"This
compels me to nothing which I should not otherwise have done," he had
said to his Mennonite friend when the sentence reached him in the
Oudekirk Road. But was it so? If he had not been cut off from his
father and his brothers and sisters, and the friends of childhood,
would he have treated the beauties of his ancestral faith with so
grudging a sympathy? The doubt disturbed him, revealing once more how
difficult was self-mastery, absolute surrender to absolute Truth.
Never had he wavered under persecution like Uriel Acosta--at whose
grave in unholy ground he had stood when a boy of eight,--but had it
not wrought insidiously upon his spirit?

"Alas!" thought he, "the heaviest burden that men can lay upon us, is
not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but that they
thus plant hatred and scorn in our souls. That is what does not let us
breathe freely or see clearly." Retrospect softened the odiousness of
his Jewish persecutors; they were but children of a persecuting age,
and it was indeed hard for a community of refugees from Spain and
Portugal to have that faith doubted for which they or their fathers
had given up wealth and country. Even at the hour of his Ban the
pyres of the Inquisition were flaming with Jewish martyrs, and his
fellow-scholars were writing Latin verses to their sacred memories.
And should the religion which exacted and stimulated such sacrifices
be set aside by one providentially free to profess it? How should they
understand that a martyr's death proved faith, not truth? Well, well,
if he had not sufficiently repaid his brethren's hatred with love, it
was no good being sorry, for sorrow was an evil, a passing to lesser
perfection, diminished vitality. Let him rather rejoice that the real
work of his life--his _Ethica_, which he was working out on pure
geometrical principles--would have no taint of personality, would be
without his name, and would not even be published till death had
removed the last possibility of personal interest in its fortunes.
"For," as he was teaching in the book itself, "those who desire to aid
others by counsel or deed to the common enjoyment of the chief good
shall in no wise endeavor themselves that a doctrine be called after
them."

Another stone and a hoot of derision from a gang of roughs reminded
him that death might not wait for the finishing of his work.
"Strange," he reflected, "that they who cannot even read should so run
to damn." And then