Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/269

 The moments of worship are as follows: (a.) Inner feeling or subjective attitude. The gods are duly recognised and revered; they are the substantial powers, the essential, real content of the natural and spiritual universe, the Universal. These universal powers, as exempt from contingency, are recognised by man just because he is thinking consciousness. Thus the world no longer exists for him in an external and contingent fashion, but in the true mode. We thus hold in respect duty, justice, knowledge, political life, life in the State, family relationships. They represent what is true, the inner bond which holds the world together, the substantial element in which the rest exists, the valid element, what alone holds its ground against the contingency and independence which act in opposition to it.

This content is the objective in the true sense, i.e., what is absolutely and essentially valid and true, not in the external objective sense, but within subjectivity also. The substance of these powers is the moral element peculiar to men, their morality, their actual and valid power, their own substantiality and essentiality. The Greek people are hence the most human people; with them everything human is affirmatively justified and developed, and the element of measure is present in it.

This religion is essentially a religion of humanity, that is, the concrete man, as regards what he actually is, as regards his needs, inclinations, passions, and habits, as regards his moral and political relations, and in reference to all that has value in these and is essential, is in his gods in presence of his own nature. Or, to put it otherwise, his god has within him the very content composed of the noble and the true, which is at the same time that of concrete man. This humanity of the gods is what was defective in the Greek view, but it is at the same time its attractive element. In this religion there is nothing incomprehensible, nothing which cannot be understood; there is no kind of content in the god which