synagogue. That the family became known thenceforth by the topographical ap¬ pendage to their domestic name is only what we find in numerous other instances, e.g. Aquinas, Oliveyra, de

1 Paul, a native and bishop of Burgos, through, whose influence the et New-Christians ” were removed in 1412 from all offices of honour and trust, on the ground that their change of religion was hypocritical, was himself a converted Jew, with the name of Solomon Hallevi. Jost’s Geschichte der Israelites 7ter Theil, p. 62.

2 Op. ait . 6ter Theil, p. 323.

CHAP. I.

RELUCTANT TOLERATION.

Barrios, <TAguilar, de la Vega, Leon, Pereira, de Lara ; all of which are personal names given by locality, and, except the first, within the range of Jewish experience.

It was no home of religions peace on which the refugees had alighted. They had taken advantage of large professions of toleration which were never meant for them, or indeed for more than a victorious majority of the persons who made them. They found them¬ selves in an uncongenial community, which gave them no rights of worship or of citizenship, but which, pre¬ occupied with its own dissensions, left them in the security of indifference and contempt. They slipped unnoticed into settlement and fell into the habits of their race, by the passive connivance of a local magistracy, chiefly drawn from the more tolerant Arminian party in the State: and when the general question of their treatment was referred in Holland to a Commission of the Estates, they were already in occupancy ; and it was wisely resolved to let each city admit or exclude Jewish residents as it preferred; only, if admitted, they were not to be’ obliged, as in other countries, to wear any distinctive badge. The Remonstrants (the Broad Churchmen of that day) have been charged with intolerance towards the Jewish colony, because they complained that* in Amsterdam, all sects, non-Christian as well as Christian, themselves alone excepted, were free to worship God according to their conscience. 1 But the inference which they draw

1 See Graete, ix. p. 526. Liberty of conscience was imperfectly appreciated by all parties in that generation. But the Arminions

SPINOZA: HIS LIFE.

PABT I.

from this inconsistency is not, that the synagogues should he closed; it is, that Eemonstrant churches should he allowed. And it is a fair argument to say, “What we ask from you requires a less stretch of liberality than you have already shown to be agreeable to your sense of right.”

A generation sufficed to overcome the first diffi¬ culties of settlement in a new country: the industry, the enterprise, the conduct of the Jews, and not less their hatred of Spanish tyranny, secured them respect from their neighbours : and when Baruch Spinoza was bom, there was nothing to hinder his regular training in the faith and culture of his people. Beyond the life of the home and the synagogue, there was open to the hoy a Jewish High School, affording an education ascending through seven classes. 1 After passing through

opened the way to a better understanding of it: and it is perverse to hold them up to odium as its unworthy violators.

1 Graetz, x. 9. This brilliant writer maintains in a note an opinion which he has not ventured to interweave with his text, viz. that Spinoza himself was a native of Spain and lived there till he was fourteen years of age. This he infers from the following reference, in a letter of Spinoza’s, to a contemporary Jewish martyrdom: “Ipse enim inter alios quendam Judam, quern Mum appellant, novi, qui in mediis flammis, quum jam mortuus crederetur, hymnum qui incipit— Tib% Deiis, animam vneam offero canere incepit, et in medio cantu exspiravit” (Ep. 76). This auto-da-fi of Judas the Faithful is known to have taken place at Valladolid on the 26th of July 1644: so that, as a witness of it, Spinoza must have been still in Spain. Surely, a strange critical judgment! (1.) Spinoza’s birthday being November 24, 1632, his age in 1644 would be twelve, not fourteen. (2.) If we render “Ipse novi” “ I myself knew,” it does not follow from his knowing the man that he was present at his execution;

CHAP. X.

MANASSE BEN ISRAEL.

the elementary stages, he would come under the influ¬ ence of two teachers in succession, whose repute ex¬ tended beyond their country and their time.

The younger of these, Manasse ben Israel (who would be forty-two when Spinoza was fourteen) was a native of Amsterdam, the son of a Portuguese exile and confessor; and had acquired, by the manifold relations of his family, in addition to his literary and sacred duties, the command of ten languages. His accomplishments as a linguist threw him into frequent intercourse with foreigners, and favoured the growth of an ease and tact and winning demeanour for which he became remarkable. There was something in his personality which kept every anti-Jewish prejudice at a distance: and when (in 1G55) a negotiator was wanted to win from Cromwell and the Parliament permission for Jewish settlement in England, he was selected as the most persuasive envoy, and by his influence with the Protector opened here a new asylum for the outcasts. Quick of perception, pliant in sym¬ pathy, never indiscreet unless from vanity, he was a

if it does, must we apply the same inference to the “alios” among whom he stands ? (3.) To hear this rendering, “ Koveram” would be required: “novi” can only mean “I know” a man, i,e, the case of a man (among others), who did so and so. As this Judas was a near friend of R, Manasse hen Israel of Amsterdam, it is probable that Spinoza did personally know him, and was in the way of first-hand testimony to the incidents of his martyrdom. (4.) Even an assertion of Spinoza’s personal presence at Valladolid in 1644 would not justify us in wiping out and reconstructing the tradition of his previous twelve years. Graetz, x. Note 1.

