Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/93

, when truth has attained a sure existence, loses some of its importance. In fact, if this religion at its start as suffering, appears in relation to what is outside of it as willing to endure, to yield, to submit to death, in course of time, when it has grown strong, its inner energy will act towards what is outside of it with a correspondingly violent display of force.

The next thing in the affirmative part of this religion is the proclamation of the Kingdom of God; into this Kingdom, as representing the Kingdom of love to God, Man has to transport himself, and he does this by directly devoting himself to the truth it embodies. This is expressed with the most absolute and startling frankness, as, for instance, at the beginning of the so-called Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Words like these are amongst the grandest that have ever been uttered. They represent a final central point in which all superstition and all want of freedom on Man’s part are done away with. It is of infinite importance that, by Luther’s translation of the Bible, a popular book has been put into the hands of the people, in which the heart, the spirit can find itself at home in the very highest, in fact in an infinite way; in Catholic countries there is in this respect a grave want. For Protestant peoples the Bible supplies a means of deliverance from all spiritual slavery.

There is no mention of any mediation in connection with this elevating of the spirit whereby it may become an accomplished fact in Man; but, on the contrary, the mere statement of what is required implies this immediate Being, this immediate self-transference into Truth, into the Kingdom of God. It is to the intellectual and spiritual world, to the Kingdom of God, that Man ought to belong, and in it it is feeling or moral disposition alone which has value, but not abstract feeling, not mere chance opinion, but that absolute feeling or disposition which has its basis in the Kingdom of God. It is in