The natural historical entity presents us always only with initial facts which lead on to corresponding further happenings, but never with facts in which the nature of the society, that is to say the way in which we are to behave towards it and to belong to it, can be determined. If one allows that in the conception of the natural entity there is also given one of a self-determined purpose, there arises a fundamental confusion in people’s notion of the organization. The individual and humanity as a whole, which are just as truly natural entities as the two historical ones, are robbed of their rights and sacrificed to the latter. The increased understanding with which we now study the natural policy of societies with historical origin can therefore not alter at all our demand that State and Church shall direct their course more and more with reference to the ideal of man and of humanity as their natural poles, and be obliged to find in them their higher effectiveness. Civilization demands, then, that State and Church become capable of development. This presupposes that the relations of influence between the collective body and individual members of it will become different from what they have been. In the last few generations the individual has in face of State and Church surrendered more and more of his spiritual independence. He received his spirit [pg 280] and temper from them, instead of the spirit and temper that was growing within him working as a shaping force upon State and Church. This abnormal relation was unavoidable. The individual had, of course, nothing in which he could be spiritually independent. He had, therefore, no spirit and temper in which he could come to terms with the entities of real life. Nor was he in a position to think out ideals which could work upon reality. There was no course left for him but to adopt as an ideal an idealized reality. But in the world- and life-view of reverence for life he obtains the means to a firm and valuable self-determination. It is with a will and a hope which he carries ready shaped within himself that he faces reality. It is to him something self-evident that every society that is formed among men must serve towards the maintenance, the advancement, and the higher development of life, and the production of true spirituality. That which is decisive for the commencement of a development of State and Church which has civilization for its aim and object, is that the mass of men belong to these two entities in the spirit and temper of reverence for life and the ideals which grow out of it: when that is the case there arises in State and Church a spirit which works for their transformation into something ethical and spiritual.