2. What concerns us now is to make the Principle of Christianity, which has been explained at considerable length, into the principle of the world; the task set before the world is to bring this absolute Idea within itself, to actualize it in itself, and thereby to reconcile itself to God. This task once more falls into three separate divisions. In the first place we have the dissemination of the Christian religion and the bringing of it within the hearts of men; this, however, lies outside the limits of our consideration. The heart signifies the subjective man as ‘this,’ and through this principle the latter has a different position from before; it is essential that this subject should be present. The individual subject is the object of divine grace; each subject, or man as man, has on his own account an infinite value, is destined to partake of this spirit which must, as God, be born within the heart of every man. Man is determined for freedom, he is here recognized as implicitly free; this freedom is, however, at first only formal, because it remains within the principle of subjectivity. The second point is that the principle of the Christian religion should be worked out for thought, and be taken up into thinking knowledge, and realized in this; and thus that it should attain to reconciliation, having the divine Idea within itself, and that the riches of thought and culture belonging to the philosophic Idea should become united to the Christian principle. For the philosophic Idea is the Idea of God, and thought has the absolute right of reconciliation, or the right to claim that the Christian principle should correspond with thought. The Fathers have rendered the service of thus elaborating the Christian religion in thinking knowledge; but neither have we to consider further this development of the Christian principle, since it belongs to the history of the Church. We have only here to give the point of view adopted regarding the relation of the Fathers to Philosophy. They for the most part lived within the ancient Roman world and in Latin culture, though the Byzantines likewise are included with them. We know that the Fathers were men of great philosophic culture, and that they introduced Philosophy, and more especially Neo-Platonic philosophy, into the Church; in this way they worked out a Christian system by which the first mode in which Christianity was manifested in the world was supplemented, for system was not present in this first manifestation. The Fathers have dealt with all questions respecting the nature of God, the freedom of man, the relationship to God—who is the objective—the origin of evil, and so on; and whatever thought decided regarding these questions was by them brought into and incorporated with the Christian system. The nature of spirit, the way of salvation, _i.e._ the various stages in the spiritualizing of the subject, his growth, the process of spirit, whereby