. He had the courage to examine things for himself, and to give
his conclusion to the world. His life was unstained by an unjust act.
He did not, like Abraham, turn a woman from his door with his child in
her arms. He did not, like King David, murder a man that he might
steal his wife. He didn't believe in Scotch Presbyterianism. I don't
see how any good man ever did. Just think of going to the day of
judgment, if there is one, and standing up before God and admitting,
without a blush, that you have lived and died a Scotch Presbyterian. I
would expect the next sentence would be, "Depart ye cursed in
everlasting fire." Hume took the ground that a miracle could not be
used as evidence until you had proved the miracle. Of course that
excited the church. Why? Because they could not prove one of them.
How are you going to prove a miracle? Who saw it, and who would know a
devil if he did see him? Hume insisted that at the bottom of all good
is something useful; that after all, human happiness was the great
object, end, and aim of life; that virtue was not a termagant, with
sunken cheeks and frightful eyes, but was the most beautiful thing in
the world, and would strew your path with flowers from the cradle to
the grave. When he died they gave an account of how he had suffered.
They knew that the horrors of death would fall upon him, and that God
would get his revenge. But his attending physician said that his death
was the most serene and most perfectly tranquil of any he had ever
seen. Adam Smith said he was as near perfect as the frailty incident
to humanity would allow human being to be.

The next is Benedict Spinoza, a Jew, born at Amsterdam in 1768. He
studied theology, and asked the rabbis too many questions, and talked
too much about what he called reason, and finally he was excommunicated
from the synagogue, and became an outcast at the age of twenty-four,
without friends. Cursed, anathematized, bearing upon his forehead the
mark of Cain, he undertook to solve the problem of the universe. To
him the universe was one. The infinite embraced the all. That all was
God. He was right; the universe is all there is, and if God does not
exist in the universe He exists nowhere. The idea of putting some
little Jewish jehovah outside the universe, as if to say that from an
eternity of idleness he woke up one morning and thought he would make
something.

The propositions of Spinoza are as luminous as the stars