Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/121

 Spirit of God, though at the same time it is necessary to distinguish between them and the definite content, the history, the truth which confronts them. Faith in this history, in reconciliation, is, on the one hand, immediate knowledge, an act of faith; on the other hand, the nature of Spirit is in itself this process which has been considered in the universal Idea, and in the Idea in the form of manifestation, and this means that the subject itself is nothing but Spirit, and consequently becomes a citizen of the Kingdom of God owing to the fact that it passes through this process in virtue of what it is. The Other, which exists for the subjects, exists for them objectively in this divine drama in the sense in which the spectator beheld himself objectively in the Chorus.

To begin with, it is undoubtedly the subject, the human subject, Man, in whom is revealed what comes by the aid of Spirit to have for Man the certainty of reconciliation, and comes to be characterised as individual, exclusive, different from others. Thus the representation of the divine history is an objective one so far as the other subjects are concerned; they have accordingly still to pass through this history and this process in their own selves also.

In order to this, however, they must first presuppose that reconciliation is possible, or, to put it more accurately, that this reconciliation has actually and completely taken place and is a certainty.

This is the universal Idea of God in-and-for-itself; the other presupposition is that this reconciliation is something certain for Man, and that this truth does not exist for him by means of speculative thought, but is, on the contrary, something certain. This presupposition implies that it is certain that the reconciliation has been accomplished, i.e., it must be represented as something historical, as something which has been accomplished on the earth, in a manifested form. For there is no other mode of representing what is called certainty. This is