SECTION LXXI.

As morality is connected with religion in an indissolubly vital unity, hence the God-consciousness is the necessary presupposition and condition of morality, and the character and degree of the morality is consequently also conditioned on the character and degree of the God-consciousness, although a higher degree of the latter does not necessarily work also a higher degree of morality. Hence true morality is only there possible where there is a true God-consciousness, that is, where God is not conceived of as in some manner limited, but as the infinite Spirit in the fullest sense of the word. Only where the moral idea has its absolutely perfect reality, in the personal holy God, has morality a firm basis, true contents, and an unconditional goal.

If morality is in any manner conditioned by religion, then is also the quality of this morality different in different religions. We have already shown that morality is not conditioned by the mere God-consciousness, but only by it as having grown into religion, for a God-consciousness which does not become a religious one, but remains mere knowledge, cannot become a moral power; and this is the simple explanation of the fact, that while a feebler God-consciousness cannot produce a higher degree of morality, yet a higher God-consciousness does not necessarily create also a higher degree of morality,—namely, when it does not develop itself 81into a religious life-power. When it does so develop itself, however, then it is unconditionally true that the degree of morality perfectly corresponds to the degree of God-consciousness;—otherwise we would be forced to modify our previously assumed position, that religion and morality are two indissolubly united and mutually absolutely conditioning phases of one and the same spiritual life. Where God is conceived of as merely an unspiritual nature-force, as in China and India, there morality cannot rest on the free moral personality of man, but, on the contrary, it must throw the personality into the back-ground as illegitimate; where the divine is conceived of only in the form of an antagonism of mutually hostile divinities, as with the Persians, there the moral idea lacks its unconditional obligatoriness, and in fact the contra-moral has its relative justification; and where the divine is conceived of as a plurality of limited individual personalities, there the sphere of morality is invaded by the pretensions of the arbitrarily self-determining subject, and moral action lacks a solid basis. It is only where there is a consciousness of the infinite personal Spirit that both the moral personality is free, and the moral idea absolutely unconditional and sure. The heathen do not really have the divine law; they have only, lying in the very nature of the rational spirit, an unconscious presentiment of the same [Rom. ii, 14, 15].—Though Polytheism is with us no longer in fashion, still we are all the more infested with Pantheism, or such a form of Deism as differs therefrom only by an unscientific arbitrary inconsequence,—not, however, by any means with that vigorous and comparatively respectable Pantheism of India which drew, with moral earnestness, the full practical consequence of its world-theory, and presented in an actually-carried-out renunciation of the world the very contrary of our natural and legitimate claim to happiness,—but, on the contrary, with a Pantheism that is in every respect morbid and characterless, and which, greedy of enjoyment, delights itself in a world robbed of God. Pantheism lacks the antecedent condition of all morality, namely, personal freedom; with the universal prevalence of unconditional necessity there is no place for choice and self-determination; it also lacks a moral purpose, seeing that it knows 82no ideal, reality-transcending goal of morality, but, on the contrary, must acknowledge the real as per se the fulfillment of the ideal, that is, as good,—and for the reason that that which appears as a goal of life-development, is, in fact, realized from necessity; it lacks also a moral motive, for the sole causative ground of the absolutely necessary life-development is, as unfree and as unfreely-acting, non-moral,—is only a conscious nature-impulse. On the assumption that the entire being and activity of the individual is simply a necessary expression of the existence and life which God generates for himself in the world, it follows that each and every being is fully and perfectly justified in whatever nature and activity he may chance to appear, and no one can reproach another because of any seeming moral depravity. The moral tendencies of Pantheism, and of the therewith essentially identical Naturalism, must not be judged of from individual instances of men who are still unconsciously imbued with the moral spirit of the community, but rather from the effects that result where this world-theory has taken hold on the masses,—as at the time of the Reign of Terror in France, and in the bearing and aspirations of our more recent demagogues of reform, nearly all of whom are imbued with Pantheistic views.