OF THE SPIRIT. 293 



to the understanding and imagination rather than to the 

 feelings and the heart. Being as such useless for the 

 purposes of popular education, it brought about a wide- 

 spread but fatal tendency to regard the religion of the 

 more highly educated and academic classes as something 

 different from the religion of the people. As the whole 

 of the religious teaching of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and 

 Hegel amounted in reality to little more than an inter- 

 pretation or a metaphysical paraphrase of the Christian 

 verities, which were accepted in a symbolical or meta- 

 phorical sense, it was inevitable that one of the principal 

 articles of Christianity — viz., that it is a religion for all 

 men alike, the high and the low, the poor and the rich, 

 the learned and the simple — was in danger of being lost. 

 It meant the sacrifice of the true catholicity of Christian 

 faith and doctrine as it lived in its Founder and His 

 Apostles. 



This view found a philosophical formula in Hegel's 23. 



H626l's 



' Philosophy of Eeligion ' : there the view was distinctly formula for 



^ -^ o . religion. 



upheld that religion was a necessary and important, but 

 not the highest, stage of mental or spiritual develop- 

 ment ; that the latter had to be sought and found 

 in philosophy. At the close of his lectures on the 

 ' History of Philosophy,' Hegel himself says : — 



" The highest aim and interest of philosophy is to 

 reconcile thought, the idea, with reality. Philosophy 

 is the veritable theodicy, compared with art and religion 

 and their sentiments, — the reconciliation of the mind, in- 

 deed of that mind which has grasped itself in the freedom 

 and wealth of its reality. It is easy otherwise to find satis- 

 faction in subordinate regions of intuition and feeling." 



