The true and real existence of the spirit is then neither God in himself nor man in himself, but it is the Godman; it is neither its infinity alone, nor its finite nature alone, but it is that action by which it is given and withdrawn from one to the other, an action which on the side of the Divinity has produced revelation, on the side of humanity, religion.

If God and man are one in themselves, and if religion is the human phase of this unity, this unity must be developed for man in religion, fall under his conscience, and become a reality. Doubtless so long as man is yet unacquainted with the fact that he is spirit, he cannot at the same time know that God is man; so long as he remains a natural spirit he will deify nature; when he shall have become a spirit subject to the law, an epoch in which he only outwardly subdues his nature, he will consider God as a legislator; but when once in its contact with the history of the world, this nature and this law shall have comprehended, the first its corruption and the second its misfortune, this will feel the necessity of a God to lift it above itself, and that to have one who will descend to the level of itself. From the moment in which humanity is sufficiently developed to make a religion of this truth, that God is. man and that man is of the divine race, as religion is the form under which truth becomes the property of the common conscience, this truth appearing like a palpable certainty, must appear also in a manner intelligible to all, that is to say, an individual of the human race must arise, and be known as a present God. This God-man comprising in one being the divine essence of infinity combined with finite human personality, it may be said of him that he is born of a human mother with the divine spirit for father. His personality, being reflected not in itself but in absolute substance, not desiring to be anything for itself, but desiring to be only for God, is without sin and perfect. A man of divine essence, he is the power which controls nature, and he performs miracles; but being God in human manifestation, he is dependent upon nature;

and, subject to the necessities and sufferings to which this nature exposes him, he is reduced to a state of abasement. Must he also pay the last debt of nature? Does not the necessity of death imposed upon human nature prevent the conclusion that it is one in itself with the divine nature? No; the man-God dies, and in this shows that with God the incarnation is a serious reality, and that he has not refused to descend to the infinite depths of finite nature, because he knows how to leave this abyss, and reascend to himself, because he can after the most complete alienation from himself remain identical with himself. Besides, the man-God, being a spirit reflected in his infinity, is in direct opposition to man in his finite nature; from which results an opposition and a struggle and the violent death of the man-God at the hand of sinners, so that to physical stiffering is added the moral suffering caused by ignominy and the imputation of crime. God treading thus the road to heaven as far as the tomb, in his turn man will tread the road from the tomb to heaven; the death of the prince of life is the life of mortality. Already, by the fact alone of his entrance into the world as manGod, God showed that he was reconciled with the world; but he went further than this: in effacing by death his human nature he has pointed out the way by which he effects an eternal reconciliation, which is by alienating himself so far as to take upon himself our nature, and suppressing this alienation he remains by this eternal alternation identical with himself. The death of the man-God being only the suppression of his alienation, is, in fact, an elevation and return towards God, consequently, death is essentially followed by the resurrection and the ascension.

The man-God who, during his life, in the presence of his contemporaries was an individual differing from them and perceptible to the senses, when removed from view by death, entered into their imagination and their remembrance; the unity in him of the divinity and the humanity became in this way the common property of the conscience; and Christianity in it spiritually

The

repeats the phases of his corporeal existence. believer existing in the heart of nature should die, as Christ, to nature, but only inwardly as he died outwardly; he should crucify himself and be spiritually interred, as Christ was corporeally, in order that by the suppression of his nature he may remain as a spirit identical with himself, and thus participate in the beatitude and glory of Christ.

§ CXLVIII.

Last Dilemma.

By these means, from the idea of God and man in their reciprocal connection with each other, we arrive, it would appear, by transcendental argument, at the truth of the conception which the Church has formed of Christ, and we are brought back, by inverse reasoning to the orthodox view of the subject. In effect, whilst on the one hand the truth of the conceptions of the Church respecting Christ was deduced from the exactness of evangelical history, here, on the other, the exactness of the history is deduced from the truth of the conceptions. What is rational is at the same time real; the idea is not merely a possibility, after the manner of Kant, it is also an existing actuality; then, the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures having been demonstrated to be a rational idea must have had an historical existence. In consequence, it has been remarked by Marheineke that the unity of God with man was manifestly realised in the person of Jesus Christ; in him, according to Rosenkranz, was concentrated the divine power over nature; he could not act otherwise than miraculously, ard the performance of miracles, which appears so strange to us, was natural to him. The resurrection, says Conradi, is the necessary conséquence and accomplishment of his personality; it ought so little to surprise us that, on the

contrary, we ought to have been surprised if it had not taken place.

But does this deduction raise the contradiction manifest in the doctrine of the Church respecting the person and the work of Christ? We have but to compare the imputations which Rosenkranz in his examination of the criticism of the belief in Christ of the Church, by Schleiermacher, has heaped upon this author with what he himself has put in the place of it in his "Encyclopædia," and we shall find that the general propositions of the unity of the divine and human natures do not render the least in the world more conceivable the appearance of a person in whom this unity might have individually existed in an exclusive manner. If I can imagine that the divine spirit alienating and abasing itself is the human spirit, and the human spirit entering into itself and elevating itself above itself is the divine spirit, I cannot the more on this account imagine how the divine nature and the human nature could have formed integral portions, distinct and nevertheless united, of one historieal person. When I see that the spirit of humanity, in virtue of its unity with the divine spirit, in the course of the history, assumes more and more the character of a power having command over nature, that is quite different to conceiving of a person endowed with similar power to execute individual voluntary acts. In fine, if it be true that the suppression of the natural character is the resurrection of the spirit, we are not on this account entitled to infer that an individual could be corporeally raised from the dead.

Thus we are thrown back to the view of the subject taken by Kant, which we ourselves have just found insufficient; for if the idea has no reality it is an empty possibility, and a vain ideal. But must we then suppress all reality of the idea? By no means, we would only suppress the reality which is not derived from the premises. If we attribute reality to the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures, is this to affirm of necessity that it must once have become a

reality in an individual as it had never previously become a reality, and as it would never again become so? This is not the way in which the idea is realised; it never lavishes all its riches on one copy to act the miser by all the rest; it is never completely impressed on this unique copy to leave on all the others but an imperfect impression; but it delights in displaying its treasures in a variety of copies which reciprocally complete themselves, in an alternation of individuals who arrive and pass away in their turn. And is not this a true realisation of the idea? If I look upon humanity as the realisation of the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures, is it not a real idea in an infinitely more exalted sense than if I limit this realisation to an individual? Is not an eternal incarnation of God more true than an incarnation limited to a point in time ?

Such is the key to all belief in Christ. The subject of the attributes which the Church gives to Christ is, instead of an individual, an idea, but a real idea, and not an idea without reality, after the manner of Kant. Embodied in an individual, in a God-man, the properties and the functions which the Church attributes to Christ contradict each other; they agree in the idea of the kind. Humanity is the union of the two natures, the God made man, that is to say, the infinite spirit which has gone out of itself and entered into finite nature, and the finite spirit cognisant of its infinity. It is the child of the visible mother and the invisible father, of spirit and of nature. It is that which performs miracles; for, in the course of human history, the spirit obtains more and more perfect mastery of nature within as well as without man, and this in presence of it descends to the character of inert matter on which its activity is exercised. It is sinless, for the progress of its development is irreproachable; guilt never attaches but to the individual, it does not reach to the kind and its history. It is that which dies, is raised again, and ascends to heaven; for, from its human nature arises a more and more elevated spiritual