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he tone of fairness in Spinoza's manner, which compels most modern readers to believe in his honesty, and which presents so striking a contrast to the profaneness of subsequent scepticism, was then regarded as latent irony. The work on its appearance was suppressed by public authority; but it was frequently reprinted; and probably no work of free thought has ever had more influence, both on friends and foes, except the memorable work of Strauss in the present age. Not only have freethinkers been moulded by it, but it has produced lasting effects on those who have loved the faith of Christ. For Spinoza's work, if it did not create, gave expression to the tendency of which slight traces are perceptible elsewhere,(356) to recognize a large class of facts relating to the personal peculiarities of the inspired writers, and to the "human element," as it has been frequently called(357) in scripture, for which orthodox criticism has always subsequently had to find a place in a theory of inspiration; facts which first shook the mechanical or verbal theory, which, however piously intended, really had the effect of degrading the sacred writers almost into automatons, and regarded them as the pens instead of the penmen of the inspiring Spirit.(358) Indirectly the effect of Spinoza's thought was seen even in the English church. The difficulties which, through means of the English deists, it brought before the notice of the great apologetic writers of our own country, created the free, but perhaps not irreverent theory of revelation manifested in the churchmen of the last century,(359) which restricted the miraculous assistance of inspiration to the specific subject of the revealed communication, the religious element of scripture, and did not regard it as comprehending also the allusions, scientific or historic, extraneous to religion. Nor is it merely in respect of criticism that Spinoza's views have affected subsequent thought. The central principle of his philosophy, the pantheistic disbelief of miraculous interposition which has subsequently entered into so many systems, was first clearly applied to theology by him. Wherever the disbelief in the supernatural has arisen from _a priori_ considerations, and expressed itself, not with allegations of conscious fraud against the devotees of religion, nor with attempts to explain it away as merely mental realism, but with assertions that miracles are impossible, and nature an unchangin
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