§ 167. (2) The religious sense which grows in the child that he has an uninterrupted personal relation to the Absolute as a person, constitutes the beginning of the practical forming of religion. The second step is the induction of the child into the objective forms of worship established in some positive religion. Through religious training the child learns to renounce his egotism; through attendance on religious services he learns to give expression to his religious feeling in prayer, in the use of symbols, and in church festivals. Education must, however, endeavor to retain freedom with regard to these forms, so that they shall not be confounded with Religion itself. Religion displays itself in these ceremonies, but they as mere forms are of value only in so far as they, while externalities, are manifestations of the spirit which produces them. ——If the mechanism of ceremonial forms is taken as religion itself, the service of God degenerates into the false service of religion, as Kant has designated it in _Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason_. Nothing is more destructive to the sensibility to all real religious culture than the want of earnestness with which prayers, readings from the Bible, attendance on church, the communion, &c., are often practised by teachers. But one must not conclude from this extreme that an ignorance of all sacred forms in general would be more desirable for the child.—— § 168. (3) It is possible that a man on the stand-point of ecclesiastical religious observances may be fully contented; he may be fully occupied in them, and perfect his life thereby in perfect content. But by far the greater number of men will see themselves forced to experience the truth of religion in the hard vicissitudes of their lot, since they carry on some business, and with that business create for themselves a past whose consequences condition their future. They limit themselves through their deeds, whose involuntary-voluntary authors they become; involuntary in so far as they are challenged to the deeds from the totality of events, voluntary in so far as they undertake them and bring about an actual change in the world. The history of the individual man appears therefore on the one hand, if we consider its material, as the work of circumstances; but on the other hand, if we reflect on the form, as the act of a self-determining actor. Want of freedom (the being determined through the given situation) and freedom (the determination to the act) are united in actual life as something which is exactly so, and cannot become anything else as final. The essence of the spiritual being stands always over against this unavoidable limitation as that which is in itself infinite, which is beyond all history, because the absolute spirit, in and for itself, has no history. That which one calls his history is only the manifesting of himself, and his everlasting return out of this manifestation into himself an act which in absolute