Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/139

 he begins in this condition of established existing truth and in the consciousness of it. That is his relation to this truth, which actually exists, and is presupposed as having an absolute and essential existence.

2. Since the individual is thus born in the Church, he is forthwith destined, although, to be sure, unconsciously, to share in this truth and to become a partaker of it; he is destined for this truth. The Church expresses this in the Sacrament of Baptism, Man is in the fellowship of the Church, in which Evil is essentially, in-and-for-itself, overcome, and God is essentially, or in-and-for-Himself, reconciled.

Baptism shows that the child has been born in the fellowship of the Church, not in sin and misery; that he has not come into a hostile world, but that the Church is his world, and that he has only to train himself in the Spiritual Community which already actually exists as representing his worldly condition.

Man must be born twice, once naturally, and then again spiritually, like the Brahman. Spirit is not immediate, it exists only in so far as it brings itself out of itself; it exists only as the regenerate Spirit.

This regeneration is no longer that infinite sadness which is in general the birth sorrow of the Spiritual Community; the subject is not indeed spared the infinitely real sorrow, but this is softened; for there still exists the opposing factor of particularity, of special interests, passions, selfishness. The natural heart which encompasses Man is the enemy that has to be fought; this is, however, no longer the real battle out of which the Spiritual Community sprang.

The doctrine of the Church is related to this individual as something external. The child is, to begin with, Spirit implicitly only, it is not yet realised Spirit, does not actually exist as Spirit, but has only the capability, the faculty of being Spirit, of becoming Spirit actually; thus the truth comes to it at first as something taken for