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270 stormed Heaven. The stars nearest to us are dark bodies like the earth, and the earth far off is as bright as the twinkling stars; our star-decked carpet is gone; where now can we place the throne of God? Hell, too, we have no more. There, we used to think, below, far below, roasted and stewed the godless, till Columbus steered ever westward, and now we know that people live there too just as we live. What shall we do now with our pious and godless ones?"

"Jufrow Olympia," answered Spinoza, "did you not perfectly agree with me last Friday when I explained to you that the external appearances of things had justly fallen away that men might hold fast to the ideal of them? Every elevation of mind by which a man rises above his personal harmony and chimes in with the universal harmony—the existence of God you may call it, if you are so fond of the term—is, to my ideas, Heaven and its felicity; that state of forcible separation from self, no hold in self, and no external support in opposition to the laws of natural destiny, shaken by the slightest impulse, without consciousness of unity with the whole—can there be a more frightful hell?"

"Granted," replied Olympia, "but I prefer my earlier ideas."

"That I believe," said Oldenburg; "but you cannot throw such metaphysical ideas at any