deity; if his relation to man is done away with, so also is his existence.
Nevertheless Protestantism, at least in theory, has retained in the background of this human God the old supranaturalistic God. Protestantism is the contradiction of theory and practice; it has emancipated the flesh, but not the reason. According to Protestantism, Christianity, i. e., God, does not contradict the natural impulses of man: "Therefore, we ought now to know, that God does not condemn or abolish the natural tendency in man, which was implanted in Nature at the creation, but that he awakens and preserves it.—"Luther (T. iii. p. 290). But it contradicts reason and is therefore, theoretically, only an object of faith. We have shown, however, that the nature of faith, the nature of God, is itself nothing else than the nature of man placed out of man, conceived as external to man. The reduction of the extrahuman, supernatural, and anti-rational nature of God to the natural, immanent, inborn nature of man, is therefore the liberation of Protestantism, of Christianity in general, from its fundamental contradiction, the reduction of it to its truth,—the result, the necessary, irrepressible, irrefragable result of Christianity.
THE END.
