Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/244

 and will. Man is not like a stone here, so that it is not a case of grace only operating in a practical way, while man forsooth is the passive material, without participating in any way in what goes on. The end to be reached rather is that through me the Divine should come to be in me, and that toward which the action, which is my action, tends, is the renunciation in general of that self of mine, which no longer retains itself for its own sake. Such is the twofold active movement which constitutes worship, and thus is its end the existence of God in man.

I am to make myself such that the Spirit may dwell in me, that I may be spiritual. This is my work, the human work, and that same work is God’s, regarded from His side. He moves toward man, and is in man through man’s exaltation of himself. What seems to be my act is then God’s, and conversely, too, what seems His is mine. This, it is true, runs counter to the merely moral standpoint of Kant and Fichte; there goodness still remains something which has yet to be brought forth, to be realised, and continues, too, to be something that ought-to-be, as if it were not already essentially there. Here, then, is a world outside of me, which as forsaken of God waits for me to bring the end, the good into it. The sphere of moral action is limited. In religion, on the contrary, goodness, reconciliation, is absolutely complete, and exists on its own account; the Divine unity of the spiritual and the natural world is presupposed—the particular self-consciousness being regarded as belonging to the latter—and the whole question concerns only myself and has reference to myself, and centres in this, that I lay aside my subjectivity and take and have my share in that work which eternally completes itself. According to this, goodness is in no sense something which merely ought to be, an ideal, but is, on the contrary, Divine power, eternal truth.

In like manner, if in the present day it is felt to be