Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/106

 under any other form. When the eternal history of Spirit exhibits itself in an outward way, in the sphere of the natural, Evil which realises itself in the Divine Idea can appear only in the form of the Natural, and thus the reversion which takes place can have only the form of natural death. The Divine Idea cannot proceed beyond this characteristic of the natural. This death, however, although it is natural, is the death of God, and thus sufficient as an atonement for us, since it exhibits the absolute history of the Divine Idea, what has implicitly taken place and takes place eternally.

That the individual man does something, attains to something, and accomplishes it, is owing to the fact that this is how the matter stands regarding the true reality looked at from the point of view of its Notion. The fact, for example, that any particular criminal can be punished by the judge, and that this punishment is the carrying out and expiation of the law, does not imply that it is the judge who does this, or that the criminal does it by undergoing the punishment as a particular outward event; but, on the contrary, what takes place is in accordance with the nature of the thing or true fact, with the necessity of the Notion. We thus have this process before us in a double form: on the one hand, we have it in thought, in the idea embodied in law, and in the Notion; and, on the other, in one particular instance, and in this particular instance the process is what it is because this belongs to the nature of the thing, and apart from this neither the action of the judge nor the suffering undergone by the criminal would represent the punishment inflicted by the law and the expiation it demands. The fundamental reason, the substantial element, belongs to the nature of the thing.

Accordingly this is how it stands, too, with that satisfaction or atonement for us above referred to, i.e., what lies at the basis of that idea is that this atonement has actually and completely taken place, has taken place