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 fullv 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.
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