But limits of space preclude me from
saying more than, that his ideal of right will be found conformable to
the highest standards of the most spiritual religions.
[Sidenote: Purity.]
This ideal I ventured to symbolize rather than define as "purity." For
after all the philosophic reasoning with which it is no less lucidly
than laboriously worked out in the final book of his _Ethica_,
"Concerning Human. Freedom"--the moral result of all this intellectual
effort is that same cleansing of the soul from vain desire and that
subordination of the earthly self to its divine idea which we are taught
in the Sermon on the Mount. And while surely every one but a fanatical
anti-Christian must allow the greater prophetic worth of the Galilean,
who could teach these sublime lessons so that "the common people heard
him gladly," it seems difficult to deny to the heretic Jew of the Hague
the second rank among the teachers given to the world by that strangely
gifted race. For though he could not speak to "the common people," he
left as his legacy to mankind, not so much a system of philosophy, as an
impregnable foundation for morals and religion, available for the time
now coming upon us--such a time as that suggested by the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, when he spoke of "the removing of those things
that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which
cannot be shaken may remain.
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