Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/18

 the Divine comes into view, and exists for Spirit in history of this kind, this history has no longer the character of outward history; it becomes divine history, the history of the manifestation of God Himself. This constitutes the transition to the Kingdom of the Spirit, in which we have the consciousness that Man is implicitly reconciled to God, and that this reconciliation exists for Man. The process of reconciliation itself is contained in Worship.

It has to be noted further that we do not, as we did previously, draw a distinction between Notion, Form, and Worship. It will become evident, as we go on to treat of the subject, that worship enters in directly everywhere. The following general remarks may here be made on this point. The element with which we have got to do is Spirit, and Spirit is what manifests itself, what essentially exists for self, or has actual existence, and as thus conceived of it never exists alone, but always possesses the character of something revealed, something which exists for an Other, for its own Other, i.e., for that side of Being which is represented by the finite spirit. Worship thus is the relation of the finite spirit to the absolute Spirit, and for this reason we find that this idea of worship is present in each of these elements.

In this connection a distinction has to be drawn between the Idea as it exists in the various elements for the Notion, and the Idea as it appears in the form of ordinary conception. Religion is universal, not only for thought which is marked by culture and intellectual grasp, for the philosophical consciousness; but the truth of the Idea of God is manifest also to the ordinary consciousness which represents things pictorially by ideas, and is marked by those necessary characteristics which are inseparable from the ordinary or popular ideas of things.