Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/334

 Power—was the Roman world and its religion. In this religion of utility or conformity to end, the end was none other than the Roman State, which thus represents abstract Power exercising its authority over the national spirit of the various peoples. The gods of all nations are collected together in the Roman Pantheon, and mutually destroy each other, owing to their being thus united. The Roman spirit as representing this fate, destroyed the happiness and joyousness of the beautiful life and consciousness of the religions which went before, and crushed down all the various forms in which this consciousness showed itself into a condition of unity and uniformity. It was this abstract Power which produced the tremendous misery and the universal sorrow which existed in the Roman world, a sorrow which was to be the birth-throe of the religion of truth. The distinction between free men and slaves disappears in the presence of the all-embracing power of the Emperor; everything permanent, whether existing in an inward or in an outward form, is destroyed, and we are in the presence of the death of finitude, since the Fortuna of the one Empire itself succumbs too.

The true taking up of finitude into the Universal, and the perception of this unity, could not have their development within those religions, and could not originate in the Roman and Greek world.

The penitence of the world, the discarding of finitude, and the despair of finding satisfaction in what was temporal and finite which gained the upper hand in the spirit of the world, all served to prepare the soil for the true, spiritual religion, a preparation which had to be completed on the part of man, in order that “the time might be fulfilled.” Granting that the principle of Thought was already developed, still the Universal was not yet an object for consciousness in all its purity, as is evident from the fact that even in philosophical speculation, Thought was united with ordinary externality, as, for