Inner discrepancy however pervades the whole field of

religion. We are tempted to exemplify it, once again, by

the sexual passion. A man may believe in his mistress,

may feel that without that faith he could not live, and

may find it natural, at the same time, unceasingly to

watch her. Or, again, when he does not believe in her or

perhaps even in himself, then he may desire all the more

to utter, and to listen to, repeated professions. The

same form of self-deception plays its part in the

ceremonies of religion.

This criticism might naturally be pursued into

indefinite detail, but it is sufficient for us here to

have established the main principle. The religious

consciousness rests on the felt unity of unreduced

opposites; and either to combine these consistently, or

upon the other hand to transform them is impossible for

religion. And hence self-contradiction in theory, and

oscillation in sentiment, is inseparable from its

essence. Its dogmas must end in one-sided error, or else

in senseless compromise. And, even in its practice, it

is beset with two imminent dangers, and it has without

clear vision to balance itself between rival abysses.

Religion may dwell too intently on the discord in the

world or in the self. In the former case it foregoes its

perfection and peace, while, at the same time, it may

none the less forget the difference between its

private will and the Good. And, on the other side, if it

emphasizes this latter difference, it is then threatened

with a lapse into bare morality. But again if, flying

from the discord, religion keeps its thought fixed on

harmony, it tends to suffer once more. For, finding that

all is already good both in the self and in the world,

it may cease to be moral at all, and becomes at once,

therefore, irreligious. The truth that devotion even to

a finite object may lift us above moral laws, seduces

religion into false and immoral perversions. Because,

for it, all reality is, in one sense, good alike, every

action may become completely indifferent. It idly dreams

its life away in the quiet world of divine inanity, or,

forced into action by chance desire, it may hallow every

practice, however corrupt, by its empty spirit of

devotion. And here we find reproduced in a direr form

the monstrous births of moral hypocrisy. But we need not

enter into the pathology of the religious consciousness.

The man who has passed, however little, behind the

scenes of the religious life, must have had his moments

of revolt. He must have been forced to doubt if the

bloody source of so many open crimes, the parent of such

inward pollution can possibly be good.

But if religion is, as we have seen, a necessity,

such a doubt may be dismissed. There would be, in the

end perhaps, no sense in the enquiry if religion has, on

the whole, done more harm than good. My object has been

to point out that, like morality, religion is not

ultimate. It is a mere appearance, and is therefore

inconsistent with itself. And it is hence liable on

every side to shift beyond its own limits. But when

religion, balancing itself between extremes, has lost

its balance on either hand, it becomes irreligious. If

it was a moral duty to find more than morality in

religion, it is, even more emphatically, a religious

duty still to be moral. But each of these is a

mode and an expression at different stages of the good;

and the good, as we have found, is a self-contradictory

appearance of the Absolute.

It may be instructive to bring out the same

inconsistency from another point of view. Religion

naturally implies a relation between Man and God. Now a

relation always (we have seen throughout) is self-

contradictory. It implies always two terms which are

finite and which claim independence. On the other hand a

relation is unmeaning, unless both itself and the

relateds are the adjectives of a whole. And to find a

solution of this discrepancy would be to pass entirely

beyond the relational point of view. This general

conclusion may at once be verified in the sphere of

religion.

Man is on the one hand a finite subject, who is over

against God, and merely "standing in relation." And yet,

upon the other hand, apart from God man is merely an

abstraction. And religion perceives this truth, and it

affirms that man is good and real only through grace, or

that again, attempting to be independent, he perishes

through wrath. He does not merely "stand in relation,"

but is moved inly by his opposite, and indeed, apart

from that inward working, could not stand at all. God

again is a finite object, standing above and apart from

man, and is something independent of all relation to his

will and intelligence. Hence God, if taken as a thinking

and feeling being, has a private personality. But,

sundered from those relations which qualify him, God is