Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/146

 thing; the process truly takes place only in the spirit of the subject.

In this case there is no transubstantiation—transubstantiation there certainly is, but it is of the kind by which what is external is absorbed and abolished; while the presence of God is of a purely spiritual sort, and is directly connected with the faith of the subject.

(3.) According to this third conception God is present only in the conception we form of Him, only in memory, and thus His presence is so far merely immediate and subjective. This is the conception of the Reformed Church, an unspiritual and merely lively remembrance of the Past, not a divine Presence, not a really spiritual existence. Here the Divine, the Truth has got lowered to the prose of the Enlightenment and of the mere Understanding, and expresses a merely moral relation.

(c.) The Realisation of the Spiritual culminating in Universal Reality.

This directly involves the transformation and remodelling of the Spiritual Community.

Religion is here the spiritual religion, and the Spiritual Community exists primarily in what is inward, in Spirit as such. This inner element, this subjectivity which is present to itself as inward, not developed in itself, is feeling or sensation; the Spiritual Community has also as an essential part of its character, consciousness, ordinary thought or mental representation, needs, impulses, a worldly existence in fact, but this brings with it disunion, differentiation; the divine objective Idea presents itself to consciousness as an Other outside of it which is given partly through authority and is partly appropriated in acts of devotion—to put it otherwise, the moment of communion is merely a single moment, or the divine Idea, the divine content is not actually seen, but is only represented in the mind. The Now or actuality of