took them up and developed them still
further. The result came speedily. Hobbes, for this and other sins, was
put under the ban, even by the political party which sorely needed him,
and was regarded generally as an outcast; while La Peyrere, for this and
other heresies, was thrown into prison by the Grand Vicar of Mechlin,
and kept there until he fully retracted: his book was refuted by seven
theologians within a year after its appearance, and within a generation
thirty-six elaborate answers to it had appeared: the Parliament of Paris
ordered it to be burned by the hangman.

In 1670 came an utterance vastly more important, by a man far greater
than any of these--the Tractatus Thrologico-Politicus of Spinoza.
Reverently but firmly he went much more deeply into the subject.
Suggesting new arguments and recasting the old, he summed up all with
judicial fairness, and showed that Moses could not have been the author
of the Pentateuch in the form then existing; that there had been glosses
and revisions; that the biblical books had grown up as a literature;
that, though great truths are to be found in them, and they are to be
regarded as a divine revelation, the old claims of inerrancy for them
can not be maintained; that in studying them men had been misled by
mistaking human conceptions for divine meanings; that, while prophets
have been inspired, the prophetic faculty has not been the dowry of the
Jewish people alone; that to look for exact knowledge of natural and
spiritual phenomena in the sacred books is an utter mistake; and that
the narratives of the Old and New Testaments, while they surpass those
of profane history, differ among themselves not only in literary merit,
but in the value of the doctrines they inculcate. As to the authorship
of the Pentateuch, he arrived at the conclusion that it was written long
after Moses, but that Moses may have written some books from which
it was compiled--as, for example, those which are mentioned in the
Scriptures, the Book of the Wars of God, the Book of the Covenant,
and the like--and that the many repetitions and contradictions in the
various books show a lack of careful editing as well as a variety of
original sources. Spinoza then went on to throw light into some other
books of the Old and New Testaments, and added two general statements
which have proved exceedingly serviceable, for they contain the germs of
all modern broad churchmanship; and the first of them gave the formu