leaves the religious emotions cold; hence, if not in express words, yet in fact, there must be attributed to God a condition corresponding to the subjective need, the need of the worshipper, in order to establish reciprocity.[1] All the positive definitions of religion are based on reciprocity. The religious man thinks of God, because God thinks of him; he loves God, because God has first loved him. God is jealous of man; religion is jealous of morality;[2] it sucks away the best forces of morality; it renders to man only the things that are man’s, but to God the things that are God’s; and to Him is rendered true, living emotion,—the heart.
When in times in which peculiar sanctity was attached to religion, we find marriage, property, and civil law respected, this has not its foundation in religion, but in the original, natural sense of morality and right, to which the true social relations are sacred as such. He to whom the Right is not holy for its own sake, will never be made to feel it sacred by religion. Property did not become sacred because it was regarded as a divine institution; but it was regarded as a divine institution because it was felt to be in itself sacred. Love is not holy, because it is a predicate of God, but it is a predicate of God because it is in itself divine. The heathens do not worship the light or the fountain, because it is a gift of God,
- ↑ “They who honour me, I will honour, and they who despise me shall be lightly esteemed.”—1 Sam. ii. 30. “Jam se, o bone pater, vermis vilissimus et odio dignissimus sempiterno, tamen confidit amari, quoniam se sentit amare, imo quia se amari præsentit, non redamare confunditur. . . . Nemo itaque se amari diffidat, qui jam amat.”—Bernardus ad Thomam (Epist. 107). A very fine and pregnant sentence. If I exist not for God, God exists not for me; if I do not love, I am not loved. The passive is the active certain of itself, the object is the subject certain of itself. To love is to be man, to be loved is to be God. I am loved, says God; I love, says man. It is not until later that this is reversed, that the passive transforms itself into the active, and conversely.
- ↑ “The Lord spake to Gideon: The people are too many, that are with thee, that I should give Midian into their hands; Israel might glorify itself against me and say: My hand has delivered me,”—i.e., “Ne Israel sibi tribuat, quæ mihi debentur.” Judges vii. 2. “Thus saith the Lord: Cursed is the man that trusteth in man. But blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord and whose hope is in the Lord.”—Jer. xvii. 5. “God desires not our gold, body and possessions, but has given these to the emperor, (that is, to the representative of the world, of the state,) and to us through the emperor. But the heart, which is the greatest and best in man, he has reserved for himself;—this must be our offering to God—that we believe in him.”—Luther (xvi. p. 505).
