2 22 THE POPULAR SCIEN-CE MONTHLY. 



tion of the sovereign, never, most surely, can they be prevented from thinking 

 as they will. What, then, must ensue? That men will think one way and speak 

 another ; that, consequently, good faith a virtue most necessary to the state 

 will become corrupted ; that adulation a detestable thing and perfidy will be 

 Jiad in repute, entailing the decadence of all good and healthy morality. What 

 can be more disastrous to a state than to exile honest citizens as evil-doers, 

 because they do not share the opinions of the crowd and are ignorant of the 

 art of feigning? What more fatal than to treat as enemies and doom to death 

 men whose only crime is that of thinking independently ? The scaffold, which 

 should be the terror of the wicked, is thus turned into the glorious theatre 

 where virtue and toleration shine out in all their lustre, and publicly cover the 

 sovereign majesty with opprobrium. Beyond question there is only one thing 

 to be learned from such a spectacle : to imitate those noble martyrs ; or, if one 

 fears death, to become the cowardly flatterers of power. Nothing, then, is so 

 full of peril as to refer and submit to divine i-ights matters of pure speculation, 

 and to impose laws on opinions which are, or may be, subjects of discussion 

 among men. If the authority of the state limited itself to the repression of 

 actions while allowing impunity to words, controversies would less often turn 

 into seditions." 



More sagacious than many so-called practical men, our speculator 

 sees perfectly well that the only durable governments are the reason- 

 able, and that the only reasonable governments are the constitutional. 

 Far from absorbing the individual in the state, he gives him solid guar- 

 antees against the state's omnipotence. He is no revolutionary, but a 

 moderate ; he transforms, explains, but does not destroy. His God 

 is not indeed one who takes pleasure in ceremonies, sacrifices, odor of 

 incense, yet Spinoza has no design whatever to overthrow religion ; 

 he entertains a profoimd veneration for Christianity, a tender and a 

 sincere respect. The supernatural, however, has no meaning in his 

 doctrine. According to his princijiles, anything out of Nature would 

 be out of being, and therefore inconceivable. Prophets, revealers, 

 have been men like others : 



" It is not thinking, but dreaming," he says, " to hold that prophets have had 

 a human body and not a human soul, and that consequently their knowledge 

 and their sensations have been of a different nature from ours. . . . The pro- 

 phetic faculty has not been the dowry of one people only the Jewish people. 

 The quality of Son of God hos not been the privilege of one man only. . . . 

 To state my views openly, I tell you that it is not absolutely necessary to know 

 Christ after the flesh ; but it is otherwise when we speak of that Son of God, 

 that is to say, that eternal Wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all 

 things, and more fully in the human soul, and above all in Jesus Christ. With- 

 out this wisdom no one can attain the state of beatitude, since it alone teaches 

 us what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong. ... As to 

 what certain Churches have added, ... I have expressly warned you that I 

 do not know what they mean, and, to speak frankly, I may confess that they 

 seem to me to be using the same sort of language as if they spoke of a circle 

 assuming the nature of a square." 



Was not this exactly what Schleiermacher said? And as to Spi- 



