Theologico-Political Treatise (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Benedict de Spinoza and Heidi Morrison Ravven

Theologico-Political Treatise is the only work of Baruch Spinoza’s original philosophy published during his lifetime.  The work has three purposes: to defend and bolster religious tolerance, to make a plea for freedom of thought and democracy, and to offer a new approach to the study and interpretation of the Bible and to its political uses.  Despite the author’s attempt to disguise its origin—it was published in 1670 anonymously and with a false city of publication—the Treatise was quickly attributed to Spinoza and became a sensation.  It was widely vilified, considered an illegal publication, and quickly put under local censorship and suppression.  Nevertheless, unlike other banned books, the Theologico-Political Treatise spread like wildfire all over Europe and numerous copies of it in various European language translations were found in libraries from Britain and all over Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411434073

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS IS THE ONLY WORK OF BENEDICT Spinoza's original philosophy published during his lifetime. The work has three purposes: to defend and bolster religious tolerance, to make a plea for freedom of thought and democracy, and to offer a new approach to the study and interpretation of the Bible and to its political uses. Despite the author's attempt to disguise its origin—it was published in 1670 anonymously and with a false city of publication, Hamburg rather than Amsterdam—the Tractatus was quickly attributed to Spinoza and became something of a sensation. It was widely vilified, considered an illegal publication, and quickly put under local censorship and suppression. The Dutch Reformed Church condemned it in 1673, and in July 1674 it was officially banned at the Synod of Dordrecht. Nevertheless, unlike other banned books, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus spread like wildfire all over Europe and numerous copies of it in various European language translations were found in libraries from Britain and all over Europe.

Benedict Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at age twenty-four, and he never joined another religious group but kept a respectful distance, attending religious services of various persuasions. He was born in Amsterdam to a Portuguese Jewish family who had fled to the Netherlands, escaping the persecutions of the Catholic Inquisition which, in 1497, had forced all the Jews of Portugal to convert to Christianity. This was only the latest in a wave of forced conversions in the Iberian peninsula beginning with those in Spain in 1391. Some of those forced to convert secretly maintained loyalty to Judaism for generations, and Spinoza's parents were among these. In the Netherlands, crypto-Jews (or Marranos) escaping the Iberian peninsula could renew their Jewish commitments openly and return to a Jewish communal life, especially after 1609 when the Netherlands won its independence from Spain after battling for it for almost a century. It is not surprising that Spinoza in his political works was a great advocate of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. Nor do we wonder that his overriding concern was how to lessen the dangers of religious fanaticism upon democratic institutions and political stability. In the Ethics Spinoza places freedom as the ultimate aim and central value of the life well lived. Spinoza had a traditional Jewish education and was particularly versed in and influenced by the Jewish philosophical tradition and especially by Maimonides, Gersonides, Crescas, and Hebreo Leone. The influence of Maimonides and Judaeo-Arabic scientific naturalism is evident throughout Spinoza's works, especially in his assessment of religion and its political function, but also in his sensitivity to language, metaphor, literary genre, style, and rhetorical modes.

The immediate impetus for the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was the threat to freedom of thought and liberty in the Netherlands precipitated by the Dutch Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, wars that originated in commercial maritime rivalries between England and the Netherlands. But the war to which Spinoza was also responding was the Thirty Years' War between Protestants and Catholics that had gone on during his childhood. That war ended only in 1648 when Spinoza was sixteen. The Dutch revolt against Spanish domination had begun in the 1560s and had resulted in the independence of the largely Calvinist Netherlands from Catholic Spain only in 1609. The truce of 1609 had opened up the Netherlands as a refuge to many Marrano Jews escaping persecution in the Iberian peninsula, among them Spinoza's parents. So the Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam into which Benedict Spinoza was born offered a quite newly established security and freedom from religious persecution.

Spinoza took five years off from working on the Ethics to write the Tractatus in response to what he regarded as the urgent demands of the times: to shore up the liberty of conscience and thought, tolerance, and freedom of worship that were traditions in the Netherlands but now under increasing threat. Spinoza also hoped through the Tractatus to encourage democratization and religious pluralism by setting out a model in which he envisioned how both could be institutionalized in a modern liberal, non-denominational form of government. So as the title suggests, Spinoza's concern in the Tractatus is not just with proposing a new form of government to meet the demands of a New Age, but also with proposing a new vision for the relationship between religion and government.

