Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/207

 God, that what they do they should do for the glory of God; that what they will should be in accordance with God’s will, and that their will should be a true will. This end has, at the same time, a limitation attached to it, and we have to consider in how far this limitation belongs to the essential nature of God, to what extent the conception, the ordinary idea of God itself, still contains this limitation.

If the ordinary or popular idea of God is limited, those further realisations of the divine conception in human consciousness are limited also. What is always most essential, but is also most difficult, is to understand the presence of the limitation in One, and to recognise that it is at the same time a limitation of the Idea, and in such a way that this latter does not yet appear as the absolute Idea.

God, as the one who determines Himself in His freedom and according to His freedom in such a way that what is spiritual is free, is wisdom; but this wisdom, this end, is at first merely end and wisdom in general. The wisdom of God, His self-determination, have not yet received their development. This development within the Idea of God is first found in the religion in which the nature of God is entirely revealed.

The defect of this Idea is that though God is the One, He is this in Himself only in the determinateness of His unity, and is not what eternally develops itself within itself. There is not as yet any developed determination. What we call wisdom is so far something abstract—abstract universality.

The real end which we have is the first end. It exists as an end of God in Spirit as actual, and thus it must have universality in itself, it must be a divine and true end in itself, and one which has substantial universality. A substantial end in Spirit means that the spiritual individuals know themselves to be one, and act towards each other as one and are in unity. The end is