_Religious Culture._
§ 152. Social culture contains the formal phase, moral culture the real
phase, of the practical mind. Conscience forms the transition to
religious culture. In its apodeictic nature, it is the absoluteness of
spirit. The individual discerns in the depths of its own consciousness
the determinations of universality and of necessity to which it has to
subject itself. They appear to it as the voice of God. Religion makes
its appearance as soon as the individual distinguishes the Absolute from
himself as personal, as a subject existing for itself and therefore for
him. The atheist remains at the stage of insight into the absoluteness
of the logical and physical, æsthetic and practical categories. He may,
therefore, be perfectly moral. He lacks religion, though he loves to
characterize his uprightness by this name, and to transfer the dogmatic
determinations of positive religion into the ethical sphere. It belongs
to the province of religion that I demean myself towards the Absolute
not only as toward that which is my own substance, and that in relation
to it not I alone am the subject, but that to me also the substance in
itself is a personal subject for itself. If I look upon myself as the
only absolute, I make myself devoid of spiritual essence. I am only
absolute self-consciousness, for which, because it as idea relates only
to itself, there remains only the impulse to a persistent conflict with
every self-consciousness not identical with it. Were this the case, such
a self-consciousness would be only theoretical irony. In religion I know
the Absolute as essence, when I am known by him. Everything else, myself
included, is finite and transitory, however significant it may be,
however relatively and momentarily the Infinite may exist in it. As
existence even, it is transitory. The Absolute, positing itself,
distinguishing itself from itself in unity with itself, is always like
to itself, and takes up all the unrest of the phenomenal world back
again into its simple essence.
§ 153. This process of the individual spirit, in which it rises out of
the multiplicity of all relations into union with the Absolute as the
substantial subject, and in which nature and history are united, we may
call, in a restricted sense, a change of heart [Gemuth]. In a wider
sense of the word we give this name to a certain sentimental
cheerfulness (light-heartedness), a sense of comfort--of little
significance. The highest emotions of the heart culminate in religion,
whose warmth is inspired by practical activity and conscientiousness.
§ 154. Education has to fit man for religion. (1) It gives him the
conception of it; (2) it endeavors to have this conception actualized in
him; (3) it subordinates the theoretical and practical process in
fashioning him to a determinate stand-point of religious culture.
--In the _working out_ or detailed treatment of Pedagogics, the
position which the conception of religion occupies is very uncertain.
Many writers on Education place it at the beginning, while others
reserve it for the end. Others naïvely bring it forward in the midst of
heterogeneous surroundings, but know how to say very little concerning
it, and urge teachers to kindle the fire of religious feeling in their
pupils by teaching them to fear God. Through all their writing, we hear
the cry that in Education nothing is so important as Religion. Rightly
understood, this saying is quite true. The religious spirit, the
consciousness of the Absolute, and the reverence for it, should permeate
all. Not unfrequently, however, we find that what is meant by religion
is theology, or the church ceremonial, and these are only one-sided
phases of the total religious process. The Anglican High-Church presents
in the colleges and universities of England a sad example of this error.
What can be more deadening to the spirit, more foreign to religion, than
the morning and evening prayers as they are carried on at Oxford and
Cambridge with machine-like regularity! But also to England belongs the
credit of the sad fact, that, according to Kohl's report, there live in
Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and London, thousands of men who have
never enjoyed any teaching in religion, have never been baptized, who
live absolutely without religion in brutal stupidity. Religion must form
the culminating point of Education. It takes up into itself the
didactical and practical elements, and rises through the force of its
content to universality.--