Page:The Theme of the Joseph Novels.djvu/23

 with its luxuries and absurd snobberies, in a land of the grandchildren, a land whose atmosphere is so much to Joseph's taste because he is himself a grandchild and a late soul.

The feeling for the way, the advancement, the change, the development is very strong in the book, its whole theology is connected with it and derived from it: namely, from its conception of the old testamental "Bond" between God and man: from the conviction that God and man are mutually dependent upon each other in common aspiration for enhancement. For God, too, is subject to development, He, too, changes and advances: from the desert-like and demoniacal to the spiritual and holy; and He can do so without the help of the human spirit as little, as the human spirit can without Him.—Were I to determine what I, personally, mean by religiousness, I should say: it is attentiveness and obedience; attentiveness to the inner changes of the world, the mutation in the aspects of truth and right; obedience which loses no time in adjusting life and reality to these changes, this mutation, and thus in doing justice to the spirit. To live in sin is to live against the spirit, to cling to the antiquated, obsolete, and to continue to live in it, due to inattentiveness and disobedience. And whenever the book speaks about the "concern with God," it speaks about the just fear of this sin and folly. "Concern with God" is not alone the creating of God in one's thoughts, and de termining and recognizing Him, but principally the concern with His will, with which ours must coincide; with the demands of the present, the postulate of the aeon, of the world hour. It is the intelligent listening to what the world spirit wants, to the new truth and necessity; and a special, religious concept of stupidity follows from that: the stupidity [19]