Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/281

Rh at the root of his inward being, discord, obscurity, and bondage, and therefore a want of absolute dignity. Such is the position even of the purely Moral Man, when regarded by the light of Religion. How displeasing, then, as seen by this light, must be the condition of him who has not even attained to True Morality, but as yet only follows the impulses of Nature. He too is guided by the Eternal Law of the Universe; but to him it neither speaks in his own language nor honours him with speech at all, but leads him on with dumb compulsion as it does the plant or the animal; employs him like an unreasoning thing, without consulting his own Will in aught, and in a region where mere mechanism is the only moving power.

Religion discloses to Man the significance of the one Eternal Law which, as the Law of Duty, guides the free and noble, and, as the Law of Nature, governs ignoble instruments. The Religious Man comprehends this Law, and feels it living within himself, as the Law of the Eternal development of the One Life. How each individual moment of our Earthly Life is comprehended in that Eternal development of the one original Divine Life he cannot indeed understand, because the Infinite has no limit and therefore can never be embraced by him; but that every one of these moments does absolutely lie contained within this development of the One Life he can directly perceive and clearly recognise. What was the Law of Duty to the Moral Man, is to him the inward movement of the One Life directly revealed as Life; what is the Law of Nature to others is to him the unfolding of the outward and apparently dead substratum of that One Life.

This one clearly recognised Life now becomes thoroughly established in the Religious Man, reposing upon itself, sufficient for itself, and blessed in itself;—dwelling there with unspeakable Love; with inconceivable rapture bathing his