Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/117

 immediacy in which Man might find some worth is thrown away; it is in mediation alone that he finds such value, but of an infinite kind, and in which subjectivity becomes truly infinite and has an essential existence, is in-and-for-itself. It is only through this mediation that Man is not immediate, and thus at first he is capable merely of having such value; but this capacity and possibility is his positive, absolute, essential nature or characteristic.

This characteristic contains the reason why the immortality of the soul becomes a definite doctrine in the Christian religion. The soul, the individual soul, has an infinite, an eternal quality, namely, that of being a citizen in the Kingdom of God. This is a quality and a life which is removed beyond time and the Past; and since it is at the same time opposed to the present limited sphere, this eternal quality or determination eternally determines itself at the same time as a future. The infinite demand to see God, i.e., to become conscious in spirit of His truth as present truth, is in this temporal Present not yet satisfied so far as consciousness in its character as ordinary consciousness is concerned.

The subjectivity which has come to understand its infinite worth has thereby abandoned all distinctions of authority, power, position, and even of race; before God all men are equal. It is in the negation of infinite sorrow that love is found, and there, too, are first found the possibility and the root of truly universal Right, of the realisation of freedom. The Roman formal life of right or justice starts from the positive standpoint and from the Understanding, and has no principle whereby to maintain absolutely the standpoint of Right, but is thoroughly worldly.

This purity of subjectivity which passes out of infinite sorrow by mediating itself in love, is reached simply by that mediation which has its objective form and pictorial representation in the sufferings, death, and exaltation of