Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/320

 forgotten everything inward and universal connected with thought, it has reached an utterly prosaic state, and what it aims at, what it seeks to raise itself to is nothing higher than what is supplied by the wholly formal understanding which puts together into one picture the circumstances, the character and mode of immediate Being, and knows no other mode of substantiality.

When power was thought of as existing in this prosaic condition, and when for the Romans the power which had to do with such finite ends and with immediate, real, and external circumstances, represented the welfare of the Roman Empire, it was no great step to go further and worship as God the actual present Power connected with such ends, the individual present form of such welfare, the Emperor in fact, who had this welfare in his hands. The Emperor, this monstrous individual, was the Power which presided over the life and happiness of individuals, of cities and of states, a power above law. He was a more wide reaching power than Robigo; famine, and all kinds of distress of a public character were in his hands; and more than that, rank, birth, wealth, nobility, all these were of his making. He was the supreme authority even above formal law and justice, upon the development of which the Roman spirit had expended so much energy.

All the special deities, however, are, on the other hand, again brought into subjection to the universal, real Power; they fall into the background before the universal purely essential power of sovereignty, the greatness of the Empire, which spreads itself over the whole known civilised world. In this universality the destiny of the divine particularisation consists in the necessity there is that the particular divine powers should be disposed of and pass away in this abstract universality, just as the individual and divine national spirit of the various peoples is suppressed by being brought under the one sovereign authority. This comes out also in several practical or