[Illustration: Reproduced (by permission) from _Spinoza's Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being_, by Professor A. Wolf (A. & C. Black).] {48} In 1673 the enlightened ruler of the Palatinate, a brother of Descartes's Princess Elizabeth, offered Spinoza a professorship at Heidelberg, with full liberty to teach his philosophy. But the pantheistic recluse wisely refused it. Even at the present day such teaching as his would meet with little mercy at Berlin, Cambridge, or Edinburgh. As it was, we have reason to believe that even in free Holland only a premature death saved him from a prosecution for blasphemy, and his great work the _Ethica_ could not with safety be published during his lifetime. It appeared anonymously among his posthumous works in November, 1677, without the name of the true place of publication on the title-page. Spinoza was for his time no less daring as a Biblical critic than as a metaphysician. His celebrated _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ has for its primary purpose to vindicate the freedom of scientific thought against ecclesiastical interference. And this he does by drawing a trenchant line of demarcation between the respective offices of religion and of philosophy. The business of the one is to form the character and to purify the heart, of the other to guide and inform the intellect. When religion undertakes to teach scientific truth the very ends for which it exists are defeated. When theological dogmatism gains control of the Churches the worst passions are developed under its influence. Instead of becoming lowly and charitable, men become disturbers of public order, grasping intriguers, bitter and censorious persecutors. The claims of theology to dictate our intellectual beliefs are not only mischievous, but totally invalid. They rest on the authority of the Bible as a revelation of God's will. But no such supernatural revelation ever was or could be given. Such violation of the order of nature as the miracles recorded in Scripture history would be impossible. And the narratives recording them are discredited by {49} the criticism which shows that various books of the Old Testament were not written by the men whose names they bear, but long after their time. As a Hebrew scholar Spinoza discusses the Jewish Scriptures in some detail, showing in particular that the Pentateuch is of a later date than Moses. His limited knowledge of Greek is offered as a reason for not handling the New Testament with equal freedom; but some contradictions are indicated as disallowing the infallibility claimed for it. At the same time the perfection of Christ's character is fully acknowledged and accepted as a moral revelation of God.