THE SOUL IMMORTAL.

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it thinks, the more it is, that is, the more it has of perfection and blessedness. True thought is in adequate ideas. All others are inadequate and mutilated, leading to error and sorrow, and making men slaves to their appetites and passions. The life of reason is the most perfect life, because it is the life in God. The supreme life of the soul is the knowledge of God.'*

Spinoza's object was the same as that proposed by Des Cartes -to prove that religion is the highest reason; that the doctrines of religion are in accordance with reason, that is to say, rational. Starting with the existence of God, which he held for a primary truth, he went on to demonstrate the immortality of the soul. This was involved in the definition of soul. It is an idea: a thought of God's. As such it is an eternal mode of the eternal understanding of God. It does not belong to time. Its existence is as immutable as that of its Divine Object. It does not perceive things under the form of duration, that is, successively and imperfectly, but under the form of eternity, that is, in their immanent relation to substance. The human soul is thus a pure intelligence entirely formed of adequate ideas, entirely active and altogether happy; in a word, altogether in God. But the absolute necessity of the Divine nature requires every soul in its turn to have its career in time, and partake the vicissitudes of the body, which is appointed for it. From eternal life it falls into the darkness of the terrestrial state. Detached in some way from the bosom of God it is exiled into nature. Henceforth, subjected to the laws of time and change, it perceives things only in their temporal and changing aspect, and with difficulty seizes the eternal bond which binds the entire universe and itself to God. It does, however, seize it, and by a lofty effort, surpassing the weight of the corporeal chain, it finds again the infinite good which it had lost. The human soul is thus immortal. The senses, memory, and imagination being passive faculties appropriated to a successive and changing existence,

DEFINITIONS from the fourth book-the subject of which is the bondage of man, or the power of the Passions:

I understand by good that which we certainly know to be useful to us. By evil that which we certainly know hinders us possessing a certain good.

PROPOSITION.

Men are constantly and necessarily in conformity with nature only, so far as they live according to the counsels of reason.

PROPOSITIONS from the fifth book-the subject of which is Liberty :

The more we comprehend particular things, the more we comprehend God. The soul can imagine nothing, nor remember anything past, but on condition that the body continues to exist.

perish with the body. Then too the soul loses all its inadequate ideas, which were the cause of the passions, prejudices, and errors which enslaved it and led it astray while it was in the body. Reason, which enables us to perceive things under the form of eternity, alone subsists. "The human soul cannot enThere remains something of it

tirely perish with the body. which is eternal.'*

We have come from God. Once we existed in the bosom of God, and loved Him with an eternal love. Our souls fell from eternity into time. They came into material bodies. We have reminiscences of our former blessedness in that reason which tells us that God is the highest good: the only true joy of the soul. When the body is dissolved, and that order of things which is constituted by the union of our souls with bodies is ended, then we shall find the good which we lost, or rather which was for a time hidden from our eyes. This is life eternal; this is true blessedness, to find, in the contemplation of the perfect Being, the satisfaction of the desire of our souls. Those who now live rationally have a foretaste of this blessedness, which they shall enjoy in its full fruition when all dies but reason, and God shall love us in Himself, and we shall perfectly love God in us.

Spinoza pursues, throughout, the object which Des Cartes had proposed to show the reasonableness of religion; yea, to demonstrate that religion is reason itself, and that reason is religion. The highest life is the most rational, and that must be religious. For what is reason? That which gives us such clear and adequate ideas of God, of ourselves, and of the eternal relations of the universe, that we cannot do otherwise than love God, and all mankind. And to be thus guided by reason is to preserve and increase our being. It is to nourish the eternal life

*Nevertheless, there is necessarily in God, an idea which expresses the essence of such and such a human body under the character of eternity.

That the idea which expresses the essence of the body under the character of eternity is a mode determind by thought which relates it to the soul and which is necessarily eternal. Yet it is impossible for us to remember that we have existed before the body, since no trace of that existence can be found in the body, and that eternity can be measured by time or have any relation to it, and yet we feel, we prove, that we are eternal. Although we do not remember to have existed before the body, we feel that our soul, so far as it includes the essence of the body under the character of eternity is eternal, and this eternal existence cannot be measured by time, or stretched into duration.

Our soul, so far as it knows its body and itself under the character of eternity, possesses necessarily the knowledge of God, and knows it is in God, and is conceived by God.

within us. Our being is in thought, and the very essence of thought is the idea of God. To know God is then our highest knowledge. To love Him is our highest joy. And this participation in blessedness, leads us to desire that other men may enjoy it too. It then becomes the foundation of morality; the only true source of all good in men. The Divine law is thus a natural law; the foundation of religious instruction; the eternal original of which all the various religions are but changing and perishable copies. This law, according to Spinoza, has four chief characters. First, it is alone truly universal, being founded on the very nature of man, so far as he is guided by reason. In the second place, it reveals and establishes itself, having no need of being supported by histories and traditions. Thirdly, it does not require ceremonies, but works. Actions which we merely call good because they are commanded by some institutions, are but symbols of what is really good. They are incapable of perfecting our understanding. We do not put them among works that are truly excellent among such as are the offspring of reason, and the natural fruits of a sound mind. The fourth character of the Divine law, is that it carries with it the reward of its observance, for the happiness of man, is to know and to love God with a soul perfectly free; with a pure and an enduring love; while the chastisement of those who break it is a privation of these blessings, slavery to the flesh, and a soul always restless and troubled.

