Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/297

 For it is the atonement, the reconciliation (call it what you please, and bring it before your mind in the way most easy to you), to which we must come, if we mean to follow the facts of the religious consciousness. Here, as everywhere, the felt contradiction implies, and is only possible through, an unity above the discord: take that away, and the discord goes. The antithesis of the sinful and divine will is implicitly their union; and that union, in the subject, requires only to be made explicit, for the subject, by thought and will.

But for the subject it is not yet explicit; and it is only we who reflect upon the religious consciousness, that see the matter thus. That consciousness as such has not the insight that the divine will is the will of its own true and inmost self: I may know that, as a fact, in God there is the unity of the two natures; but for me God is (here at least) only not my self; the divine is an object between which and me there is a chasm; my inner self may desire it, but can only desire it as an other and a beyond. True