come to light, s in the Oriental tale; the seal has been broken, and the giant has been welcomed as a benign genius. Spinoza's pantheism by the power of his sequent reasoning as well as by the spirit of his concentration has carried the elements of fervent positive faith into the strongholds of modern culture and scientific and religious seeking. He has had great power over naturalists, theologians, and men of letters.

The naturalists claim him as their own, and justly, so far as he affirms with them the unity of nature and the reign of law, but unjustly, if they ascribe to him the creed of materialism without the Almighty God and the omnipresent Spirit. The materialists, in claiming him, accept their destruction, as the Trojans accepted the fatal horse. He was too honest to say that he believed in God if he did not, and he was too learned and wise to confound God with matter without knowing it. The theologians have first wholly quarrelled with him, and then found light in him. He has helped them in their effort to recover the ground which was lost by the Locke school in its denial of the immanence of God and of all proof of religion but that of outward miracles, and his name stands closely connected with the revival of the doctrine of the Incarnation and of the living Church. Puritan New England has felt his power, and the controversy some forty years ago between Norton and Ripley turned much on the thought of Spinoza, and ended in gain to religion by uniting the new idea of God's immanence with the old idea of his transcendence, a union so vital and central in interpreting the currents of Christian thought in the present day and the comprehensive character of the rising faith. The men of letters have been helped by Spinoza, and Voltaire's lampoon stands in strange contrast with the praise of Lessing and Herder, Goethe and Coleridge, and of the idealists of the new culture in both hemispheres. Goethe found in him the best teacher of renunciation, as well as the best witness to the fact of the mystical connection of the soul with nature and man, the mystery that so often had taken him by surprise and taught him that he did not do his finest work of himself only, but that it came to him from the unfathomed depths of being. So the lensmaker of the Hague was a master of great men; and he who bore in himself under his workman's blouse the self-denial that Thomas à Kempis, the monk of a Dutch convent, cherished under his

cowl, had a power that Marcus Aurelius his brother stoic, in his purple might have coveted, and perhaps he held it with as much dignity as that with which the imperial stoic held the sceptre.

In closing this study of the career of Benedict de Spinoza one cannot but conjecture what his influence upon the coming age will be, and it would be a comfort if we could help our vision of the future by such a picture of his place among modern philosophers as the pencil of Raphael gave of Plato with his school, or as Kaulbach gave of Luther and his company of reformers. Auerbach's romance brought the Wandering Jew to cheer Spinoza in his dejection and exile, and to salute him in his twenty-fifth year as the new saviour of men; but no such extravagance deluded the philosopher or dictates these pages. We may perhaps ask what visions filled the soul of the seer as death drew near, and what thoughts came to him as he went two hundred years ago to his bed for the last night's sleep on Saturday evening after he had smoked his pipe as usual and had a long conversation on the sermon which the painter and his wife had just been hearing. He may have looked out of the window upon that Dutch winter scene, and beheld his life there symbolized as his latest biographer, Van den Linden, sees it: "It is like one of those sad landscapes of Ruysdael's, which we hardly venture to approach in fear of destroying its silent solitude, and whose face can hardly be looked upon without profound sadness." What the sleeper saw in his dreams, or what visions opened within his mind on that Sunday morning when he awoke, we do not know, but we can tell now what only prophetic sight then might have told, as we translate sober history into prophecy and ascribe to him as he was dying the honors that have crowned his name since death. Sober truth places him in the centre of a circle of naturalists, philosophers, divines, and poets who have been sent to bring about the reconciliation of culture with religion, and to make the ethics of God and nature the law and the life of men. That lonely, sad, persecuted, deep, brave man builded better than he knew, and the Divine power that he worshipped has brought more meaning and virtue out of his thought than the thinker saw in it, and will bring yet more out of it in the new Truce of God that is coming between the belligerent powers of science and faith.

SAMUEL OSGOOD.