Spinoza's solution to the problem of the place of religion in a modern political society is a liberal solution but one somewhat different from Locke's separation of Church and State as well as from Hobbes' authoritarian vision of the complete subordination of religious authority to the political sovereign. For Spinoza's concern was not merely to remove ecclesiastical authority from political life but even more crucially he set out to weaken independent systems of religious authority by redefining the basic meaning of the authoritative document, the Bible, that all the different Christian and Jewish communities held as sacred and the source of their legitimacy and power. So rather than marginalize the Bible and religion, Spinoza envisions a society in the Tractatus in which the Bible is redefined as a basic universal ethic, general enough that all groups and individuals could sign on to it. Spinoza proposes that the Bible be understood as a basic set of moral principles, an updated Ten Commandments, which can serve as the constitution of a democratic pluralist polity that champions both freedom of conscience and freedom of thought. In the society he envisions religious particularisms would be privatized while a common denominator of a biblical ethic focused on a basic morality of good deeds (rather than right thoughts) would be held in common and promoted by the state.

So Spinoza sets as his aim the reinterpretation of the biblical text as the basis for a civil religion that promotes a state that cuts across Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish differences. Spinoza aims to show that the Bible ought to be used as the founding constitution of a modern multi-religious society. Thus for him it is a work whose import is in its devotion to general ethical suasion and not to either special pleading or scientific and philosophic truths. He is not concerned with validating prophecy (any religion) but instead with its power to move the masses and thus serve, appropriately reinterpreted, as a founding political document.

Spinoza's solution to the problem of religion and politics in the Tractatus was largely inspired by Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed, although the influences upon the work are myriad, from the Roman historians and philosophers to Machiavelli to Hobbes. Spinoza tweaks Maimonides' political vision towards greater tolerance and a broad, democratic distribution of power, adopting Maimonides' terms of the debate, to wit, the latter's conception of the nature of religion (that's what he means by prophecy) and its crucial and in his view indispensable, albeit dangerous, role in politics. Religious feelings and loyalties, because of their tremendous potency, must be managed rather than merely eliminated from the political arena. For Maimonides, the Bible (unlike Spinoza who included the New Testament, Maimonides referred only to the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament) was both a political document as well as a veiled introduction to the fundamentals of a true (Aristotelian) science and philosophy. That is, it consisted in both a political constitution and a scientific textbook, both in narrative and fanciful garb so as to reach the common people. The imaginative tales and moral rules were to induce in the masses the ethical moderation at the heart of (Aristotle's vision of) a good society. And the veiled science was to reduce superstition to a minimum by offering the uneducated masses a rudimentary rational scientific outlook and worldview. Maimonides' greatest hope was to eradicate from the masses their religious anthropomorphism, the view that God is a venerable old man residing in the heavens and controlling the world by fiat and moral intervention, and to replace it with a view of the heavens as the working out of grand natural processes over eons originating in the divine in ways beyond our understanding.

Spinoza follows Maimonides part way in signing on to the political import of religion as both suasion and political governance to be used to induce an obedience and loyalty to morals and justice. He drops the scientific claims of Maimonides about the Bible's hidden meaning and introduces instead a method of reading the Bible based on the analysis of the Hebrew linguistics and the varying historical and cultural contexts of the various biblical texts. Spinoza's invention of this approach to the Bible contributed greatly to the development of the modern academic study of the Bible. Spinoza took strong issue with Maimonides' claim that the prophets were philosophers and that the Bible offers veiled insights into the central doctrines of philosophy and science, a belief so deeply held by Maimonides that he included it as one of his Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith.¹ At the same time, however, Spinoza agreed with Maimonides' doctrine of the imaginative (literary and suasive) character² and the political function³ of the Bible and of its authors and of the major prophetic figures.

