Spinoza smiled tenderly. "Be guided by Dr. Cordes, not by me."
The goodwife was puzzled. "Dost thou then think I can be saved in Dr. Cordes' doctrine?" she asked anxiously.
"Yes, 'tis a very good doctrine, the Lutheran; doubt not thou wilt be saved in it, provided thou livest at peace with thy neighbors."
Her face brightened. "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 desires, but not of the causes of them. I fear me even Oldenburg does not understand that virtue follows as necessarily from adequate knowledge as from the definition of a triangle follows that its angles are equal to two right angles. I am, I suppose, also to let men continue to think that the planetary system revolves round them, and that thunders and lightnings wait upon their wrong-doing. Oldenburg has doubtless been frighted by the extravagances of the restored Court. But 'tis not my teachings will corrupt the gallants of Whitehall. Those who live best by Revelation through Tradition must cling to it, but Revelation through Reason is the living testament of God's word, nor so liable as the dead letter to be corrupted by human wickedness. Strange that it is thought no crime to speak unworthily of the mind, the true divine light, no impiety to believe that God would commit the treasure of the true record of Himself to any substance less enduring than the human heart."
A business letter made a diversion. It concerned the estate of the deceased medical student, Simon De Vries, a devoted disciple, who knowing himself doomed to die young, would have made the Master his heir, had not Spinoza, by consenting to a small annual subsidy, persuaded him to leave his property to his brother. The grateful heir now proposed to increase Spinoza's allowance to five hundred florins.
"How unreasonable people are!" mused the philosopher again. "I agreed once for all to accept three hundred, and I will certainly not be burdened with a stuiver more."
His landlady here entered with the loaf, and Spinoza, having paid and entered the sum in his household account-book, cut himself a slice, adding thereto some fragments of Dutch cheese from a package in his hand-bag.
"Thou didst leave some wine in the bottle," she reminded him.