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PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, 483 further, it has the significance of being (to use Schopen- hauer's words) the " metaphysics of the people." Although religion and piety be made synonymous, it must still be admitted that in a being capable of knowing and willing as well as of feeling, this devout frame will have results in the spheres of cognition and action. In regard to cultus Schleiermacher maintains that a religious observance which does not spring from one's own feeling and find an echo therein is superstitious, and demands that religious feeling, like a sacred melody, accompany all human action, that everything be done with religion, nothing from religion. Instead of expressing itself in single specifically religious actions, the religious feeling should uniformly pervade the whole life. Let a private room be the temple where the voice of the priest is raised. Dogmas, again, are descriptions of pious excitation, and take their origin in man's reflection on his religious feelings, in his endeavor to explain them, in his expression of them in ideas and words. The concepts and principles of theology are valid only as descriptions and presentations of feelings, not as cognitions ; by their unavoidable anthropomorphic character alone they are completely unfitted for science. The dogmatic system is an envelopment which religion accepts with a smile. He who treats religious doctrines as science falls into empty mythology. Principles of faith and principles of knowledge are in no way related to one another, neither by way of opposition nor by way of agreement ; they never come into contact. A theology in the sense of an actual science of God is impossible. Further, out of its dogmas the Church constructs prescriptive symbols, a step which must be deplored. It is to be hoped that some time religion will no longer have need of the Church. In view* of the present condition of affairs it must be said that the more religious a man is the more secular he must become, and that the cultured man opposes the Church in order to promote religion. So-called natural religion is nothing more than an abstraction of thought; in reality positive religions alone exist. Because of the infinity of God and the finitude of man, the one, universal, eternal religion can only manifest