Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/147

 communion as thus represented is transferred partly to a region beyond, to a heaven beyond the present, partly to the past and partly to the future. Spirit, however, is above all things present, and demands a real and complete presence; it demands more than love merely, than sad ideas or mental pictures, it demands that the content should itself be present, or that the feeling, the sensation experienced should be developed and expanded.

Thus the Spiritual Community, in its character as the Kingdom of God, has standing over against it, objectivity in general. Objectivity in the shape of an external immediate world is represented by the heart with its interests; another form of objectivity is the objectivity of Reflection, of abstract Thought, of the Understanding; and the third and true form of objectivity is that of the Notion; and we have now to consider how Spirit realises itself in these three elements.

1. In religion the heart is implicitly reconciled; this reconciliation has thus its place in the heart, it is spiritual—is the pure heart which attains this enjoyment of the presence of God in it, and consequently reconciliation, the enjoyment of being reconciled. This reconciliation is, however, abstract; the self, the subject, that is to say, represents at the same time that aspect of this spiritual presence according to which a worldly element in a developed form is actually found in the self, and thus the Kingdom of God, the Spiritual Community, has a relation to the worldly element.

In order that the reconciliation be real, it is necessary that in this development, in this totality, the reconciliation should also be consciously known, be present, and be brought forward into actuality. The principles which apply to this worldly element actually exist in this spiritual element.

The truth of the worldly element is the Spiritual, or, to put it more definitely, it means that the subject as an object of divine grace, as a being who is reconciled with