Church? To speak of the Spiritual Community passing away is to end with a discordant note.
Only, how can it be helped? This discordant note is actually present in reality. Just as in the time of the Roman Empire, because universal unity in religion had disappeared, and the Divine was profaned, and because, further, political life was universally devoid of principle, of action, and of confidence, reason took refuge only in the form of private right, or, to put it otherwise, because what was by its very nature essential, what existed in-and-for-itself was given up, individual well-being was elevated to the rank of an end, so, too, is it now. Moral views, individual opinion and conviction without objective truth, have attained authority, and the pursuit of private rights and enjoyment is the order of the day. When the time is fulfilled in which speculative justification, justification by means of the Notion, is what is needed, then the unity of the outer and inner no longer exists in immediate consciousness, in the world of reality, and in the sphere of Faith nothing is justified. The rigidity of an objective command, an external direction, the power of the State can effect nothing here; the process of decay has gone too deep for that. When the Gospel is no longer preached to the poor, when the salt has lost its savour, and all the foundations have been tacitly removed, then the people, for whose ever solid reason truth can exist only in a pictorial conception, no longer know how to assist the impulses and emotions they feel within them. They are nearest to the condition of infinite sorrow; but since love has been perverted to a love and enjoyment from which all sorrow is absent, they seem to themselves to be deserted by their teachers. These latter have, it is true, brought help to themselves by means of reflection, and have found their satisfaction in finitude, in subjectivity and its virtuosity, and consequently in what is empty and vain, but the substantial kernel of the people cannot find its satisfaction there.
