excess of them, against which we have to protest. Whatever is the expression of the religious spirit, which carries itself out in the world, is religious and good, unless it goes to excess: and the excess is measured by the failure to strengthen or the weakening of the will. Just so any institution, observance, or discipline (it matters not what) which strengthens the religious will, is good, provided it does so strengthen it as a whole, and is not in other ways contrary to religion and morality. The same holds good in the moral sphere; there we may have ascetic exercises which strengthen the will, and are therefore, and so far as they do that, good; but not good, or even bad, when they go beyond. But as to what in detail is legitimate or not, all this is matter of particular fact, with which we have nothing to do.
To repeat, public and private exercises are religious and good as the simple voice of, or as means to the strengthening of, the religious will. That will consists in the faith that overcomes the world, by turning it into the Christian world which for faith it is. The inner sphere of religion, which brings home to itself its assurance and its bliss, is only the inner sphere, and by itself is not religion. By itself it is not even the inner, for it is so only when it is the inner of the outer; and that outer, where faith fails, is not, and with it goes the inner as such. A sensuous or semi-sensuous gloating over the pleasures of the anticipated result is, in morals as in religion, when considered in reference to the will, a mere debauchery. Here as there it is the Hedonism which kills practice; and considered as θεωρία, it belongs to art or science, not religion at all. Furthermore sensitiveness or intensity of the religious consciousness is no more religion than that of the moral consciousness is morality; nor again is a right perception in these matters any more than a right perception. It is religion only when the divine will, of which for faith the world is the realization, reflects itself in us; and, with the personal energy of our own and its self-consciousness, carries out both its and our will into the world, which is its own and ours, and gives us, in the feeling which results from function, that inner assurance of identity which precedes and accompanies the action of our will. And thus for religion and morality the content of the will is the same, though the knowledge and the spirit are widely different.
