If it was not love to God, what is love to Him?"
To the eighteenth proposition, "No one can hate God," there is a
scholium which shows that the problem of pain which Spinoza has left
unsolved must have occurred to him. "But some may object that if we
understand God to be the cause of all things, we do for that very reason
consider Him to be the cause of sorrow. But I reply that in so far as
we understand the causes of sorrow, it ceases to be a passion (Prop. 3,
pt. 5), that is to say (Prop. 59, pt. 3) it ceases to be a sorrow; and
therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of sorrow do we
rejoice." The third proposition of the fifth part which he quotes
merely proves that in so far as we understand passion it ceases to be a
passion. He replies to those "who ask why God has not created all men
in such a manner that they might be controlled by the dictates of reason
alone," {52} "Because to Him material was not wanting for the creation
of everything, from the highest down to the very lowest grade of
perfection; or, to speak more properly, because the laws of His nature
were so ample that they sufficed for the production of everything which
can be conceived by an infinite intellect.
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