In the Tractatus, Spinoza also adopts and adapts Maimonides' literary method, a cryptic style that is meant to shield the radicalism of his conclusions from all but the most astute readers. Both were concerned with the potential dangers to political stability of their debunking of the direct divine origins of both the Bible and of authoritative religious inspiration, or prophecy. Yet despite this nagging concern both also felt compelled to carry out their planned works: Maimonides felt acutely the pressing need to prove the rationality and scientific respectability of Judaism to the philosophically astute and increasingly sophisticated, scientifically educated Jewish audience of the twelfth-century Golden Age of Spanish Arabic science and philosophy in which he lived. And he was also concerned to rationalize Judaism for the Jewish masses.

Spinoza too was personally and professionally overcome with the urgency of dampening religious irrationalism. He hoped to confront religious fanaticism and stop it in its tracks, dampening the terrible effects it had on political liberties and on the advancement of science and philosophy. He had experienced the effects of religious fanaticism intimately in his parents' Marrano heritage in Portugal of hiding their Jewish commitments from the Catholic Inquisition on pain of torture and death. He had also experienced the pressure for religious conformity in his own excommunication from the Jewish community perhaps for challenging too openly religious doctrine on the afterlife. And all around him swirled religious debates, religious wars, and the political persecutions of free thinkers and of their works even though the Netherlands was also temporary refuge to great philosophers such as Descartes and Hobbes, escaping even more restrictive regimes and their threats of religious and ideological persecution.

Spinoza took a page from Maimonides' Guide in presenting his own veiled radical critique of traditional religion, as Maimonides had, as a systematic reinterpretation of the Bible and its language. While Maimonides wanted to expose what he regarded as the hidden scientific rationalism at the heart of the biblical text if one only had the keys to unlock its symbolic meanings, Spinoza aimed to purge the Bible of its particularisms in the interest of finding within it a cross-religious, cross-cultural moral core doctrine and also a viable model of the just society. A great deal of ink has been spilled by scholars on whether or not Maimonides or Spinoza uses a literary method of deliberate contradiction to hide the import of what he is saying from those it might rashly set afire and also to avoid reprisal. Maimonides lends support for this view in his own case since he enumerates, in his introduction, seven sources of contradiction in literary works, the last of which is an author's desire to disguise his own meaning, hiding it from those only partially educated readers in whom it might trigger a tendency to religious skepticism and the undermining of political stability. Maimonides warns the reader that his book is intended only for those who have been fully, exhaustively, and professionally trained in the Jewish tradition as well as in the rudiments of the philosophic and scientific education of his day (the late twelfth century) and as a result have come to have some doubts about the former in the light of the latter.

Spinoza clearly wrote the Tractatus for an educated audience. He wrote it in Latin, the literary language of the educated. But unlike his other works, it is not directed principally to fellow philosophers and professional theologians. His style is based more on the Roman historians—he cites Quintus Curtius Rufus repeatedly in this regard—and we can also feel the presence of Machiavelli. So Spinoza teaches by the use of examples coming from history, a method suited to the generally educated reader, rather than by arguing broad philosophic points abstractly and systematically as he does in his philosophic works. Yet the history he draws from, rather than that of the Romans or Greeks, is that of the biblical Jews or Hebrews of the Bible. Thus he implicitly treats the Bible as a secular document, analogous to the classical histories, drawing political, not what we would call religious or spiritual, lessons from it.

In Spinoza's case the evidence is less direct than it is for Maimonides that he deliberately uses contradiction to hide his meaning, and perhaps as a result, the scholarly controversy is perhaps even more heated. Rather than jump into the scholarly fray, I'll simply recommend the following procedure to the reader of the Tractatus: Spinoza redefines important terms throughout the book, for example, divine, spirit, Word of God, blessedness, salvation, and divine 'providence.' When you see such a redefinition, write it down and apply it wherever else you see that term, either earlier or later in the text. You must systematically replace your own understanding of the word, often the standard meaning of it, with Spinoza's redefinition. In that way, with that kind of close and careful reading, you will grasp Spinoza's intent.

