ted with this malady. Our literature is full of its
products. It inveighs against its dissipation, and nevertheless at the
same time cannot resist a certain kind of pleasure in it. Diabolical
sentimentality!--

III. _The Absolute Process of Religious Culture._

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.)

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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 objecti