No man has ever been more fiercely assailed or more enthusiastically defended. He has been denounced as an Atheist, a Pantheist, a blasphemer, and a fatalist. He has been upheld as a man eminently holy, a devout lover of God and of Christ.[187] Strange as it may seem, all these statements may be said to be true, though of course in different senses of the terms employed. For his Atheism—he seems to have been repelled, from the first, by the anthropomorphism of the Scriptures. It was not merely that God was there represented as possessed of an eye, a hand, etc., but as performing human actions, and influenced by human feelings. This was, in his view, absolute falsehood,[188] and the result was that he entirely rejected the God of revelation, and with Him, of course, the whole scheme of salvation as propounded in the Bible. Thus, then, he may be styled an Atheist. But, on the other hand, he constructed a system in which he affirmed that there exists but one substance, though with infinite attributes, and that this substance is God, who is either absolutely or in some modified form everything. The man who holds this cannot, it may be said, be an Atheist.[189] He is, again, no Pantheist, for he distinguishes between God and the universe;[190] yet the Christian Pantheists, as they may be called, claim him as their own, if not their founder. For the other charges, he no doubt affirms that, as nothing can be done, either directly or indirectly, except by God, all human acts, however wicked, may be said to be done by Him. This, according to our ideas, is both blasphemy and fatalism. Yet Spinoza attributes the _act_ only, not its moral wickedness, to God. When pressed to say whether the atrocious murder of Agrippina by Nero was due to God, he answered that it must be so due, so far as the act was concerned. But no act is good or evil in itself, and it was Nero’s evil mind, not God’s, that made the crime.[191] So with his fatalism. When he denies that man can act otherwise than as God wills, he appears to enunciate the plainest fatalism;[192] nor do I see how any other conclusion can logically be drawn from his premisses. But then Spinoza also teaches the beauty, the happiness, the necessity of holiness, of moral culture and self-discipline—things not merely inconsistent, but irreconcilable, with fatalism. He holds language which an apostle might endorse. ‘Justice and charity,’ he writes, ‘are the one infallible sign of the catholic faith, the genuine fruits of the Holy Spirit. Where they are found, there is Christ. Where they are wanting, Christ is not. For by the Spirit of Christ are we led to justice and charity.’ We are _led_—so, too, the Scriptures teach—_led_, if we will follow; not blindly driven, as the fatalist must believe.