Page:Essence of Christianity (1854).djvu/215

 intellectual pleasures of life; but religion knows nothing of the joys of the thinker, of the investigator of Nature, of the artist. The idea of the universe is wanting to it, the consciousness of the really infinite, the consciousness of the species. God only is its compensation for the poverty of life, for the want of a substantial import, which the true life of rational contemplation presents in unending fulness. God is to religion the substitute for the lost world,—God is to it in the stead of pure contemplation, the life of theory.

That which we have designated as the practical or subjective view is not pure, it is tainted with egoism, for therein I have relation to a thing only for my own sake; neither is it self-sufficing, for it places me in relation to an object above my own level. On the contrary, the theoretic view is joyful, self-sufficing, happy; for here the object calls forth love and admiration; in the light of the free intelligence it is radiant as a diamond, transparent as a rock-crystal. The theoretic view is aesthetic, whereas the practical is unaesthetic. Religion therefore finds in God a compensation for the want of an aesthetic view. To the religious spirit the world is nothing in itself; the admiration, the contemplation of it is idolatry; for the world is a mere piece of mechanism. Hence in religion it is God that serves as the object of pure, untainted, i.e., theoretic or aesthetic contemplation. God is the existence to which the religious man has an objective relation; in God the object is contemplated by him for its own sake. God is an end in himself; therefore in religion he has the significance which in the theoretic view belongs to the object in general. The general being of theory is to religion a special being. It is true that in religion man, in his relation to God, has relation to his own wants as well in a higher as in the lower sense: “Give us this day our daily bread;” but God can satisfy all wants of man only because he in himself has no wants,—because he is perfect blessedness.