THERE can be no doubt that, in performing the functions of money, silver is of a greater antiquity than gold. Asia was a commercial country when Europe was a wilderness; and as it is a well-established fact that the East has not perceptibly changed her habits from the remotest ages, we find at the present moment that silver, and silver alone, is the money of Asia. Gold has no doubt at times been coined and perhaps used to a very limited extent in that region; but these coins have been used more as ornaments than money. The reason for coining gold in India may have been indeed undoubtedly was - to give an ornament its actual value at sight. Thus, if a piece of stamped gold had a certain mark, it represented the then equivalent amount of silver rupees; and, on a husband decking his wife with a chain on which hung fifty gold coins, it was understood that the ornament was worth, intrinsically, one hundred rupees, as each coin represented a gold piece worth two rupees. There are even at the present time tons of gold and silver coins used in a similar way in India. But from the remotest age silver was the money factor of the East.

During the sway of the Romans in Europe both gold and silver were used as money, and it is from this period that in reality we gain some knowledge of the relative value of silver to gold. Such value, however, is very doubtful, and we must accept the best data and authorities that can be found on the subject. The authorities who have made the question their study give the relative value of silver and gold, during a period extending from the first to the close of the fifteenth century of our era, as follows:

These relative values were, however, very changeable. Thus, for instance, while the actual ratio during the year 1494 might have been 10.50 to 1 in Lombard Street, London, a higher or a lower ratio prevailed on the Rialto at Venice, or in the Judengasse at Frankfort. But commerce, industry, navigation, and finance itself were entirely changed by the discovery of America at the end of the fifteenth century.

The immense quantities of solid gold brought to Europe during the sixteenth century from America not only made it necessary to use gold as money, but also gave to silver a different relative value, while both metals, being used as a medium of exchange, lost their former degree of purchasing power. This, of course, was perfectly natural, owing to the immense increase of the precious metals in the civilized and commercial world, and it is highly interesting to study the ratio of silver to gold after the discovery of America. Thus we find that in 1494 the relative value was 10.50 ounces of fine silver to 1 ounce of fine gold.

And from that date to the year 1800 it was, on an average, as near as possible, 15 to 1. During the present century, from 1800 to 1872, the average ratio has been 15.47 to 1.

Thus it will be seen that the immense influx of gold during the sixteenth century depreciated the ratio of silver from 10.50, in 1494, to 11.70, in 1561, or over eleven per cent. This comparatively slight depreciation, notwithstanding the immense influx of gold, was owing to two causes: first, gold in a great measure assumed the function of money, which silver had hitherto chiefly performed; and, second, the influx of silver kept pace with that of gold.

During the seventeenth century the still greater influx of silver from Mexico, Peru, and other South American provinces speedily asserted itself, and we find the ratio in 1665 to be as high as in 1800, and even higher. The fact is, during the seventeenth cen

tury, gold like silver could only be obtained by mining, and hence the cost of obtaining it from the New World increased proportionally.

It is remarkable that hardly any writers have looked upon the immense increase in the stock of gold during the sixteenth century in a practical light. When the Spaniards came to Mexico and Peru during the earlier part of the sixteenth century, they did not set miners to dig ore or wash alluvial soil; they simply took by force the precious metals of the Incas and Montezumas, which had already accumulated for ages in those countries. Hence, it needed no more labor or expense to get gold during that period than it would now cost for a band of pirates to ravage England and France of their accumulated stock of precious metals and bring them to America. But when this enormous supply of precious metal was exhausted, manual and expensive labor had to be employed to obtain the metal; and it is owing to this fact that not only did gold and silver retain their value as money, but also that the values of the two metals maintained a comparatively stable relation.

The main. effect of the influx of precious metal into Europe, during the two centuries succeeding the discovery of America, was bloody and unrelenting war. This expensive pastime found even the enormous influx of gold and silver into Europe inadequate, and the great nations had recourse to two expedients for replenishing their exchequers, first, loans, and, second, the more convenient forced loans of paper money. There is, of course, a great difference between a paper circulation resting upon an actual metallic basis and one based upon the faith of government. The one, being redeemable at the will of the holder, is, to all intents and purposes, actual money; the other is subject to the internal political state of the country and to the "supply and demand" of the metal in the land where the paper money is used. But an irredeemable currency has naturally the effect of banishing both gold and silver, to a great extent, from those countries where it was not only used formerly, but where it would be in great demand if an irredeemable paper currency should cease to exist. For instance, when this country resumes specie payment, if it be done entirely on a gold standard, it will require, at least, from four to five hundred million dollars in gold not merely to resume,