Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/233

 created in the image of God, but emphatically forget the doctrine of the grace of God, of justification through Christ, and, above all, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, who leads the church into all truth, and abides for ever in His church. The grand present day cry raised against this truth is—Pantheism. If, however, the be knowledge of the infinite content, in such sort that this form itself belongs to the infinite content, then the content is directly adequate to the form. It is present, not in finite existence, but in absolute manifestation of itself, and this is not Pantheism, for it has before it the existence of the divine in a particular form. If man, on the other hand, be immediately God, that is to say, if he as this individual unit knows God, that is the doctrine of Pantheism. The Church, on the contrary, declares that it is only through the abrogation of this naturalness (which abrogation, in its natural form, is seen in natural death) that man becomes united with God. If we grasp what is taught by the Church, in the Notion, in thought, the speculative determinations which have been specified will be found to be involved in it; and if there are theologians who cannot, by grasping them in thought, follow out such doctrines which undoubtedly have to do with the innermost depths of the divine Essence, they ought in that case to let them alone. Theology is the comprehension or understanding of religious content. Such theologians ought therefore to acknowledge that they cannot comprehend it, and should not seek to criticise the comprehension of it, and least of all should they apply to it such terms as Pantheism, &c.

The older theologians had the most thorough grasp of this divine depth, while among the Protestants of the present day, whose entire resources consist of criticism and history, philosophy and science have been wholly neglected. Meister Eckardt, a Dominican monk, in speaking of this innermost element, says, in one of his sermons, among other things, the following: “The eye