[162F-EOC: p. 309]
“To the heathen, man was a common, to the Christian, a select being … .” [162F-EOC: p. 309]
[163F-EOC: p. 309-310]
[P. 309] “The Christians expected the destruction of the world immediately, because the Christian religion has in it no [P. 310] cosmical principle of development … . (…) The heathens, on the contrary, set no limits on the development of the cosmos; they supposed the world to be destroyed only to arise again renovated as a real world; they granted it eternal life. The Christian destruction of the world was a matter of feeling, an object of fear and longing; the heathen, a matter of reason, an inference from the contemplation of nature.” [163F-EOC: p. 309-310]
[164F-EOC: p. 311-312]
[P. 311] “The fall of the creature … is only an hypothesis by which faith drives from its mind the burdensome, [P. 312] disquieting contradiction, that Nature is a product of God, and yet, as it actually is, does not harmonise with god, i.e., with the Christian sentiment.” [164F-EOC: p. 311-312]
[165F-EOC: p. 314]
“ … the … true Christian … is bound to deny Nature, while he satisfies it … . … he publicly disavows what he privately does.” [165F-EOC: p. 314]
[166F-EOC: p. 314]
“The heathens confirmed, the Christians contradicted their faith by their lives.” [166F-EOC: p. 314]
[167F-EOC: p. 316]
“Why do not the believing theologians of modern times enter into such specialities as occupied the older theologians? Because their faith is itself only general, indefinite, i.e., a faith which they only suppose themselves to possess; because from the fear of their understanding, which has long been at issue with their faith, from fear of risking their feeble faith by bringing it to the light, that is, considering it in detail, they suppress the consequences, the necessary determinations of their faith, and conceal them from their understanding.” [167F-EOC: p. 316]
[168F-EOC: p. 320]
“Love acts from necessity, personality from will. Personality proves itself as such only by arbitrariness; personality seeks dominion, is greedy of glory; it desires only to assert itself, to enforce its own authority. The highest worship of God as a personal being is therefore the worship of God as an absolutely unlimited, arbitrary being. Personality … is indifferent to all substantial determinations which lie in the nature of things; inherent necessity, the coercion of natural qualities, appears to it constraint.” [168F-EOC: p. 320]