Despite the precautions that Spinoza took to cushion the reception of the Tractatus, when it was published in 1670, it was widely vilified. Spinoza was branded an atheist, and the language used to describe him even by some venerable contemporary theologians and important clerics would, even today, have to be bleeped on television. The scandalized reactions not only continued during Spinoza's lifetime but continued over generations and throughout Europe. Spinoza and the Tractatus were not only vilified by conservative theologians but met with the heated denunciations of even major Enlightenment figures, such as Pierre Bayle (himself a religious skeptic and an escapee from religious persecution from France to the Netherlands), who devoted an entire volume of his famous Historical and Critical Dictionary to Spinoza, and later of Voltaire.

The unanticipated storm over the Tractatus led Spinoza to withhold the publication of the Ethics, which was published only soon after Spinoza's early death from silicosis in 1677. Spinoza had hoped that the Tractatus would smooth the way for the Ethics, but it clearly had just the opposite effect. Perhaps Spinoza, despite his warning to himself to be ever wary of the depth and breadth of human irrationality encapsulated in his motto, caute (Caution!), underestimated the power of the emotional fanaticism his own critique of religion could arouse. Spinoza was not rehabilitated in European educated opinion until his rediscovery by prominent nineteenth-century German literary figures and philosophers, but theirs was not the Spinoza of the Tractatus. Their Spinoza was derived from a Romantic reading of the Ethics, a reading that inspired Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, and Schelling, and those they influenced. Through them the popular image of Spinoza was forged anew, this time as the lone thinker intoxicated with nature. That Spinoza is still with us but it is not the Spinoza of the Tractatus. The real Spinoza of the Ethics is not as distant from the Spinoza of the Tractatus as the Romantics imagined. For in both his great works Spinoza is concerned with the emotions, and particularly with the emotional hold upon us of our most fanatical and irrational feelings. Notice how Spinoza begins the Tractatus with an analysis of how fear can cause people to act in fanatical and other irrational ways. He is concerned also that fear, cleverly exploited by political power, can induce subordination in people. These are themes that are central to the Tractatus but also important in the Ethics and analyzed in that text down to their deepest causes in nature. The importance of Spinoza's Tractatus and its relevance to the present moment of rising religious fanaticisms all over the world could not be greater.

A COMMENT ON THE ELWES TRANSLATION

The importance of the Elwes translation has been to bring the works of Spinoza to an English-speaking public. Elwes was not a professional Latinist. For those wishing to further their understanding of Spinoza, there are several more technically precise translations into English available. They are noted in the suggested reading.

Heidi Morrison Ravven, Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College, has written extensively on Spinoza, the imagination and the emotions, Spinoza and Jewish philosophy, and Spinoza and recent neuroscience. She is currently working on a long-term project funded by the Ford Foundation on Rethinking Ethics and American Pluralism through Spinoza.

PREFACE

MEN WOULD NEVER BE SUPERSTITIOUS, IF THEY COULD GOVERN ALL their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, overconfident, and vain.

This as a general fact I suppose everyone knows, though few, I believe, know their own nature; no one can have lived in the world without observing that most people, when in prosperity, are so over-brimming with wisdom (however inexperienced they may be), that they take every offer of advice as a personal insult, whereas in adversity they know not where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passerby. No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes will raise them to hope, or plunge them into despair—if anything happens during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have proved abortive a hundred times before) style it a lucky or unlucky omen. Anything which excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.

Thus it is brought prominently before us, that superstition's chief victims are those persons who greedily covet temporal advantages; they it is, who (especially when they are in danger, and cannot help themselves) are wont with prayers and womanish tears to implore help from God: upbraiding Reason as blind, because she cannot show a sure path to the shadows they pursue, and rejecting human wisdom as vain; but believing the phantoms of imagination, dreams, and other childish absurdities, to be the very oracles of Heaven. As though God had turned away from the wise, and written His decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear. If anyone desire an example, let him take Alexander, who only began superstitiously to seek guidance from seers, when he first learnt to fear fortune in the passes of Sysis (Curtius, v. 4); whereas after he had conquered Darius he consulted prophets no more, till a second time frightened by reverses. When the Scythians were provoking a battle, the Bactrians had deserted, and he himself was lying sick of his wounds, he once more turned to superstition, the mockery of human wisdom, and bade Aristander, to whom he confided his credulity, inquire the issue of affairs with sacrificed victims. Very numerous examples of a like nature might be cited, clearly showing the fact, that only while under the dominion of fear do men fall a prey to superstition; that all the portents ever invested with the reverence of misguided religion are mere phantoms of dejected and fearful minds; and lastly, that prophets have most power among the people, and are most formidable to rulers, precisely at those times when the state is in most peril. I think this is sufficiently plain to all, and will therefore say no more on the subject.

