Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/256

 has laid down those conditions, has created them. A further leading idea is that this Will which decrees the calamity, acts in accordance with the moral connection which implies that it goes well or ill with a man or with a people because that man or that people has merited what happens as their desert. The course of Nature is on this account interrupted in reference to the purposes of men, and thus Nature appears as antagonistic to their advantage and prosperity. In the case of such severance, what is requisite is the re-establishment of the unity of the divine Will with the ends of men. Worship thus takes the form of propitiation or atonement. This is brought about by means of acts of repentance and expiation, by sacrifice and ceremonies, in which man makes it manifest that he is in earnest as regards the renunciation of his particular will.

The view that God is the ruling power over Nature—that Nature depends upon a higher Will—is what really lies at the basis of this standpoint. The only question which presents itself here is as to how far the divine Will is represented in natural events—as to how it is to be recognised in these. It is taken for granted from this point of view that the power of Nature is not natural only, but contains within itself purposes which, as such, are foreign to it—namely, purposes of goodness, which concern the welfare of man, and that that welfare is dependent upon these purposes. We too recognise this as true. But the well-being is of an abstract, universal sort. When people speak of their well-being, they have particular ends which are wholly their own as apart from others, and thus they comprise their well-being within limited, natural existence. But if a man descends in this manner from the divine Will to particular ends, he descends into the realm of finiteness and contingency. The religious feeling, the pious thought that individual misfortune is dependent upon the Good, rises also, it is true, direct from the individual up to God, to the Universal,