own destiny; and while only distinguishing God, as subject, from
himself, yet holds fast to the unity of man and God. The system of
humanitarian education began to unfold from this principle, which no
longer accords the highest place to the natural unity of national
individuality, nor to the abstract obedience of the command of God, but
to that freedom of the soul which knows itself to be absolute necessity.
Christ is not a mere ideal of the thought, but is known as a living
member of actual history, whose life, sufferings and death for freedom
form the security as to its absolute justification and truth. The
aesthetic, philosophical, and political ideal are all found in the
universal nature of the Christian ideal, on which account no one of them
appears one-sided in the life of Christ. The principle of Human Freedom
excludes neither art, nor science, nor political feeling.

Sec. 235. In its conception of man the humanitarian education includes both
the national divisions and the subjection of all men to the divine law,
but it will no longer endure that one should grow into an isolating
exclusiveness, and another into a despotism which includes in it
somewhat of the accidental. But this principle of humanity and human
nature took root so slowly that its presuppositions were repeated within
itself and were really conquered in this reproduction. These stages of
culture were the Greek, the Roman, and the Protestant churches, and
education was metamorphosed to suit the formation of each of these.

--For the sake of brevity we would wish to close with these general
definitions; the unfolding of their details is intimately bound up with
the history of politics and of civilization. We shall be contented if we
give correctly the general whole.--

Sec. 236. Within education we can distinguish three epochs: the monkish,
the chivalric, and that education which is to fit one for civil life.
Each of these endeavored to express all that belonged to humanity as
such; but it was only after the recognition of the moral nature of the
Family, of Labor, of Culture, and of the conscious equal title of all
men to their rights, that this became really possible.

I. _The Epoch of Monkish Education._

Sec. 237. The Greek Church seized the Christian principle still abstractly
as deliverance from the world, and therefore, in the education
proceeding from it, it arrived only at the negative form, positing the
universality of the individual m