Pantheism Its Story and Significance

EXCERPT
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.