ve 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.

Sec. 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 im