< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE 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 had 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 rights 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 reasonable, and that the only reasonable governments are the constitutional. Far from absorbing the individual in the state, he gives him solid guarantees 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 profound veneration for Christianity, a tender and a sincere respect. The supernatural, however, has no meaning in his doctrine. According to his principles, 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 prophetic faculty has not been the dowry of one people only—the Jewish people. The quality of Son of God has 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. Without 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-

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