Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/236

 he says that it would have been better if God had given the Jews some definite instruction regarding the immortality of the soul, rather than to have taught them to go to the      (aller à la selle). Latrinæ thus become a content of faith (Deut. xxiii. 13-15).

The non-spiritual, from its very nature, is not a content which can belong to faith. If God speaks, it is spiritually, for Spirit reveals itself to Spirit alone.

In like manner theology has in recent times laid stress in connection with exegesis on the number of codices in which this or that disputed passage is to be found. Thus there is a passage in the New Testament which, according to the Greek text, reads, “God (Θς) blessed for evermore;” an old fragment of parchment found in Oxford, on the contrary, reads, “Who (Christ) blessed for evermore,” a difference occasioned by the stroke in the Θ. Now, however, it has been pointed out that the stroke shows through from the other side, &c.

If criticism of what we know concerning the nature of God takes to do with such things, then these are testimonies which are no testimonies at all. The content of religion is the eternal nature of God, not accidental and external things of this kind.

When Mendelssohn was asked to come over to the Christian religion, his reply was that his own religion did not require of him a faith in eternal truths, but only in certain laws, modes of action or ceremonial observances, and that he looked upon it as an advantage possessed by the Jewish religion that in it eternal truths are not presented for our acceptance, since for the finding of these reason is sufficient; those positive statutes he said had been established by God, whereas these eternal truths are the laws of nature, mathematical truths, &c.

We must indeed concede that they are eternal, but they are of very limited content, and are no content of eternal Spirit in and for itself. Religion, however, must contain nothing else but religion, and it should contain