Dogma and Morality, Faith and Love, contradict each other in Christianity. It is true that God, the object of faith, is in himself the idea of the species in a mystical garb--the common Father of men--and so far love to God is mystical love to man. But God is not only the universal being; he is also a peculiar, personal being, distinguished from love. Where the being is distinguished from love arises arbitrariness. Love acts from necessity, personality from will. Personality proves itself as such only by arbitrariness; personality seeks dominion, is greedy of glory; it desires only to assert itself, to enforce its own authority. The highest worship of God as a personal being is therefore the worship of God as an absolutely unlimited, arbitrary being. Personality, as such, is indifferent to all substantial determinations which lie in the nature of things; inherent necessity, the coercion of natural qualities, appears to it a constraint. Here we have the mystery of Christian love. The love of God, as the predicate of a personal being, has here the significance of grace, favour: God is a gracious master, as in Judaism he was a severe master. Grace is arbitrary love,--love which does not act from an inward necessity of the nature, but which is equally capable of not doing what it does, which could, if it would, condemn its object; thus it is a groundless, unessential, arbitrary, absolutely subjective, merely personal love. "He hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth (Rom. ix. 18).... The king does what he will. So is it with the will of God. He has perfect right and full power to do with us and all creatures as he will. And no wrong is done to us. If his will had a measure or rule, a law, ground, or cause, it would not be the divine will. For what he wills is right, because he wills it. Where there is faith and the Holy Spirit ... it is believed that God would be good and kind even if he consigned all men to damnation. 'Is not Esau Jacob's brother? said the Lord. Yet I have loved Jacob and hated Esau.'"--Luther (Th. xix. pp. 83, 87, 90, 91, 97). Where love is understood in this sense, jealous watch is kept that man attribute nothing to himself as merit, that the merit may lie with the divine personality alone; there every idea of necessity is carefully dismissed, in order, through the feeling of obligation and gratitude, to be able to adore and glorify the personality exclusively. The Jews deified the pride of ancestry; the Christians, on the other hand, interpreted and transformed the Jewish aristocratic principle of hereditary nobility into the democratic principle of nobility of merit. The Jew makes salvation depend on birth, the Catholic on the merit of works, the Protestant on the merit of faith. But the idea of obligation and meritoriousness allies itself only with a deed, a work, which cannot be demanded of me, or which does not necessarily proceed from my nature. The works of