Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/145

 central point of Christian doctrine, and it is from it that all the differences in Christian doctrine get their colour and peculiar character. The conceptions formed of it are of three kinds:—

(1.) According to one conception the host, this outward, material, unspiritual thing is, owing to the act of consecration, the actually present God—God as a thing, and in the form of an empirical thing, and thus, too, as empirically enjoyed by Man. Since God is thus known as something outward in the Supper which is the central point of doctrine, this externality is the basis of the whole Catholic religion. There arises from this a slavishness of knowledge and action; this externality runs through all further definitions of the truth owing to the fact that the True is represented as something fixed and external. Being thus something which has a definite existence outside of the subject, it can come to be in the power of others; the Church is in possession of it as it is of all the means of grace; the subject is in this respect something passive and receptive which does not know what is true, right, and good, but has to accept it merely from others.

(2.) According to the Lutheran conception the movement starts from something external which is an ordinary common thing, but the act of communion takes place and the inner feeling of the presence of God arises to the extent to which, and in so far as, the externality is eaten not simply in a corporal fashion, but in spirit and faith. It is only in spirit and in faith that we have the present God. The sensible presence is in itself nothing, nor does consecration make the host into an object worthy of adoration; but, on the contrary, the object exists in faith only, and thus it is in the consuming and destroying of the sensuous that we have union with God and the consciousness of this union of the subject with God. Here the grand thought has arisen that, apart from the act of communion and faith, the host is a common, material