Christ which is able to satisfy the sensuous need, but rather the sensuous aspect of His bodily presence in general, the cross, the places in which He moved about, and so on. To this, relics, &c., come to be added. There is no lack of such mediate means of satisfying the craving felt. For the Spiritual Community, however, the immediate Present, the Now, is past and gone. The sensuous idea accordingly, above all, integrates the Past, views it from the point of view of the whole, for it the Past is a one-sided moment; the Present contains the Past and the Future in it as moments. Thus the sensuous idea finds the completion of its representation in the Second Advent, but the essentially absolute return is the act of exchanging externality for what is inward: this is the Comforter who can come only when sensuous history as immediate is past.
This, therefore, is the point represented by the formation of the Spiritual Community, or the third point; it is the Spirit. It represents the transition from what is outward, from outward manifestation to what is inward. It occupies itself with the certainty felt by the subject of its own infinite non-sensuous substantiality, and of the fact that it knows itself to be infinite and eternal, knows itself to be immortal.
The retreat into inner self-consciousness which is involved in this conversion is not of the Stoical kind, the value of which consists in the fact that it accomplishes this through the strength of the individual spirit as exercising thought, and seeks for the reality of thought in Nature, in natural things and in comprehending these, and which consequently is devoid of infinite sorrow and stands at the same time in a thoroughly positive relation to the world. On the contrary, it takes the form of the self-consciousness which endlessly yields up its particularity and individuality, and finds its infinite value only in that love which is contained in infinite sorrow and arises out of it. All