SPINOZA : HIS LIFE.

PABT I.

diplomat© without insincerity; while the tone of his religious feeling touched many a chord in a Puritan heart, attuned as it was to the strain of Hebrew piety. Well read, though not profound as a scholar, he was most in his element as a preacher; his familiarity with the Scriptures and the Talmud seldom drawing him into criticism or philosophy, but furnishing endless lessons for the outer and inner life of men. He delivered his first sermon at fifteen. He died at Middelburg in 1657 on his way home from the English mission. Of his numerous writings only one has gained more than contemporary influence; but from the Vindicim Judseorum Moses Mendelssohn drew the materials for his defence of Judaism four generations later.

More eminent for Hebrew scholarship and more limited to it, was the senior Kabbi, Saul Levi Morteira, the leading Talmudist of Amsterdam. He had come thither in 1616 on a curious errand. In his native Venice he had become attached as a pupil to an eminent medical practitioner, Elias Montalto, who afterwards became physician to the French Queen, Mary de Medici, and remained in attendance on her wherever her Court might be. On one of her journeys, the physician was taken ill and died at Tours. Eor a Jew (as he was) there was no burial rite possible in France. So the queen had his body embalmed, and sent it, under escort of his son, his uncle, and Morteira, by way of Nantes, for interment at Ouderkerk, near Amsterdam. The young Morteira, then only twenty, having left a favourable impression, was induced by

CHAP. I.

SAUL LEVI MOKTEIRA.

his people to remain and undertake the synS^&u^^ service: and thus an accidental visit inaugurated nuT* long career. 1 The local consideration which he enjoyed must he attributed to judgment and character in practical affairs: for both his preaching and erudition were commonplace enough ; and the numerous Spanish MSS. which he left did not appear, even to friendly eyes, worthy of publication.

The characteristics of these two men would place the young Spinoza in very different relations to them. The sympathetic nature of Manasse would take the side of the hoy's feeling, and keep him simply receptive; and if the biographers pass this teacher’s name in silence, it is because of such quiet growth there is nothing to tell. Morteira’s mental habits were sure to convert this docility into antagonism. Fond of the forms, but incapable of the spirit of philosophical thought, he could not fail to start more problems than he could solve ; while his dogmatic temper would but fix the difficulties which he attempted to beat down. It is no wonder that, under -such a master, the clearwitted boy of fifteen found matter for many puzzling questions in his Hebrew Bible and his Talmud; and met with answers more disturbing still. He had caught from his straightforward father an abhorrence of pious pretences, and could not be imposed upon by critical excuses and evasions : and when he got nothing better to help his perplexities, what could a modest and retiring youth do, but keep his difficulties to himself,

1 Graetz, ix. 525 ; x . 10, Note 2.

SPINOZA: HIS LIFE.

PART I, in reserve for future and private scrutiny? Eeticent for a while on biblical subjects, he gained a knowledge of Italian, probably from the Yenetian Morteira; of Trench, perhaps from Manasse ben Israel; and of German, most likely from the same German acquaint¬ ance under whom, at a later time, he began the conquest of Latin.

These studies suffice to account for three or four years of suspended application to theology; especially if at the same time he served his apprenticeship to the art—of grinding optical glasses—by which he was to earn his bread. While he still lived in his father’s house, not only filial deference, but the very presence of his mother and two sisters, would prolong his sympathy, or postpone his breach, with the domestic religion, and hold him content with neutral and secular pursuits. He would go with them to the synagogue; he would not desert the historic festivals. But that the thirst for Gentile culture was growing in him was indicated by his feeling the want of Latin, the great medium of intellectual intercourse in Europe. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries even the higher Jewish schools made no provision for the study of Greek or Latin. 1 Their most accomplished authors, though often wielding with ease the living languages of their time, rarely wrote in Latin, .unless to dedicate

CHAP. I.

THEOLOGICAL CHANGE.

a book or treat of some medical subject. There was even a religious distaste for classical scholarship, as the foster-mother of heathen admirations: and one of Spinoza’s schoolfellows under Morteira, named Moses Zacuto, looked back upon his acquisition of Latin as a sin, and imposed upon himself a forty days’ fast to wash the language from his memory and the stain from his conscience. 1 The opposite feeling of Spinoza, awakened by increasing acquaintance with Christian neighbours, foreshows the direction of his mind.

