Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/230

 and this is how it is represented in the story of the Fall, according to which it enters in from the outside, in that man is deceived by the serpent.

God punishes evil as something which ought not to be. It is good only that ought to be, since it is what the Lord has enjoined. There is here as yet no freedom, and there is not even freedom to find out what the divine and eternal law is. The characteristics of the Good, which are undoubtedly the characteristics of reason as well, derive their worth from the fact that they are rules laid down by the Lord, and the Lord punishes any transgression of these; this is the wrath of God. The relation in which the Lord here stands to the Good expresses merely the idea of something that ought to be. What He ordains is what ought to be, is law. To the Lord belongs the exercise of penal righteousness; the conflict between good and evil occurs within the subject as being finite. An element of contradiction is thus present in finite consciousness, and consequently there enters in a feeling of contrition, of sorrow, caused by the fact that the Good is only something which ought to be.

3. The third aspect of worship or cultus is reconciliation. It has reference essentially only to the particular faults of separate individuals, and is brought about by means of sacrifice.

Here sacrifice is not intended simply to signify that the offerer is symbolically renouncing his finitude, and preserving his unity with God, but it signifies more definitely the act of acknowledgment of the Lord, a testifying that He is feared; and it has the still further signification of being an act whereby what of the finite remains has been redeemed and ransomed. Man cannot look on Nature as something which he can use according to his own arbitrary desires; he cannot lay hold of it directly, but he must get whatever he wishes to have through the mediation of something foreign to himself. Everything is the Lord’s, and must be bought back from