More sagacious than many so-called practical men, our speculator sees perfectly well that the only durable governments are the reasonable, and that the only reasonable governments are the constitutional. Far from absorbing the individual in the state, he gives him solid guarantees against the state's omnipotence. He is no revolutionary, but a moderate; he transforms, explains, but does not destroy. His God is not indeed one who takes pleasure in ceremonies, sacrifices, odor of incense, yet Spinoza has no design whatever to overthrow religion; he entertains a profound veneration for Christianity, a tender and a sincere respect. The supernatural, however, has no meaning in his doctrine. According to his principles, anything out of Nature would be out of being, and therefore inconceivable. Prophets, revealers, have been men like others:
"It is not thinking, but dreaming," he says, "to hold that prophets have had a human body and not a human soul, and that consequently their knowledge and their sensations have been of a different nature from ours. . . . The prophetic faculty has not been the dowry of one people only—the Jewish people. The quality of Son of God has not been the privilege of one man only. . . . To state my views openly, I tell you that it is not absolutely necessary to know Christ after the flesh; but it is otherwise when we speak of that Son of God, that is to say, that eternal Wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all things, and more fully in the human soul, and above all in Jesus Christ. Without this wisdom no one can attain the state of beatitude, since it alone teaches us what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong. . . . As to what certain Churches have added, . . . I have expressly warned you that I do not know what they mean, and, to speak frankly, I may confess that they seem to me to be using the same sort of language as if they spoke of a circle assuming the nature of a square."
Was not this exactly what Schleiermacher said? And as to Spi-
