“If this be so,” then replies Blyenburg, “bad men fulfil God’s will as well as good.”

“It is true,” Spinoza answers, “they fulfil it, yet not as the good nor as well as the good, nor are they to be compared with them.  The better a thing or a person be, the more there is in him of God’s spirit, and the more he expresses God’s will; while the bad, being without that divine love which arises from the knowledge of God, and through which alone we are called (in respect of our understandings) his servants, are but as instruments in the hand of the artificer, —­they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in their service.”

Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical language the extreme doctrine of Grace:  and St. Paul, if we interpret his real belief by the one passage so often quoted, in which he compares us to “clay in the hands of the potter, who maketh one vessel to honour and another to dishonour,” may be accused with justice of having held the same opinion.  If Calvinism be pressed to its logical consequences, it either becomes an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves itself into the philosophy of Spinoza.  It is monstrous to call evil a positive thing, and to assert that God has predetermined it,—­to tell us that he has ordained what he hates, and hates what he has ordained.  It is incredible 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.