Spinoza starting with reason, and the reasonableness of religion, of necessity came into collision with those parts of Christianity which are at present above our reason. While he could aim a deadly blow at superstition, and recommend the general precepts and doctrines of Christianity, he was yet compelled to put aside, or relegate to the category of impossibles, other doctrines or events which did not seem according to reason. There was no Revelation for him in the ordinary conventional sense of that word. Revelation was in the human soul; in the light that God Himself is kindling in men's hearts. What we call revelation is but the gathering up of the greatest and most important

The intellectual love of the soul for God, is the very love which God has for Himself, not only so far as He is infinite, but so far as His nature can be expressed by the essence of the human soul, considered under the character of eternity; in other words, the intellectual love of the soul for God is a part of the infinite love which God has for Himself.

From this it follows that so far as God loves Himself He also loves men, and consequently the intellectual love of God for men, and the intellectual love of God, are only one and the same thing.

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JESUS CHRIST IS THE TRUTH.

truths which God has revealed to the human race. But they were revealed through the human mind in the natural order of things, and while our reason endorses them as rational, we are not compelled to believe that the wisest of those, through whom they were made, were free from the errors and prejudices of the age in which they lived.

Revelation or prophecy Spinoza defines as a certain knowledge of anything revealed to men by God.' He immediately adds that from this definition, it follows that natural knowledge may also be called prophecy, for the things which we know by the natural light depend entirely on the knowledge of God, and His eternal decrees. The difference between natural knowledge and divine is one of degree. The Divine passes the bounds which terminate natural knowledge. It cannot have its cause in human nature, considered in itself, but there is a Light which lightens every man who cometh into the world, and we know by this that we dwell in God, and God in us, because He hath made us to participate of His Holy Spirit. The prophets, by whom the Scripture revelations were made, had imaginations which reached after higher truths. They saw visions that were not given to other men; visions of which they themselves did not always understand the meaning. But to Jesus was given an open vision. He saw and comprehended truth as it is in God. He was not a mere medium of the divine revelation; He was the revelation, the truth itself. "Though it is easy' says Spinoza' to comprehend that God can communicate Himself immediately to men, since without any corporeal intermediary, He communicates His essence to our souls, it is nevertheless true, that a man, to comprehend by the sole force of his soul, truths which are not contained in the first principles of human knowledge, and cannot be deduced from them, ought to possess a soul, very superior to ours and much more excellent. Nor do I believe that any one ever attained this eminent degree of perfection except Jesus Christ, to whom were immediately revealed without words, and without visions, these decrees of God which lead men to salvation. God manifested Himself to the apostles by the soul of Jesus Christ, as he had done to Moses by a voice in the air, and therefore we can say that the voice of Christ, like that which Moses heard, is the voice of God. We can also say in the same sense that the wisdom of God, I mean a wisdom more than human, was clothed with our nature in the person of Christ, and that Jesus Christ was the way of Salvation." Spinoza's relation to Christianity is a vexed question

among his critics. In this passage he evidently presents Jesus Christ as the very incarnation of truth, which is the wisdom of God, and which, with the Greek Fathers, was God Himself, or God the Son. He openly admitted that he did not hold the ordinary belief concerning God; the Trinity; and the doctrine of the incarnation. In a letter to a friend he wrote, "To show you openly my opinion, I say that it is not absolutely necessary for salvation, to know Christ after the flesh; but it is altogether otherwise if we speak of the Son of God, that is, of the eternal wisdom of God, which is manifested in all things, and chiefly in the human soul and most of all in Jesus Christ. Without this wisdom, no one can come to the state of happiness for it is this alone which teaches what is true and what is false, good and evil. As to what certain churches add that God took human nature, I expressly declare that I do not know what they say, and to speak frankly, I confess that they seem to me, to speak a language as absurd as if one were to say that a circle has taken the nature of a triangle." He calls this the doctrine of certain modern Christians, intimating that there was no such doctrine in the early Church. God dwelt in the tabernacle, and in the cloud, but He did not take the nature either of the cloud or the tabernacle. He dwelt in Jesus Christ as He dwelt in the temple but with greater fulness for in Jesus Christ was the highest manifestation, and this S. John wished to declare with all possible explicitness when he said, that the Word was made flesh. Spinoza's doctrine will be best understood by comparing it with what the Alexandrian Fathers have written on the Trinity and the incarnation of the Word or Wisdom of God. The fall of man was explained by Spinoza as we have more than once seen it explained by others. Man lost his liberty by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam having found Eve discovered that there was nothing in nature more useful to him then her. But as he found that the beasts were like himself he began to imitate their passions and to lose his liberty. He came under the dominion of his passions, which is the real bondage of the soul. To be freed from this dominion is liberty.† Redemption, or the restoration of this liberty, began immediately after the fall. The patriarchs were guided by the spirit of

It is this which enables us clearly to understand in what our salvation, our blessedness, in other words, our liberty, consists: namely, in a constant and · eternal love for God, or if people wish it in the love of God for us. The Holy Scripture gives to this love, this blessedness, the name of glory, and that rightly. We may refer this love to the soul or to God, in either case it is always that eternal peace which is not truly distinguished from glory.