Page:Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing.djvu/51

Rh attempt to gag him with a bribe was just the way best calculated to defeat their end. The only person who might have understood him, and whose intervention might have been successful, was Manasseh ben Israel. But he was in England then, on a mission to Cromwell. So threats were tried next; but the threat of excommunication had no effect on Spinoza. They had reached the end of their tether. The only course open to them, as they felt, was to put him under the ban. The feeling against him was, no doubt, so strong that a fanatic might have tried to do him some physical violence. And it may be that such an attack gave rise to the story of an attempt to assassinate Spinoza with a dagger, as he was leaving the Synagogue or the theatre. But there is no evidence of this, and the probability is decidedly against it.

Some time in June 1656 Spinoza was summoned before the court of Rabbis. Witnesses gave evidence of his heresies. Spinoza did not deny them—he tried to defend them. Thereupon he was excommunicated for a period of thirty days only—in the hope that he might still relent. But he did not. Accordingly, on the 27th July 1656, the final ban was pronounced upon him publicly in the Synagogue at Amsterdam. It was couched in the following terms:

&quot;The members of the council do you to wit that they have long known of the evil opinions and doings of Baruch de Espinoza, and have tried by divers methods and promises to make him turn from his evil ways. As they have not succeeded in effecting his improve ment, but, on the contrary, have received every day more information about the horrible heresies which he practised and taught, and other enormities which he has committed, and as they had many trustworthy witnesses of this, who have deposed and testified in the presence of the said Spinoza, and have convicted him; and as all this has been investigated in the presence of the Rabbis, it has been resolved with their consent that the said Espinoza should be anathematised and cut off from the people of Israel, and now he is anathematised with the following anathema:

&quot;'With the judgment of the angels and with that of the saints, with