He could not, however, long acquiesce in a mere sus¬ pense of faith. Eabbinical authority having failed him, he determined to see for himself; and during some years (1650-1654) repeatedly read the Hebrew Scrip¬ tures and their most approved interpreters. Working silently and living blamelessly, he was passing through the most momentous crisis of his inner history. To what precise state of mind he was brought by the first collapse of his early theology, it is impossible to say : for even if, with Avenarius, 2 we date the two Dialogues incorporated with his Treatise on God and Man as early as 1651-2, nothing can be inferred from their crude and confused sentences, except that his philosophy was yet unformed. The incompleteness, however, was all on the affirmative side of his convictions: the rapid gathering of rabbinical clouds and bursting of thunders on his head clearly show the range and decisiveness of

1 Graetz, x. 170,

a TXeber die beiden ersten thasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus, v. Richard Avenarius, p. 105.

SPINOZA: HIS LIFE.

PA.ET I.

his negative conclusions. Naturalism had taken the place with him of the Supernatural; Reason, of Revela¬ tion ; prediction by determinate causes, of imaginative visions by Prophets; Necessity, of Design; and the reckoning of human consequences, of threats from Divine anger. The Israelites, though having their function in the world, ceased to be a “covenanted peopletheir annals were no more “sacred” than other history; their “ Scriptures ” fell back into the mass of ancient literature. He knew that he must be treated as an apostate. But having in him a good deal of the esoteric temper, and believing that, for the mass of men, the religious “imagination” did something of the work of truth, he was not eager to precipitate his exile; and still held his peace, so long as he ingenu¬ ously could.

Meanwhile, some new friendships opened to him which threw some side-currents into the main stream of his thought. Prom his honest biographer, the Lutheran pastor, Ooler of the Hague, we learn that Spinoza, some time before his final alienation from the synagogue, had made acquaintance with several liberalminded Christians, and become familiar with their modes of thought. Poliowing the hint, that some of these were Mennonites, 1 we too may make some nearer acquaintance with them, and through them with the man who found their society congenial to him.

The earliest disaffection towards the mediaeval Christianity assumed the form, not so much of doctrinal 1 B. de S. Opera, Paulus, it p. 603.

CHAP. I.

THE MEHHONITES.

rebellion, as of moral protest against the life which was deemed venial by the Church. It expressed the shock of conscience, the disappointment of spiritual aims, and the resolve to escape the slavery of worldly usage and accept the rule of a devout simplicity. This feature is more or less conspicuous in all the religious movements precursory to the Beformation, in those of the Albigenses, Wiclif, Savonarola, Tauler, and “ the Friends of God;” and emphatically in that of Luther’s independent contemporary, Menno Simons the Frieslander (born in 1492), from whom the Mennonites of Holland and their offshoots in other countries derive their name. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1516, and in the neighbourhood of Franeker exercised his functions for twenty years, but with a mind increasingly alienated from them by study of the Scriptures and of the Beformers’ writings. Especially was he drawn towards the spiritual side of the Anabaptist gospel: and joining the professors of it in 1536, he visited, in their service, the chief maritime towns as far as Dantzig, organising or reviving their societies, and everywhere inducing them to repudiate the appeal to the sword which, under the misguidance of Bothman and John of Leiden, had been so fatal to their followers in Munster. He wrote in defence of his peace principles against John of Leiden, and entirely separated himself with his asso¬ ciates from the war-party, with which, in fact, he had little in common beyond the disapproval of infant baptism. The characteristics which his spirit transfused into his followers resembled partly those of the Herrn-

SPINOZA: HIS LIFE.

PAST I.

hiiter, and partly those of the Society of Friends. Owning no priesthood, and no authoritative confession of faith, they left room for wide variations of teaching, which the rigorists amongst them could not, and the liberal would not, prevent. But amid all divergencies they were united in their scruple against oaths, their refusal to take arms or to accept civic office, their austere simplicity of habit, their brotherly equality, and the quiet plainness of their prayers and preaching. It attests the force of character in them, that even the unsparing impetuosity of Napoleon paused on the threshold of their communion in the Yosges and re¬ spected their right of exemption from the conscription. And if he refused to listen to the same plea in Holland, it was because they had ceased to present a united front of resistance to military claims, ‘and their larger societies were not disinclined to yield.

Proscribed by the Emperor Charles Y. in 1540, and first admitted to rights of association by William the Silent in 1581, these people sustained their religious life in private for forty years ; and, having to dispense with regular pastors and public services, provided the more assiduously for the domestic training and personal instruction of their members, one by one. An independ¬ ent intelligence and freedom from clerical narrowness thus became diffused through the whole body, which came out of its exile better than it went in.

Eighty years later, a precisely similar cause pro¬ duced, upon a smaller scale, a similar result. The Synod of Dordrecht, in 1618-9, played for the Calvin-