Page:Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing.djvu/46

xl the marriage (1671). Be that as it may, the school had a bad name, and Spinoza's reputation did not improve by his more intimate connection with it. Possibly some of the fathers, who subsequently earned the daily blessings of their sons for taking care in due time &quot;to remove them from the school of so pernicious and impious a master&quot; as Van den Enden was reputed to be, were not slow in fastening some of the blame on his Jewish assistant; and Spinoza, who was as yet too inexperienced to appreciate the wisdom of discretion, may have given utterance to many a heterodox thought. If so, the scandalised fathers who repeatedly tried to persuade the city magistrates to close Van den Enden's school, and who actually did succeed in driving him out of Amsterdam eventually, would not keep very quiet about Spinoza, and the Jewish authorities would have good reason to take alarm.

Except by the select few, religious toleration was scarcely understood in those days, even in the Netherlands. That the persecuted turn persecutors has become a truism; it is sad, but it is true. In practice, the cry for religious toleration has all too often amounted to this: you have persecuted me long enough now, let me persecute you for a change. At the very commencement of their long struggle against the tyranny of the Inquisition, the mutual intolerance of the various religious sects in the Netherlands caused infinite trouble to William the Silent, and very nearly wrecked their enterprise. As their fortunes improved and the need of union became somewhat less urgent, intolerance became increasingly manifest. The Calvinists, who were in the majority, regarded their Church more or less as the established Church, to which the Reformed clergy tried their utmost to compel all others to conform. When Philip III. made a twelve years truce with the United Netherlands in 1609, he did so, it is said, in the sinister hope that mutual religious persecutions among the different religious sects