bsolute Person, but that in
doing Evil he separates himself from him. The feeling that he through
his deed comes into contact with God himself, positively or negatively,
deepens the moral conduct to an intense sensibility of the heart.

Sec. 167. (2) The religious sense which grows in the child that he has an
uninterrupted personal relation to the Absolute as a person, constitutes
the beginning of the practical forming of religion. The second step is
the induction of the child into the objective forms of worship
established in some positive religion. Through religious training the
child learns to renounce his egotism; through attendance on religious
services he learns to give expression to his religious feeling in
prayer, in the use of symbols, and in church festivals. Education must,
however, endeavor to retain freedom with regard to these forms, so that
they shall not be confounded with Religion itself. Religion displays
itself in these ceremonies, but they as mere forms are of value only in
so far as they, while externalities, are manifestations of the spirit
which produces them.

--If the mechanism of ceremonial forms is taken as religion itself, the
service of God degenerates into the false service of religion, as Kant
has designated it in _Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason_.
Nothing is more destructive to the sensibility to all real religious
culture than the want of earnestness with which prayers, readings from
the Bible, attendance on church, the communion, &c., are often practised
by teachers. But one must not conclude from this extreme that an
ignorance of all sacred forms in general would be more desirable for the
child.--

Sec. 168. (3) It is possible that a man on the stand-point of
ecclesiastical religious observances may be fully contented; he may be
fully occupied in them, and perfect his life thereby in perfect content.
But by far the greater number of men will see themselves forced to
experience the truth of religion in the hard vicissitudes of their lot,
since they carry on some business, and with that business create for
themselves a past whose consequences condition their future. They limit
themselves through their deeds, whose involuntary-voluntary authors they
become; involuntary in so far as they are challenged to the deeds from
the totality of events, voluntary in so far as they undertake them and
bring about an actual change in the world. The history of the individual
man appears the