There winds its way through Christianity the question about the "existence of God," which, taken up ever and ever again, gives testimony that the craving for existence, corporeity, personality, reality, was incessantly busying the heart because it never found a satisfying solution. At last the question about the existence of God fell, but only to rise up again in the proposition that the "divine" had existence (Feuerbach). But this too has no existence, and neither will the last refuge, that the "purely human" is realizable, afford shelter much longer. No idea has existence, for none is capable of corporeity. The scholastic contention of realism and nominalism has the same content; in short, this spins itself out through all Christian history, and cannot end _in_ it. The world of Christians is working at _realizing ideas_ in the individual relations of life, the institutions and laws of the Church and the State; but they make resistance, and always keep back something unembodied (unrealizable). Nevertheless this embodiment is restlessly rushed after, no matter in what degree _corporeity_ constantly fails to result. For realities matter little to the realizer, but it matters everything that they be realizations of the idea. Hence he is ever examining anew whether the realized does in truth have the idea, its kernel, dwelling in it; and in testing the real he at the same time tests the idea, whether it is realizable as he thinks it, or is only thought by him incorrectly, and for that reason unfeasibly. The Christian is no longer to care for family, State, etc., as _existences_; Christians are not to sacrifice themselves for these "divine things" like the ancients, but these are only to be utilized to make the _spirit alive_ in them. The _real_ family has become indifferent, and there is to arise out of it an _ideal_ one which would then be the "truly real," a sacred family, blessed by God, or, according to the liberal way of thinking, a "rational" family. With the ancients family, State, fatherland, etc., is divine as a thing _extant_; with the moderns it is still awaiting divinity, as extant it is only sinful, earthly, and has still to be "redeemed," _i. e._ to become truly real. This has the following meaning: The family, etc., is not the extant and real, but the divine, the idea, is extant and real; whether _this_ family will make itself real by taking up the truly real, the idea, is still unsettled. It is not the individual's task to serve the family as the divine, but, reversely, to serve the divine and to bring to it the still undivine family, _i. e._ to subject everything in the idea's name, to set up the idea's banner everywhere, to bring the idea to real efficacy.