s theories of human life and
obligation. He will not hear of a virtue which desires to be rewarded.
Virtue is the power of God in the human soul, and that is the exhaustive
end of all human desire. 'Beatitudo non est virtutis pretium, sed ipsa
virtus. Nihil aliud est quam ipsa animi acquiescentia, quae ex Dei
intuitiva cognitione oritur.' The same spirit of generosity exhibits
itself in all his conclusions. The ordinary objects of desire, he says,
are of such a kind that for one man to obtain them is for another to
lose them; and this alone would suffice to prove that they are not what
any man should labour after. But the fulness of God suffices for us
all; and he who possesses this good desires only to communicate it to
every one, and to make all mankind as happy as himself. And again:--'The
wise man will not speak in society of his neighbour's faults, and
sparingly of the infirmity of human nature; but he will speak largely of
human virtue and human power, and of the means by which that nature can
best be perfected, so to lead men to put away that fear and aversion
with which they look on goodness, and learn with relieved hearts to love
and desire it.' And once more:--'He who loves God will not desire that
God should love him in return with any partial or particular affection,
for that is to desire that God for his sake should change his
everlasting nature and become lower than himself.'

One grave element, indeed, of a religious faith would seem in such a
system to be necessarily wanting. Where individual action is resolved
into the modified activity of the Universal Being, all absorbing and all
evolving, the individuality of the personal man is but an evanescent and
unreal shadow. Such individuality as we now possess, whatever it be,
might continue to exist in a future state as really as it exists in the
present, and those to whom it belongs might be anxious naturally for its
persistence. Yet it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the
idea of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed into its
elements, the soul corresponding to it must accompany it into an
answering dissolution. And this, indeed, Spinoza in one sense actually
affirms, when he denies to the mind any power of retaining consciousness
of what has befallen it in life, 'nisi durante corpore.' But Spinozism
is a philosophy full of surprises; and our calculations of what _must_
belong to it are perpetually baffled. The imagination, the