What holds good of piety and morality will necessarily apply to humanity also, because one owes his life likewise to man, mankind or the species. Only when I am under obligation to no being is the maintaining of life--my affair. "A leap from this bridge makes me free!" But, if we owe the maintaining of our life to that being that we are to make alive in ourselves, it is not less our duty not to lead this life according to _our_ pleasure, but to shape it in conformity to that being. All my feeling, thinking, and willing, all my doing and designing, belongs to--him. What is in conformity to that being is to be inferred from his concept; and how differently has this concept been conceived! or how differently has that being been imagined! What demands the Supreme Being makes on the Mohammedan; what different ones the Christian, again, thinks he hears from him; how divergent, therefore, must the shaping of the lives of the two turn out! Only this do all hold fast, that the Supreme Being is to _judge_[217] our life. But the pious who have their judge in God, and in his word a book of directions for their life, I everywhere pass by only reminiscently, because they belong to a period of development that has been lived through, and as petrifactions they may remain in their fixed place right along; in our time it is no longer the pious, but the liberals, who have the floor, and piety itself cannot keep from reddening its pale face with liberal coloring. But the liberals do not adore their judge in God, and do not unfold their life by the directions of the divine word, but regulate[218] themselves by man: they want to be not "divine" but "human," and to live so. Man is the liberal's supreme being, man the _judge_ of his life, humanity his _directions_, or catechism. God is spirit, but man is the "most perfect spirit," the final result of the long chase after the spirit or of the "searching in the depths of the Godhead," _i. e._ in the depths of the spirit. Every one of your traits is to be human; you yourself are to be so from top to toe, in the inward as in the outward; for humanity is your _calling_. Calling--destiny--task!--