§ 169. In comparing the stages of the theoretical and practical culture
of the religious feeling their internal correspondence appears. Feeling,
as immediate knowledge, and the consecration of the sense by means of
piety; imagination with all its images, and the church services with
their ceremonial observances; finally, the comprehending of religion as
the reconciliation with destiny, as the internal emancipation from the
dominion of external events--all these correspond to each other. If we
seize this parallelism all together, we have the progress which religion
must make in its historical process, in which it (1) begins as natural;
(2) goes on to historical precision, and (3) elevates this to a rational
faith. These stages await every man in as far as he lives through a
complete religious culture, but this may be for the individual a
question of chance.
§ 170. (1) A child has as yet no definite religious feeling. He is still
only a possibility capable of manifold determinations. But, since he is
a spirit, the essence of religion is active in him, though as yet in an
unconscious form. The substance of spirit attests its presence in every
individual, through his mysterious impulse toward the absolute and
towards intercourse with God. This is the initiatory stage of natural
religion, which must not be confounded with the religion which makes
nature the object of worship (fetichism, &c.)
§ 171. (2) But while the child lives into this in his internal life, he
comes in contact with definite forms of religion, and will naturally,
through the mediation of the family, be introduced to some one of them.
His religious feeling takes now a particular direction, and he accepts
religion in one of its historical forms. This positive religion meets
the precise want of the child, because it brings into his consciousness,
by means of teaching and sacred rites, the principal elements which are
found in the nature of religion.
§ 172. (3) In contradistinction to the natural basis of religious
feeling, all historical religions rest on the authoritative basis of
revelation from God to man. They address themselves to the imagination,
and offer a system of objective forms of worship and ceremonies. But
spirit, as eternal, as self-identical, cannot forbear as thinking
activity to subject the traditional religion to criticism and to compare
it as a phenomenal existence. From this criticism arises a religion
which satisfies the demands of the reason, and which, by means of
insight into the necessity of the historical process, leads to the
exercise of a genuine toleration towards its many-sided forms. This
religion mediates between the unity of the thinking consciousness and
the religious content, while this content, in the history of religious
feeling, appears theoretically as dogma, and practically as the command
of an absolute and incomprehensible authority. It is just as simple as
the unsophisticated natural religious feeling, but its simplicity is at
the same time master of itself. It is just as specific in its
determinations as the historical religion, but its determinateness is at
the same time universal, since it is worked out by the thinking reason.
§ 173. Education must superintend the development of the religious
consciousness towards an insight into the necessary consequence of its
different stages. Nothing is more absurd than for the educator to desire
to avoid the introduction of a positive religion, or a definite creed,
as a middle stage between the natural beginning of religious feeling and
its end in philosophical culture. Only when a man has lived through the
entire range of one-sided phases--through the crudeness of such a
concrete individualizing of religion, and has come to recognize the
universal nature of religion in a special form of it which excludes
other forms--only when the spirit of a congregation has taken him into
its number, is he ripe to criticize religion in a conciliatory spirit,
because he has then gained a religious character through that historical
experience. The self-comprehending universality must have such a solid
basis as this in the life of the man; it can never form the beginning of
one's culture, but it may constitute the end which turns back again to
the beginning. Most men remain at the historical stand-point. The
religion of reason, as that of the minority, constitutes in the
different religions the invisible church, which seeks by progressive
reform to purify these religions from superstition and unbelief. It is
the duty of the state, by making all churches equal in the sight of the
law, to guard religion from the temptation of impure motives, and,
through the granting of such freedom to religious individuality, to help
forward the unity of a rational insight into religion which is distinct
from the religious feeling only in its form, not in its content. Not a
philosopher, but Jesus of Nazareth freed the world from all selfishness
and all bondage.
§ 174. With this highest theoretical and practical emancipation, the
general work of education ends. It remains now to be shown how the
general idea of Education shapes its special elements into their
appropriate forms. From the nature of Pedagogics, which concerns itself
with man in his entirety, this exposition belongs partly to the history
of culture in general, partly to the history of religion, partly to the
philosophy of history. The pedagogical element in it always lies in the
ideal which the spirit of a nation or of an age creates out of itself,
and which it seeks to realize in its youth.