God, no more excellent being than itself, than a God whose name may indeed be another, but whose nature, whose substance, is the nature of the heart. And out of the heart, out of the inward impulse to do good, to live and die for man, out of the divine instinct of benevolence which desires to make all happy, and excludes none, not even the most abandoned and abject, out of the moral duty of benevolence in the highest sense, as having become an inward necessity, i.e., a movement of the heart,—out of the human nature, therefore, as it reveals itself through the heart, has sprung what is best, what is true in Christianity—its essence purified from theological dogmas and contradictions.
For, according to the principles which we have already developed, that which in religion is the predicate, we must make the subject, and that which in religion is a subject we must make a predicate, thus inverting the oracles of religion; and by this means we arrive at the truth. God suffers—suffering is the predicate—but for men, for others, not for himself. What does that mean in plain speech? nothing else than this: to suffer for others is divine; he who suffers for others, who lays down his life for them, acts divinely, is a God to men.[1]
The passion of Christ, however, represents not only moral, voluntary suffering, the suffering of love, the power of sacrificing self for the good of others; it represents also suffering as such, suffering in so far as it is an expression of passibility in general. The Christian religion is so little superhuman, that it even sanctions human weakness. The heathen philosopher, on hearing tidings of the death of his child, exclaims: “I knew that he was mortal.” Christ, on the contrary—at least in the Bible,—sheds tears over the death of Lazarus, a death which he nevertheless knew to be only an apparent one. While Socrates empties the cup of poison with unshaken soul, Christ
- ↑ Religion speaks by example. Example is the law of religion. What Christ did, is law. Christ suffered for others; therefore, we should do likewise. “Quae necessitas fuit ut sic exinaniret se, sic humiliate se, sic abbreviaret se Dominus majestatis; nisi ut vos similiter ficiatis?”—Bernardus (in Die nat. Domini). “We ought studiously to consider the example of Christ . . . That would move us and incite us, so that we from our hearts should willingly help and serve other people, even though it might be hard, and we must suffer on account of it.”—Luther (T. xv. p. 40).