The origin of superstition above given affords us a clear reason for the fact, that it comes to all men naturally, though some refer its rise to a dim notion of God, universal to mankind, and also tends to show, that it is no less inconsistent and variable than other mental hallucinations and emotional impulses, and further that it can only be maintained by hope, hatred, anger, and deceit; since it springs, not from reason, but solely from the more powerful phases of emotion. Furthermore, we may readily understand how difficult it is, to maintain in the same course men prone to every form of credulity. For, as the mass of mankind remains always at about the same pitch of misery, it never assents long to any one remedy, but is always best pleased by a novelty which has not yet proved illusive.

This element of inconsistency has been the cause of many terrible wars and revolutions; for, as Curtius well says (lib. iv. chap. 10): The mob has no ruler more potent than superstition, and is easily led, on the plea of religion, at one moment to adore its kings as gods, and anon to execrate and abjure them as humanity's common bane. Immense pains have therefore been taken to counteract this evil by investing religion, whether true or false, with such pomp and ceremony, that it may rise superior to every shock, and be always observed with studious reverence by the whole people—a system which has been brought to great perfection by the Turks, for they consider even controversy impious, and so clog men's minds with dogmatic formulas, that they leave no room for sound reason, not even enough to doubt with.

But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; yet in a free state no more mischievous expedient could be planned or attempted. Wholly repugnant to the general freedom are such devices as enthralling men's minds with prejudices, forcing their judgment, or employing any of the weapons of quasi-religious sedition; indeed, such seditions only spring up, when law enters the domain of speculative thought, and opinions are put on trial and condemned on the same footing as crimes, while those who defend and follow them are sacrificed, not to public safety, but to their opponents' hatred and cruelty. If deeds only could be made the grounds of criminal charges, and words were always allowed to pass free, such seditions would be divested of every semblance of justification, and would be separated from mere controversies by a hard and fast line.

Now, seeing that we have the rare happiness of living in a republic, where everyone's judgment is free and unshackled, where each may worship God as his conscience dictates, and where freedom is esteemed before all things dear and precious, I have believed that I should be undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task, in demonstrating that not only can such freedom be granted without prejudice to the public peace, but also, that without such freedom, piety cannot flourish nor the public peace be secure.

Such is the chief conclusion I seek to establish in this treatise; but, in order to reach it, I must first point out the misconceptions which, like scars of our former bondage, still disfigure our notion of religion, and must expose the false views about the civil authority which many have most impudently advocated, endeavouring to turn the mind of the people, still prone to heathen superstition, away from its legitimate rulers, and so bring us again into slavery. As to the order of my treatise I will speak presently, but first I will recount the causes which led me to write.

I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith. Matters have long since come to such a pass, that one can only pronounce a man Christian, Turk, Jew, or heathen, by his general appearance and attire, by his frequenting this or that place of worship, or employing the phraseology of a particular sect—as for manner of life, it is in all cases the same. Inquiry into the cause of this anomaly leads me unhesitatingly to ascribe it to the fact, that the ministries of the Church are regarded by the masses merely as dignities, her offices as posts of emolument—in short, popular religion may be summed up as respect for ecclesiastics. The spread of this misconception inflamed every worthless fellow with an intense desire to enter holy orders, and thus the love of diffusing God's religion degenerated into sordid avarice and ambition. Every church became a theatre, where orators, instead of church teachers, harangued, caring not to instruct the people, but striving to attract admiration, to bring opponents to public scorn, and to preach only novelties and paradoxes, such as would tickle the ears of their congregation. This state of things necessarily stirred up an amount of controversy, envy, and hatred, which no lapse of time could appease; so that we can scarcely wonder that of the old religion nothing survives but its outward forms (even these, in the mouth of the multitude, seem rather adulation than adoration of the Deity), and that faith has become a mere compound of credulity and prejudices—aye, prejudices too, which degrade man from rational being to beast, which completely stifle the power of judgment between true and false, which seem, in fact, carefully fostered for the purpose of extinguishing the last spark of reason! Piety, great God! and religion are become a tissue of ridiculous mysteries; men, who flatly despise reason, who reject and turn away from understanding as naturally corrupt, these, I say, these of all men, are thought, O lie most horrible! to possess light from on High. Verily, if they had but one spark of light from on High, they would not insolently rave, but would learn to worship God more wisely, and would be as marked among their fellows for mercy as they now are for malice; if they were concerned for their opponents' souls, instead of for their own reputations, they would no longer fiercely persecute, but rather be filled with pity and compassion.

