le that we should be without power to obey
him except through his free grace, and yet be held
responsible for our failures when that grace has been
withheld. And it is idle to call a philosopher
sacrilegious who has but systematized the faith which so
many believe, and cleared it of its most hideous features.

At all events, Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises
no conclusions either from himself or from
his readers. We believe that logic has no business with
such questions; that the answer to them
lies in the conscience and not in the intellect,--that
it is practical merely, and not speculative. Spinoza
thinks otherwise; and he is at least true to the
guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him
with instances of horrid crime, such as bring home
to the heart the natural horror of it. He speaks of
Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks if God can
be called the cause of such an act as that.

"God," replies Spinoza, calmly, "is the cause of all things
which have reality. If you can show that evil, errors,
crimes express any real things, I agree readily that God is
the cause of them; but I conceive myself to have proved
that what constitutes the essence of evil is not a real thing
at all, and therefore that God cannot be the cause of it.
Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so far as it was a
positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother; and we
do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the
latter lay in his being without pity, without obedience,
without natural affection,--none of which things express any
positive essence, but the absence of it: and therefore God
was not the cause of these, although he was the cause of
the act and the intention.

"But once for all," he adds, "this aspect of things will
remain intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common
notions of free will remain unimproved."

And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these
notions are as false as he supposes them, and we have
no power to be anything but what we are, there neither
is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and what we
call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will
of God, they will no more impair his moral attributes
if we suppose him to have willed them, than the same
actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or cruelty, in the
inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says,
an infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life
being more than none, the meanest active dispo