Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/92

 and to get him to seek after this abstraction or withdrawal from actual reality.

This new religion as yet concentrates itself, and does not actually exist as a church or community of believers, but shows itself rather in that energy which constitutes the sole interest of the man who has to fight and struggle in order to obtain this new condition, because it is not yet in harmony with the actual state of the world, and is not yet brought into connection with his world-consciousness.

This new religion, therefore, on its first appearance presents a polemical aspect, involves a demand that finite things should be abandoned; it demands that Man should rise to the exercise of an infinite energy in which the Universal demands that it should be laid hold of for its own sake, and in which all other ties have to be treated as matters of indifference, and all that had hitherto been regarded as moral and right, all other ties, have to be put aside.

“Who is my mother and my brother?” &c. “Let the dead bury their dead,” &c. “Whoever puts his hand to the plough and looks back is not fit for the Kingdom of God.” “I am come to bring a sword,” &c. In these words we see how a polemic is directed against all ordinary moral relations—“Take no thought for the morrow,” “Give your goods to the poor.”

All those relations which have reference to property, disappear; meanwhile they in turn cancel themselves, for if everything is given to the poor then there are no poor. All this represents doctrines and special characteristics which belong to the first appearance of the new religion when it constitutes man’s sole interest, which he must believe he is as yet in danger of losing, and when its teaching is addressed to men with whom the world is done and who are done with the world. The one side is represented by this renunciation; this giving up, this slighting of every substantial interest and of moral ties, is an essential characteristic of the concentrated manifestation of truth, a characteristic which