Furthermore, if any Divine light were in them, it would appear from their doctrine. I grant that they are never tired of professing their wonder at the profound mysteries of Holy Writ; still I cannot discover that they teach anything but speculations of Platonists and Aristotelians, to which (in order to save their credit for Christianity) they have made Holy Writ conform; not content to rave with the Greeks themselves, they want to make the prophets rave also; showing conclusively, that never even in sleep have they caught a glimpse of Scripture's Divine nature. The very vehemence of their admiration for the mysteries plainly attests, that their belief in the Bible is a formal assent rather than a living faith: and the fact is made still more apparent by their laying down beforehand, as a foundation for the study and true interpretation of Scripture, the principle that it is in every passage true and divine. Such a doctrine should be reached only after strict scrutiny and thorough comprehension of the Sacred Books (which would teach it much better, for they stand in need of no human fictions), and not be set up on the threshold, as it were, of inquiry.

As I pondered over the facts that the light of reason is not only despised, but by many even execrated as a source of impiety, that human commentaries are accepted as divine records, and that credulity is extolled as faith; as I marked the fierce controversies of philosophers raging in Church and State, the source of bitter hatred and dissension, the ready instruments of sedition and other ills innumerable, I determined to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly therein set down. With these precautions I constructed a method of Scriptural interpretation, and thus equipped proceeded to inquire—What is prophecy? In what sense did God reveal Himself to the prophets, and why were these particular men chosen by Him? Was it on account of the sublimity of their thoughts about the Deity and nature, or was it solely on account of their piety? These questions being answered, I was easily able to conclude, that the authority of the prophets has weight only in matters of morality, and that their speculative doctrines affect us little.

Next I inquired, why the Hebrews were called God's chosen people, and discovering that it was only because God had chosen for them a certain strip of territory, where they might live peaceably and at ease, I learnt that the Law revealed by God to Moses was merely the law of the individual Hebrew state, therefore that it was binding on none but Hebrews, and not even on Hebrews after the downfall of their nation. Further, in order to ascertain, whether it could be concluded from Scripture, that the human understanding is naturally corrupt, I inquired whether the Universal Religion, the Divine Law revealed through the prophets and Apostles to the whole human race, differs from that which is taught by the light of natural reason, whether miracles can take place in violation of the laws of nature, and if so, whether they imply the existence of God more surely and clearly than events, which we understand plainly and distinctly through their immediate natural causes.

Now, as in the whole course of my investigation I found nothing taught expressly by Scripture, which does not agree with our understanding, or which is repugnant thereto, and as I saw that the prophets taught nothing, which is not very simple and easily to be grasped by all, and further, that they clothed their teaching in the style, and confirmed it with the reasons, which would most deeply move the mind of the masses to devotion towards God, I became thoroughly convinced, that the Bible leaves reason absolutely free, that it has nothing in common with philosophy, in fact, that revelation and philosophy stand on totally different footings. In order to set this forth categorically and exhaust the whole question, I point out the way in which the Bible should be interpreted, and show that all knowledge of spiritual questions should be sought from it alone, and not from the objects of ordinary knowledge. Thence I pass on to indicate the false notions, which have arisen from the fact that the multitude—ever prone to superstition, and caring more for the shreds of antiquity than for eternal truths—pays homage to the Books of the Bible, rather than to the Word of God. I show that the Word of God has not been