The willing recognition of this demand (which in its second half already comprehends all morality) by a man who has come to full deliberation over himself and his life-purpose,--this it is that first brings him out of a thoroughly ineffectual revolt against a divine order he can not change by his thoughts alone, on into the possibility of a harmony with himself and the surrounding world. And besides, the whole history of humanity is nothing else than the gradual unfolding of such a free will of the nations toward the will of God. Whoever denies this, and lives up to his denial, acts against his own welfare and the end for which he was destined, as well as against the good of mankind; and this state of war against God and man, as well as against one’s own life, is very likely the cause that calls forth the feeling of sin. There is no other and better explanation for it, in my opinion. Moreover, what Evil really is and exactly what Christ understood by the prayer for deliverance from it will, as long as we live on earth, remain just as obscure to us as what God is. We only know, and from experience alone, that we can yield ourselves into its power, and further, that it possesses no other power over us than we ourselves grant it. This especially comes to pass through our disobedience to what is true and through the preponderance of the sensual, animal life over the spiritual. Every more finely organized man feels this forthwith through a gradually increasing physical discomfort from which nothing else than a turn-about shall free him. And likewise, the spirit of truth in a man or a book, in a whole household or people, one recognizes as something beneficent, while the spirit of falsehood he feels to be something unhealthy and poisonous, like bad air in a room, to which one can, to be sure, accustom oneself, if one desires. A man can, of course, try to dismiss all this matter from his thoughts; he has perfect freedom of will to do so. But whether it will let _him_ alone is quite another and more important question. We neither can nor will, therefore, dispute with those who assert they have never harbored any feeling of sin; we can not look into their souls. We only reply that they would in that case find themselves in an extreme minority and really at the stage of evolution of the animals; for these also have no feeling of moral obligation and therefore no sin, but everything is permitted them that their natural impulse demands. If, on the other hand, such men possess the feeling of sin only now and then even, still it must be said it is not explicable in any other way than from the standpoint of a moral order of the world which we can not change and contrary to which we may not behave, nor even think. We turn now to those who acknowledge all this. For them the problem is to find a way of release from a burden which is by far the most unendurable of all earthly burdens.