higher,
appear to be frivolous, because it has no need of change of form as the
higher has, and on this account it looks upon the destruction of the
form of a picture or a dogma as the destruction of religion itself. In
our time the idea is very prevalent that the content itself must change
with the changing of the psychological form, and that therefore a
religion in the stage of feeling, of conception, and of comprehension,
can no longer be the same in its essence. These suppositions, which are
so popular, and are considered to be high philosophy, spring from the
superficiality of psychological inquiry.--

Sec. 164. The theoretical culture of the religious feeling endeavors
therefore with the freedom of philosophical criticism to elevate the
presupposition of Reason in the religious content to self-assured
insight by means of the proof of the necessity of its determinations.
This is the only reasonable pedagogical way not only to prevent the
degeneration of the religious consciousness into a miserable mysticism
or into frivolity, but also to remove these if they are already
existent.

--External seclusion avails nothing. The crises of the world-historical
changes in the religious consciousness find their way through the
thickest cloister walls; the philosopher Reinhold was a pupil of the
Jesuits, the philosopher Schad of the Benedictines.--

II. _The Practical Process of Religious Culture._

Sec. 165. The theoretical culture is truly practical, for it gives man
definite conceptions and thoughts of the Divine and his relation to him.
But in a narrower sense that culture is practical which relates to the
Will as such. Education has in this respect to distinguish (1)
consecration--religious feeling in general,--(2) the induction of the
youth into the forms of a positive religion, and (3) his reconciliation
with his lot.

Sec. 166. (1) Religious feeling presupposes morality as an indispensable
condition without which it cannot inculcate its ideas. But if man from a
merely moral stand-point places himself in relation to the idea of Duty
as such, the ethical religious stand-point differs from it in this, that
it places the necessity of the Good as the self-determination of the
divine Will and thus makes of practice a personal relation to God,
changing the Good to the Holy and the Evil to Sin. Education must
therefore first accustom the youth to the idea, that in doing the Good
he unites himself with God as with the a