 A similar practical function is served by stories of miracles. Scripture speaks in a language suited to affect the imagination of ordinary people and compel their obedience. Rather than appealing to the natural and real causes of all events, its authors sometimes narrate things in a way calculated to move people—particularly uneducated people—to devotion. “If Scripture were to describe the downfall of an empire in the style adopted by political historians, the common people would not be stirred …” Strictly speaking, however, miracles—understood as divinely caused departures from the ordinary course of nature—are impossible. Every event, no matter how extraordinary, has a natural cause and explanation. “Nothing happens in nature that does not follow from her laws” (TTP, chap. 6, G III.83/S 73). This is simply a consequence of Spinoza’s metaphysical doctrines. Miracles as traditionally conceived require a distinction between God and nature, something that Spinoza’s philosophy rules out in principle. Moreover, nature’s order is inviolable in so far as the sequence of events in nature is a necessary consequence of God’s attributes. There certainly are “miracles” in the sense of events whose natural causes are unknown to us, and which we therefore attribute to the powers of a supernatural God. But this is, once again, to retreat to superstition, “the bitter enemy of all true knowledge and true morality”.