Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/119

 connection of things, not a connection of the particularity and naturalness which may still remain over and be held to have value, but unity in the Spirit simply, the love, in fact, which is just the notion or conception of Spirit itself. It is an object for itself in Christ as representing the central point of faith, in which it appears to itself in an infinite, far-off loftiness. But this loftiness is at the same time an infinite nearness to the subject, something peculiar to it and belonging to it, and thus what at first comprised individuals as a Third is also what constitutes their true self-consciousness, their most inner and individual character. Thus this love is Spirit as such, the Holy Spirit. It is in them, and they are and constitute the universal Christian Church, the Communion of saints. Spirit is infinite return into self, infinite subjectivity, not Godhead conceived of in ideas, but the real present Godhead, and thus it is not the substantial potentiality of the Father, not the True in the objective or antithetical form of the Son, but the subjective Present and Real, which, just because it is subjective, is present, as estrangement into that objective, sensuous representation of love and of its infinite sorrow, and as return, in that mediation. This is the Spirit of God, or God as present, real Spirit, God dwelling in His Church. Thus Christ said, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of you.” “I am with you always, even to the end of the world.”

It is as containing this absolute signification of Spirit, and in this deep sense of being absolute truth, that the Christian religion is the Religion of Spirit, though not in the trivial sense of being a spiritual religion. On the contrary, the true element in the determination of the nature of Spirit, the union of the two sides of the infinite antithesis—God and the world, I, this particular homuncio—is what constitutes the content of the Christian religion, and makes it into a religion of Spirit,