Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/291

 has not yet appeared. The third form of the service of God is the divine service of reconciliation. The gods must be realised in the soul, in the subject, which is hypothetically estranged, i.e., negatively determined relatively to the divine, and in opposition to it. The agreement cannot take place in the immediate way characteristic of the foregoing form; on the contrary, it demands a mediation in which that must be sacrificed which was formerly held to be fixed and independent. This negative element, which must be yielded up in order that the estrangement and alienation of the two sides may be removed, is of a twofold kind. In the first place, the soul, in its character as the natural or untutored soul, is negative relatively to Spirit; the second negative element is accordingly the positive-negative element, so to speak, that is, any misfortune whatever, and more definitely, in the third place, a moral misfortune or crime, the extreme alienation of the subjective self-consciousness relatively to the divine.

I. The soul in its natural state is not as it should be; it ought to be free Spirit, but the soul is Spirit only through the abrogation of the natural will, of the desires. This abrogation, this subjection of itself to what is moral, and the habituation to this so that the moral or spiritual becomes the second nature of the individual, is, above all, the work of education and culture. The thought of this reconstruction of man’s nature must accordingly come into consciousness at this standpoint, because it is the standpoint of self-conscious freedom, and come into it in such a way as to show that this change or conversion is recognised as requisite. If this training and conversion are represented as essential moments, and as essentially living, we get the idea of a road which the soul has to traverse, and as a consequence we get the idea of some outward arrangement in which it is supplied with the pictorial representation of this road. But if the course followed by this conversion, this self-negation and dying