The absolute religion is undoubtedly a positive religion in the sense that everything which exists for consciousness is for it something objective. Everything must come to us in an outward way. What belongs to sense is thus something positive, and, to begin with, there is nothing so positive as what we have before us in immediate perception.
Everything spiritual, as a matter of fact, comes to us in this way also, as the spiritual in a finite form, the spiritual in the form of history, and the mode in which the spiritual is thus external and externalises itself is likewise positive.
A higher and purer form of the spiritual is found in what is moral, in the laws of freedom. This, however, is not in its real nature any such outward form of the spiritual as has just been referred to, it is not something external or accidental, but expresses the nature of pure Spirit itself. It too, however, comes to us in an outward way, at first in education, training, definite teaching; there its truth or validity is simply given to us, pointed out to us.
And so, too, laws, civil laws, the laws of the State, are something positive; they come to us, they exist for us, they have authority or validity, they are, not in the sense that we can leave them alone or pass by them, but as implying that in this external form of theirs they ought also to exist for us as something subjectively essential, subjectively binding.
When we get a grasp of the law that crime should be punished, when we recognise its validity and find it to be rational, it is not something essential for us in the sense that it has authority for us only because it is positive, because it is what it is; but it has authority for us inwardly as well, for our reason, as being something essential, because it is also inward and rational.
The fact of its being positive in no way deprives it of its character as something rational, as something which
