"The scope of the book is political and practical, not speculative. The final thesis to which all its apparatus of criticism leads up is that 'in a free commonwealth it should be lawful for every man to think what he will and speak what he thinks:' a proposition which, with due reservations in behalf of decency and civil order—and the reservations were in no wise neglected by Spinoza—has now become common learning for the greater part of the civilized world. It looks to our modern eyes infinitely less bold than the arguments by which Spinoza maintained it. In order to gain his desired foundation for the freedom of speculative opinion, he plunges into an investigation of the nature of prophecy, the principles of Scriptural interpretation, and the true provinces of theology and philosophy, anticipating with wonderful grasp and insight almost every principle, and not a few of the results of the school of historical criticism which has arisen within the last two or three generations; a school which, through Lessing and his circle, is connected by direct descent with Spinoza. Taking the whole contents of the treatise together, we cannot be surprised that even in the United Provinces, then the freest country in the world, it was thought needful to issue it without the name of the author and with that of a fictitious printer at Hamburg."