The Law in the Gospel
The Old and New Testaments are an exposition of a long discipline of obedience, this makes their power, and those who study them without preconceived ideas discover this.
Spinoza distinguishes between the spiritual needs of the majority of men and the minority, and between the religions which suit the one and the other. But all men, without exception, must acquire the religion demanded by all, that is practical religion, which consists in keeping those commandments given us in the sacred books. This obedience serves to weaken passions; in the same proportion as man attains this end, so a light, ever increasing in purity, illumines his intellect, and so much the more does he comprehend that true happiness is the result of virtue. Few men go beyond this, or—without any other guide than their reason—experience that intellectual love of God, inseparable from the true knowledge of God and man; this love, when entirely disinterested, yields a joy which is not the reward of virtue, since it is one with virtue itself.
The divine law was in the world, as St John said, before the coming of Moses or of Christ, but the world as a whole was ignorant of it; reason leads us to it, and reason tells us that it leads to the highest beatitude, and that those who follow it will not need to seek any other.
But there is one thing of which reason cannot tell us; this—that the moral effect of this universal law, which is obeyed, not because it is true, necessary and perfect, but simply because Moses commanded the observance of it, by reason of the covenant made by God, and because Christ commands it in His own name, is the power of leading to this beatitude, which those obtain who strive after the spirit of Christ, perceiving in this law of God, absolute truth. This reason alone could not have taught us, it is not written in the human heart, this we learn in the Bible.
That obedience only to a truth should inevitably produce certain results can hardly be asserted with mathematical certainty, since mathematical results are the effects only of those things which can be deduced from the elements contained in them; but a moral certainty we can feel, and this was the privilege and portion of the prophets; and it was possible, as it was not contrary to reason.