Love is a far-reaching religious demand, which is not, as might be supposed, limited to love to God and man, but stands foremost in every regard. Whatever we do, think, will, the ground of it is always to be love. Thus we may indeed judge, but only "with love." The Bible may assuredly be criticised, and that very thoroughly, but the critic must before all things _love_ it and see in it the sacred book. Is this anything else than to say he must not criticise it to death, he must leave it standing, and that as a sacred thing that cannot be upset?--In our criticism on men too, love must remain the unchanged key-note. Certainly judgments that hatred inspires are not at all our _own_ judgments, but judgments of the hatred that rules us, "rancorous judgments." But are judgments that love inspires in us any more our _own_? They are judgments of the love that rules us, they are "loving, lenient" judgments, they are not our _own_, and accordingly not real judgments at all. He who burns with love for justice cries out, _fiat justitia, pereat mundus_! He can doubtless ask and investigate what justice properly is or demands, and _in what_ it consists, but not _whether_ it is anything. It is very true, "He who abides in love abides in God, and God in him." (I John 4. 16.) God abides in him, he does not get rid of God, does not become godless; and he abides in God, does not come to himself and into his own home, abides in love to God and does not become loveless. "God is love! All times and all races recognize in this word the central point of Christianity." God, who is love, is an officious God: he cannot leave the world in peace, but wants to make it _blest_. "God became man to make men divine."[197] He has his hand in the game everywhere, and nothing happens without it; everywhere he has his "best purposes," his "incomprehensible plans and decrees." Reason, which he himself is, is to be forwarded and realized in the whole world. His fatherly care deprives us of all independence. We can do nothing sensible without its being said, God did that! and can bring upon ourselves no misfortune without hearing, God ordained that; we have nothing that we have not from him, he "gave" everything. But, as God does, so does Man. God wants perforce to make the world _blest_, and Man wants to make it _happy_, to make all men happy. Hence every "man" wants to awaken in all men the reason which he supposes his own self to have: everything is to be rational throughout. God torments himself with the devil, and the philosopher does it with unreason and the accidental. God lets no being go _its own_ gait, and Man likewise wants to make us walk only in human wise.