Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/102

 and what is regarded by them as possessing the worth of something potential or essential.

Since, accordingly, the death of Christ, in addition to the fact that it is natural death, is, further, the death of an evil-doer, the most degrading of all deaths, death upon the cross, it involves not only what is natural, but also civil degradation, worldly dishonour; the cross is transfigured, what according to the common idea is lowest, what the State characterises as degrading, is transformed into what is highest. Death is natural, every man must die. But since degradation is made the highest honour, all those ties that bind human society together are attacked in their foundations, are shaken and dissolved. When the cross has been elevated to the place of a banner, and is made a banner in fact, the positive content of which is at the same time the Kingdom of God, inner feeling is in the very heart of its nature detached from civil and state life, and the substantial basis of this latter is taken away, so that the whole structure has no longer any reality, but is an empty appearance, which must soon come crashing down, and make manifest in actual existence that it is no longer anything having inherent existence. Imperial power, on its part, degraded all that was esteemed and valued by men. The life of every individual depended on the caprice of the Emperor, and this caprice was not limited by anything either without or within. But, besides life, all virtue, worth, age, rank, race, everything, in short, was utterly degraded. The slave of the Emperor was next to him the highest power in the State, or had even more power than the Emperor himself; the Senate debased itself in proportion as it was debased by the Emperor. Thus the majesty of world-empire, together with all virtue, justice, veneration for institutions and constituted things, the majesty of everything, in short, held by the world as of value was pitched into the gutter. Thus the temporal ruler of the earth, on his part, changed what was highest into what