Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/223

 and morality, and which are not held to be laws given by reason, but rather laws written down by God—and also all the rest of the State laws and regulations. Moses is called the lawgiver of the Jews, but he was not to the Jews what Lycurgus and Solon were to the Greeks, for these two gave as men their own laws. He only made the laws of Jehovah known; it was Jehovah Himself who, according to the story, engraved them on the stone. Attached to the most trifling regulations, the arrangement of the tabernacle, the usages in connection with sacrifices, and everything relating to all other kinds of ceremonial, you find in the Bible the formula “Jehovah saith.” All law is given by the Lord, and is thus entirely positive commandment. There is in it a formal, absolute authority. The particular elements in the political system are not, speaking generally, developed out of the universal end, nor is it left to man to give it its special character, for the Unity does not permit human caprice, human reason, to exist alongside of it, and political change is in every instance called a falling away from God; but, on the other hand, the particular laws, as being something given by God, are regarded as eternally established. And here the eternal laws of what is right, of morality, are placed in the same rank and stated in an equally positive form with the most trifling regulations. Tnis constitutes a strong contrast to the conception which we have of God. Worship is now the service of God; the good man, the righteous man, is he who performs this service, by keeping and observing both the moral commandments and also the ceremonial laws. This is the service of the Lord.

The people of God is accordingly a people adopted by covenant and contract on the conditions of fear and service. That is to say, the self-conscious community is no longer an original and immediate unity in union with the Essence, as is the case in the Religion of Nature. The external form of the Essence in the Religion of Nature is only a pictorial representation of Nature, an