No doubt resignation is an essential characteristic in the evolution of the Christian life; but it is only in the monkish conception of it that it requires he should cut off from himself his soul, his emotions, the so-called impulses of his Nature, and should not incorporate his life in the moral, rational, actual world, the family and the State; and it does so precisely as the Illumination and its Deism, which presupposes that God is unknowable, imposes on mankind the extremest form of resignation, namely, that of abandoning all effort either to know or conceive Him. In any true exposition of Christian doctrine, resignation is, on the contrary, merely a phasal moment of mediation, a point of transition, in which that which is purely natural, sensuous, and in general terms finite, strips off this its incompatible nature in order to permit Spirit to attain the loftier freedom and reconciliation of its own possessions, a freedom and blessedness which was unknown to the Greeks. In Christianity as thus understood we are not entitled to speak of the celebration of the one God, of the bare seclusion of Himself, and the cutting ourselves adrift from an ungodly world, for it is precisely in this spiritual freedom and reconciliation of Spirit that God is immanent, and from this point of view the famous lines of Schiller: /$ Da die Göttes menschlicher noch waren, Waren Menschen göttlicher[202]. $/ is absolutely false. We must for this very reason emphasize the later alteration made in the concluding lines which refer thus to the Greek gods: /$ Aus der Zeitfluh weggerissen schweben Sie gerettet auf des Pindus Höhn; Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben, Muss im Leben untergehn[203]. $/ These words support entirely the assertion we have made above that the Greek gods could only be localized in the mental conception and imagination; they were neither able to affirm such a position in the reality of life, nor satisfy in the long run finite spirit.