Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/216

 a state of reconciliation. The abstraction of evil has not yet disappeared.

It has to be observed further that this story ceased to have a living interest for the Jewish people, and that it did not receive any further development in the Books of the Hebrews. If we except some allusions in the later apocryphal books, it is not mentioned, speaking generally, in the others. For a long time it lay unworked, and it was in Christianity that it was first to attain its true significance. Still it cannot at all be said that man’s conflict within himself is something which did not exist amongst the Jewish people. On the contrary, it constitutes an essential characteristic of the religious spirit amongst the Hebrews, but it was not conceived of in the speculative sense as implying that it arises from the nature of man himself, being represented rather as contingent, as taking place in single individuals. In contrast to the sinner and the man who is in conflict with himself, we get the picture of the righteous man, in whom evil and the conflict with it are represented as not being an essential moment in his life, but rather righteousness is thought of as consisting in the doing of God’s will, and in being steadfast in the service of Jehovah by observing the moral commandments connected alike with the precepts of ritual and the requirements of state law. Still the conflict of man within himself is apparent everywhere, especially in the Psalms of David. Sorrow cries out of the innermost depths of the soul conscious of its sinfulness, and as a consequence we find the most sorrowful prayers for pardon and reconciliation. This deep sorrow is thus undoubtedly present, but it appears rather as belonging to the single individual than as something which is known to be an eternal moment of Spirit.

These are the principal moments of the religion of the One, so far as they concern particularisation and the determination of an end on the part of the One. This latter determination brings us to worship.