_Secondly_, we shall consider love in its positive presentment as the feeling of reconciliation between the human and the Divine; in other words the Holy Family, the maternal love of Mary, the love of Christ and that of his disciples. _Thirdly_, we have the community before us. Here it is the Spirit of God as present by virtue of the conversion of soul and the mortification of the natural and finite sense, in short, the return of man to God, a return in which penances and pains mediate in the first instance this union of God and man. 1. THE REDEMPTION-HISTORY OF CHRIST The reconciliation of God with His own substance, history in its absolute significance, or, in one word, the process of realization, is made visible to our senses and assured to our minds by the revelation of God in the world. The content of this reconcilement as expressed in the most direct way is the coalescence in unity of the absolute essence of reality with the individual subject of human consciousness. An individual man is God and God is an individual man. In this truth is implied the fact that the human spirit _intrinsically_, that is, relatively to its notion and essence, is Spirit in truth; and every particular individual in virtue of the humanity he connotes possesses the infinite vocation no less than the infinite significance of being an object of God and in union with God. But along with this and of a like importance the obligation is imposed on man to realize this notion, which, in the first instance, he merely possesses under the implication of his nature. In other words, he has to place before himself and attain to this union with God as the seal of his existence. Only when he has thus consummated his proper destiny does he become essentially free and infinite Spirit. This he can only do in so far as that unity is itself the origination, the eternal ground-root of the human and Divine nature. The goal is here the explicit beginning of the process, namely, the presupposition for the religious consciousness exhibited in romantic art, that God is Himself man and flesh, that He has become this particular human individual, in whom the reconciliation consequently no longer remains as only implicit, so that it is merely to be inferred from its _notional_ existence, but asserts itself in _objective_ existence also before the perception of human sense as this particular and actually existing man. The importance of this aspect of _particularity_ consists in this that it enables all other individuals to find in the same the picture of his own reconcilement with God; it is now no longer a mere possibility, but a fact which has on this very account appeared as really accomplished in this one person. Inasmuch, however, as this unity, conceived as the ideal reconciliation of opposed factors of one process, is no immediately unified mode of being, it is inevitable, in the _second_ place, that the process of Spirit as exemplified in this _one_ individual--the process, that