at once the power to punish and the glance which nothing escapes. That which his own nature, his reason, his conscience says to him, does not bind him, because the subjective, uncultured man sees in conscience, in reason, so far as he recognises it as his own, no universal, objective power; hence he must separate from himself that which gives him moral laws, and place it in opposition to himself, as a distinct personal being.
Belief in revelation is a child-like belief, and is only respectable so long as it is child-like. But the child is determined from without. And revelation has for its object to effect by God’s help, what man cannot attain by himself. Hence, revelation has been called the education of the human race. This is correct; only, revelation must not be regarded as outside the nature of man. There is within him an inward necessity which impels him to present moral and philosophical doctrines in the form of narratives and fables, and an equal necessity to represent that impulse as a revelation. The mythical poet has an end in view—that of making men good and wise; he designedly adopts the form of fable as the most appropriate and vivid method of representation; but at the same time, he is himself urged to this mode of teaching by his love of fable, by his inward impulse. So it is with a revelation enunciated by an individual. This individual has an aim; but at the same time he himself lives in the conceptions by means of which he realizes this aim. Man, by means of the imagination, involuntarily contemplates his inner nature; he represents it as out of himself. The nature of man, of the species—thus working on him through the irresistible power of the imagination, and contemplated as the law of his thought and action—is God.
Herein lie the beneficial moral effects of the belief in revelation.
But as Nature “unconsciously produces results which look as if they were produced consciously,” so revelation generates moral actions, which do not, however, proceed from morality;—moral actions, but no moral dispositions. Moral rules are indeed observed, but they are severed from the inward disposition, the heart, by being represented as the commandments of an external law-giver, by being placed in the category of arbitrary laws, police regulations. What is done, is done not because it is good and right, but because it is commanded by God. The inherent quality of the deed is indifferent; what-
