His mother, whom he much resembled outwardly, a Catholic from
Brabant, had had saints in her family, and from time to time the mind
of Sebastian had been occupied on the subject of monastic life, its
quiet, its negation. The portrait of a certain Carthusian prior,
which, like the famous statue of Saint Bruno, the first Carthusian,
in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Rome, could it have
spoken, would have said,--"Silence!" kept strange company with the
painted visages of men of affairs. A great theological strife was
then raging in Holland. Grave ministers of religion assembled
sometimes, as in the painted scene by Rembrandt, in the Burgomaster's
house, and once, not however in their company, came a renowned young
Jewish divine, Baruch de Spinosa, with whom, most unexpectedly,
Sebastian found himself in sympathy, meeting the young Jew's far-
reaching thoughts half-way, to the confirmation of his own; and he
did not know that his visitor, very ready with the pencil, had taken
his likeness as they talked on the fly-leaf of his note-book. Alive
to that theological disturbance in the air all around him, he refused
to be [98] moved by it, as essentially a strife on small matters,
anticipating a vagrant regret which may have visited many other minds
since, the regret, namely, that the old, pensive, use-and-wont
Catholicism, which had accompanied the nation's earlier struggle for
existence, and consoled it therein, had been taken from it. And for
himself, indeed, what impressed him in that old Catholicism was a
kind of lull in it--a lulling power--like that of the monotonous
organ-music, which Holland, Catholic or not, still so greatly loves.
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