Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/141

 absolute possibility that it may fulfil its destiny and be received into favour by God. This belongs to faith. The individual must lay hold of the truth of the implicit unity of divine and human nature, and he lays hold of this truth by faith in Christ; God is thus no longer for the individual something beyond this world, and the apprehension of this truth is in direct contrast to the first fundamental characteristic, according to which the subject is not what it ought or is intended to be. The child, inasmuch as it has been born in the Church, has been born in freedom and to freedom; there no longer exists for it any absolute Other-Being, this Other-Being is considered as something overcome and conquered.

This education in the truth is concerned only with preventing evil from appearing, for there is in Man, looked at from a general point of view, a possibility that it will appear; but in so far as evil appears when a man does what is evil, it is at the same time something which is implicitly a nullity over which Spirit has power, and this power is of such a character that Spirit is able to make evil to cease to exist, to undo it.

Repentance, Penitence signifies that the transgression has come to be recognised owing to a man’s elevation to the truth, as something which has been virtually overcome and has no longer power in itself. That what has happened can be made as though it had not happened, cannot take place in a sensuous or material way, but in a spiritual and inward way. He is pardoned, he passes for one who has been adopted by the Father amongst men.

This is the business of the Church, this training whereby the education of the spirit becomes ever more inward, and this truth becomes identical with his Self, with the will of Man, becomes his act of will, his Spirit. The battle is past, and Man is conscious that it is not a case of battle, as it is in the Persian religion or the Kantian Philosophy, in which Evil is indeed to be overcome, but