Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/85

renunciation of itself; while Spirit ought, on the contrary, in worship to liberate itself from its finiteness, and to feel and know itself in God. In the absence of that which is self-existent and commands our obedience, all worship shrinks up into subjectivity. Worship is essentially made up of dealings with and enjoyment of a something higher than ourselves, and includes assurances, evidences, and confirmation of the existence of this higher Being; but such definite dealings, such actual enjoying and assurances can have no place if the objective, obligatory moment be wanting to them, and worship would, in fact, be annihilated if the subjective side were taken to be the whole. The possibility of getting out of the subjective heart into action would thus be as much precluded as the possibility of consciousness attaining to objective knowledge. The one is connected in the closest manner with the other. What a man believes he has to do in relation to God, corresponds with the idea which he has formed of God. His consciousness of self answers to his consciousness, and conversely he cannot believe himself to have any definite duties toward God if he neither have nor suppose himself to have any definite idea of Him as an Object. Not until religion is really relation, and contains the distinction involved in consciousness, does worship attain to a definite form as the lifting up into a higher unity of the severed elements, and become a vital process. This movement of worship does not, however, confine itself to the inner life alone in which consciousness frees itself from its finiteness, is the consciousness of its essence, and the subject as knowing itself in God has penetrated into the foundation of its life. But this its infinite life now develops towards what is outside too, for the worldly life which the subject leads has that substantial consciousness as its basis, and the way and manner in which the subject defines its ends depends on the consciousness of its essential truth. It is in connection with this side that religion reflects itself