——The superficial thinking which many teachers demand in the sphere of religion is no less impractical than the want of all guidance into rightly ordered meditations on religious subjects. It is natural that the lower form of intelligence should, in contrast with the higher, appear to be frivolous, because it has no need of change of form as the higher has, and on this account it looks upon the destruction of the form of a picture or a dogma as the destruction of religion itself. In our time the idea is very prevalent that the content itself must change with the changing of the psychological form, and that therefore a religion in the stage of feeling, of conception, and of comprehension, can no longer be the same in its essence. These suppositions, which are so popular, and are considered to be high philosophy, spring from the superficiality of psychological inquiry.—— § 164. The theoretical culture of the religious feeling endeavors therefore with the freedom of philosophical criticism to elevate the presupposition of Reason in the religious content to self-assured insight by means of the proof of the necessity of its determinations. This is the only reasonable pedagogical way not only to prevent the degeneration of the religious consciousness into a miserable mysticism or into frivolity, but also to remove these if they are already existent. ——External seclusion avails nothing. The crises of the world-historical changes in the religious consciousness find their way through the thickest cloister walls; the philosopher Reinhold was a pupil of the Jesuits, the philosopher Schad of the Benedictines.—— II. _The Practical Process of Religious Culture._ § 165. The theoretical culture is truly practical, for it gives man definite conceptions and thoughts of the Divine and his relation to him. But in a narrower sense that culture is practical which relates to the Will as such. Education has in this respect to distinguish (1) consecration——religious feeling in general,——(2) the induction of the youth into the forms of a positive religion, and (3) his reconciliation with his lot. § 166. (1) Religious feeling presupposes morality as an indispensable condition without which it cannot inculcate its ideas. But if man from a merely moral stand-point places himself in relation to the idea of Duty as such, the ethical religious stand-point differs from it in this, that it places the necessity of the Good as the self-determination of the divine Will and thus makes of practice a personal relation to God, changing the Good to the Holy and the Evil to Sin. Education must therefore first accustom the youth to the idea, that in doing the Good he unites himself with God as with the absolute Person, but that in doing Evil he separates himself from him. The feeling that he through his deed comes into contact with God himself, positively or negatively, deepens the moral conduct to an intense sensibility of the heart.