Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/120

 and this content is also found in it by the ordinary uncultured consciousness.

All men are called to salvation; that is what is highest in the Christian religion and highest in a unique degree. Therefore Christ also says, “All sins can be forgiven to men except the sin against the Spirit.” The violation of absolute truth, of the Idea of that union of the two sides of the infinite antithesis, is in these words declared to be the supreme transgression. People have from time to time given themselves a deal of trouble and racked their brains trying to find out what is the sin against the Holy Spirit, and have smoothed down this significant expression in all kinds of ways in order to get entirely rid of it. Everything can be destroyed in the infinite sorrow of love, but this destroying process itself appears only as inner present Spirit. What is devoid of Spirit appears at first to have no sin in it, but to be innocent; but this is just the innocence which is by its very nature judged and condemned.

The sphere of the Spiritual Community is accordingly the region which belongs peculiarly to Spirit. The Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples, it was their immanent life, from that time onward they joyfully went out into the world as a Spiritual Community, in order to raise it to the condition of a universal Community of believers, and to extend far and wide the Kingdom of God.

We have thus to consider (a) the origin of the Spiritual Community, or, in other words, its conception or notion; (b) its existence in a definite form and its continued existence, this is the realisation of its conception; and (c) the transition from faith to knowledge, the alteration, the transfiguration of faith in philosophy.

(a.) The Conception of the Spiritual Community.

The Spiritual Community consists of the subjects or persons, the individual, empirical subjects who live in the