Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/89

 incompatible with this unity, just as in the eternal Idea otherness in no way detracts from the unity which God is.

This is the extraordinary combination the necessity of which we have seen. It involves the truth that the divine and human natures are not implicitly different. God in human form. The truth is that there is only one reason, one Spirit, that Spirit as finite has no true existence.

The substantiality of the form of manifestation is unfolded or made explicit. Because it is the manifestation of God, it is essentially for the community of believers. Manifestation means Being for an Other, and this other is the community of believers.

This historical manifestation may, however, be looked at in two different ways. On the one hand, it may be held to be Man as he is in his outward condition in the sense of ordinary Man, the sense in which Man is taken in the irreligious way of regarding this manifestation. Then, on the other hand, it may be looked at in spirit or in a spiritual way, and with the spirit, which presses on to reach its truth, and which, just because it has this infinite division, this sorrow within itself, wills the truth, wills to have, and must have, the need of truth and the certainty of truth. This is the true way of regarding the manifestation so far as religion is concerned. We must distinguish between these two standpoints—the immediate way of looking at the question, and the way followed by faith.

By faith this individual is known to possess divine nature, whereby God ceases to be a Being beyond this world. When Christ is looked at in the same way as Socrates is, He is looked at as an ordinary man, just as the Mohammedans consider Christ as God’s ambassador in the general sense in which all great men are God’s ambassadors or messengers. If we say nothing more of Christ than that He was a teacher of humanity, a martyr