Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/182

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160
SPINOZA.

offer a firm foothold, because the ordinances of nature are in them immediately represented? Must the natural order too not be founded on knowledge?

Is not the "becoming as a child" in will often impossible, while manly development of mind is a necessary and rational task? Must not the Talmud phrase have its weight, "Everything is a gift of God, except the fear of God?" Is not righteousness, which is attained by free thought, firmer and higher than love? What is the pure unrevealed thought which (Mark iv. 34) Christ "without a parable spake he unto them," and which is not given in the Evangelists?

It cannot be said how much of the spirit of opposition inculcated by his early education lay in these questions of the young thinker. He sought to free himself from it, and it came to him as a new revelation, that nowhere is it said that God has appeared to Christ, and has spoken to him with a voice and by signs, and so on, as in the Old Testament, but that he had immediately revealed himself to the Apostles in Christ. It was no revelation face to face as to Moses; not in an outward material form but from within.

Baruch knew the dogmas but ill which in the churches were associated with the events of the life and the teachings of wisdom here given. As the highest that Christ had said of himself it is written that, "he was a Temple of God," and John