This every State must do, the people's State as well as the absolute or constitutional one. It must do so as long as we rest in the error that it is an _I_, as which it then applies to itself the name of a "moral, mystical, or political person." I, who really am I, must pull off this lion-skin of the I from the stalking thistle-eater. What manifold robbery have I not put up with in the history of the world! There I let sun, moon, and stars, cats and crocodiles, receive the honor of ranking as I; there Jehovah, Allah, and Our Father came and were invested with the I; there families, tribes, peoples, and at last actually mankind, came and were honored as I's; there the Church, the State, came with the pretension to be I,--and I gazed calmly on all. What wonder if then there was always a real I too that joined the company and affirmed in my face that it was not my _you_ but my real _I_. Why, _the_ Son of Man _par excellence_ had done the like; why should not a son of man do it too? So I saw my I always above me and outside me, and could never really come to myself. I never believed in myself; I never believed in my present, I saw myself only in the future. The boy believes he will be a proper I, a proper fellow, only when he has become a man; the man thinks, only in the other world will he be something proper. And, to enter more closely upon reality at once, even the best are to-day still persuading each other that one must have received into himself the State, his people, mankind, and what not, in order to be a real I, a "free burgher," a "citizen," a "free or true man"; they too see the truth and reality of me in the reception of an alien I and devotion to it. And what sort of an I? An I that is neither an I nor a you, a _fancied_ I, a spook. While in the Middle Ages the church could well brook many States living united in it, the States learned after the Reformation, especially after the Thirty Years' War, to tolerate many churches (confessions) gathering under one crown. But all States are religious and, as the case may be, "Christian States," and make it their task to force the intractable, the "egoists," under the bond of the unnatural, _i. e._ Christianize them. All arrangements of the Christian State have the object of _Christianizing the people_. Thus the court has the object of forcing people to justice, the school that of forcing them to mental culture,--in short, the object of protecting those who act Christianly against those who act unchristianly, of bringing Christian action to _dominion_, of making it _powerful_. Among these means of force the State counted the _Church_, too, it demanded a--particular religion from everybody. Dupin said lately against the clergy, "Instruction and education belong to the State."