ightened. "Then I will be guided by thee."

Spinoza smiled. Theology demanded perfect obedience, he thought, even
as philosophy demanded perfect knowledge, and both alike were saving;
for the believing mob, therefore, to which Religion meant subversion
of Reason, speculative opinions were to be accounted pious or impious,
not as they were true or false, but as they confirmed or shook the
believer's obedience.

Refusing her solicitous offers of a warm meal, and merely begging her
to buy him a loaf, he began to read his arrears of letters, picking
them up one after another with no eagerness but with calm interest.
His correspondence was varied. Some of it was taken up with criticisms
of his thought--products of a leisurely age when the thinkers of
Europe were a brotherhood, calling to each other across the dim
populations; some represented the more deferential doubts of disciples
or the elegant misunderstandings of philosophic dilettanti, some his
friendly intercourse with empirical physicists like Boyle or like
Huyghens, whose telescope had enlarged the philosopher's universe and
the thinker's God; there was an acknowledgment of the last scholium
from the young men's society of Amsterdam--"_Nil volentibus
arduum_,"--to which he sent his _Ethica_ in sections for discussion;
the metropolis which had banished him not being able to keep out his
thought. There was the usual demand for explanations of difficulties
from Blyenbergh, the Dort merchant and dignitary, accompanied this
time by a frightened yearning to fly back from Reason to Revelation.
And the letter with the seal of the Royal Society proved equally
faint-hearted, Oldenburg exhorting him not to say anything in his next
book to loosen the practice of virtue. "Dear Heinrich!" thought
Spinoza. "How curious are men! All these years since first we met at
Rijnburg he has been goading and spurring me on to give my deepest
thought to the world. 'Twas always, 'Cast out all fear of stirring up
against thee the pigmies of the time--Truth before all--let us spread
our sails to the wind of true Knowledge.' And now the tune is, 'O pray
be careful not to give sinners a handle!' Well, well, so I am not to
tell men that the highest law is self-imposed; that there is no virtue
even in virtues that do not express the essence of one's being. Oh,
and I am to beware particularly of telling them their wills are not
free, and that they only think so because they are conscious of their
d