we here draw from the idea of the divine existence. If the existence of God, taken by itself, had not rooted itself as a religious truth in minds, there would never have been those infamous, senseless, horrible ideas of God which stigmatize the history of religion and theology. The existence of God was a common, external, and yet at the same time a holy thing:—what wonder, then, if on this ground the commonest, rudest, most unholy conceptions and opinions sprang up!
Atheism was supposed, and is even now supposed, to be the negation of all moral principle, of all moral foundations and bonds: if God is not, all distinction between good and bad, virtue and vice, is abolished. Thus the distinction lies only in the existence of God; the reality of virtue lies not in itself, but out of it. And assuredly it is not from an attachment to virtue, from a conviction of its intrinsic worth and importance, that the reality of it is thus bound up with the existence of God. On the contrary, the belief that God is the necessary condition of virtue, is the belief in the nothingness of virtue in itself.
It is indeed worthy of remark, that the idea of the empirical existence of God has been perfectly developed in modern times, in which empiricism and materialism in general have arrived at their full blow. It is true that even in the original, simple religious mind, God is an empirical existence to be found in a place, though above the earth. But here this conception has not so naked, so prosaic a significance; the imagination identifies again the external God with the soul of man. The imagination is, in general, the true place of an existence which is absent, not present to the senses, though nevertheless sensational in its essence.[1] Only the imagination solves the contradiction in an existence which is at once sensational and not sensational; only the imagination is the
- ↑ “Christ is ascended on high . . . . . that is, he not only sits there above, but he is also here below. And he is gone thither to the very end that he might be here below, and fill all things, and be in all places, which he could not do while on earth, for here he could not be seen by all bodily eyes. Therefore he sits above, where every man can see him, and he has to do with every man.”—Luther (T. xiii. p. 643). That is to say: Christ or God is an object, an existence, of the imagination; in the imagination he is limited to no place,—he is present and objective to every one. God exists in heaven, but is for that reason omnipresent; for this heaven is the imagination.
