Page:Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing.djvu/42

we do not really explain it by calling it bad names. It is often perfectly honest, and it is to be met with in all creeds, at the present no less than in the past. And, after all, the difference is mostly one of degree rather than of kind. Even Spinoza s feeling remained to the end more conservative than his thought. That was why he could not help using the language of religion long after his thought seemed to have emptied it of its religious meaning. At all events he made no secret of his views, and he grew lax in the matter of ceremonial observances, whose theoretic basis no longer appealed to him. The elaborate dietary laws of orthodox Judaism must have been something of an obstacle in his intercourse with Christian friends, and although he, no doubt, observed these laws for a time from sheer force of habit, even when their raison d'être had already lost its hold on him, still he probably got weary of excusing his apparent unsociability on the ground of a custom in which he no longer believed. Moreover, the comparatively liberal religion of his Mennonite and Collegiant friends, their Quaker-like simplicity, their brotherly equality, their humanitarian repudiation of strife and war, the plain decorum of their prayer-meetings—all this must have tended to make him increasingly dissatisfied with the over-elaborated ceremonial of his own community, and the comparative indecorum of their Synagogue services. On the other hand, his Jewish neighbours were beginning to feel scandalised by this breach of ritual observances, his frequent absence from the Synagogue, and the reports of his attendance at Christian prayer-meetings, especially so, considering that his father and grandfather had held office in the Synagogue, and Baruch himself had been looked upon as a promising " light of the Exile." Mutual distrust developed into mutual antipathy. The conservatives could not understand how any one could, merely on account of personal inconvenience, deliberately ignore divinely ordained