e of endeavor,
failure, and success through the very agency of failure.

A more typical instance of this rhythmic process is Hegel's view of the
evolution of religion. Religion, in general, is based on a dualism which
it seeks to overcome. Though God is in heaven and man on earth, religion
longs to bridge the gulf which separates man and God. The religions of
the Orient emphasize God's infinity. God is everything, man is nothing.
Like an Oriental prince, God is conceived to have despotic sway over
man, his creature. Only in contemplating God's omnipotence and his own
nothingness can man find solace and peace. Opposed to this religion of
the infinite is the finite religion of Greece.

Man in Greece stands in the centre of a beautiful cosmos which is not
alien to his spirit. The gods on high, conceived after the likeness of
man, are the expression of a free people conscious of their freedom. And
the divinities worshiped, under the form of Zeus, Apollo,
Aphrodite--what are they but idealized and glorified Greeks? Can a more
complete antithesis be imagined? But Christianity becomes possible after
this struggle only, for in Christianity is contained both the principle
of Oriental infinity and the element of Hellenic finitude, for in a
being who is both God and man--a God-man--the gulf between the infinite
and finite is bridged. The Christian, like the Greek, worships
man--Jesus; but this man is one with the eternal being of the Orient.
Because it is the outcome of the Oriental and Greek opposition, the
Christian religion is, in Hegel's sense, a higher one. Viewing the
Oriental and the Hellenic religions historically in terms of the
biological "struggle for existence," the extinction of neither has
resulted. The Christian religion is the unity of these two struggling
opposites; in it they are conciliated and preserved. And this for Hegel
is genuine evolution.

That evolution demands a union of opposites seems at first paradoxical
enough. To say that Christianity is a religion of both infinity and
finitude means nothing less than that it contains a contradiction.
Hegel's view, strange as it may sound, is just this: everything includes
a contradiction in it, everything is both positive and negative,
everything expresses at once its Everlasting Yea and its Everlasting No.
The negative character of the world is the very vehicle of its progress.
Life and activity mean the triumph of the positive over the negative, a
triumph whi