correspondents must therefore have been known to him during his stay in Amsterdam, and what is known about them helps to throw some light on this obscure period in Spinoza s life-history. They were Pieter Balling, Jarig Jelles, Dirck Kerckrinck, Lodewijk Meyer, Simon Joosten de Vries, and Jan Rieuwertsz.
Pieter Balling had acted for some time as the representative or agent of various Spanish merchants. And it is just possible that Spinoza s knowledge of Spanish first brought him into touch with him. Balling was a Mennonite, and a pronounced enemy of dogmatism. In 1662 he published a book entitled The Light on the Candlestick, in which he attacked religion based on stereotyped dogmas, and advocated a religion, partly rationalistic, partly mystical, based on the inward light of the soul. The whole spirit of the book might be summed up in the familiar lines of Matthew Arnold:
These hundred doctors try
To preach thee to their school.
We have the truth, they cry.
And yet their oracle,
Trumpet it as they will, is but the same as thine.
" Once read thy own breast right, And thou has done with fears. Man gets no other light, Search he a thousand years. Sink in thyself: there ask what ails thee, at that shrine." In 1664 he translated into Dutch Spinoza s version of Descartes Principia. In a letter written in the same year, we see Spinoza trying to console Balling on the loss of his child, and dealing tenderly with Balling s " premonitions " of his impending loss. Jarig Jelles was at one time a spice-merchant in Amster dam, but feeling that " knowledge is better than choice gold, that wisdom is better than rubies, and all the things
