uch 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.

But once for all (he adds), this aspect of things will remain
intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free
will remain unremoved.

And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these notions are as
false as Spinoza supposes them--if we have no power to be anything but
what we are, there neither is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and
what we call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God,
they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose him to have
willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or
cruelty, in the inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says, an
infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life being more than
none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and
the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. 'The Lord has
made all things for himself, even the wicked for the day of evil.'

The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear as we proceed. We
pause, however, to notice one difficulty of a metaphysical kind, which
is best disposed of in passing. Whatever obscurity may lie about the
thing which we call Time (philosophers not being able to agree what it
is, or whether properly it _is_ anything), the words past, present,
future, do undoubtedly convey some definite idea with them: things will
be which are not yet, and have been which are no longer. Now, if
everything which exists be a necessary mathematical consequence from the
nature or definition of the One Being, we cannot see how there can be
any time but the present, or how pa