is, by means of which consciousness is for the first time Spirit in Truth--should receive the form of its existence in the history of this very person. This history of Spirit attaining its consummation in one personal life consists simply in all that we have already adverted to; that is to say, the particular man casts on one side his singularity both in its bodily and spiritual presence, in other words he suffers and dies, but furthermore through the agony of death rises again out of death and ascends as glorified God, very and real Spirit, who now, it is true, has entered actual existence as this particular person, yet is with equal truth only very God as Spirit in His community. (_a_) This history furnishes the fundamental material for the romantic art of the religious consciousness, in its attitude to which, however, art, taken simply as Art, is to some extent a superfluity. For the main thing here is spiritual conviction, the feeling and conception of this eternal truth, and _the faith_ which is essential evidence to itself of the truth, and becomes in consequence a vital possession of the ideality of that conception. In other words, faith in its developed condition consists in the immediate conviction that it has confronting soul, in the organic movement of this history, the _truth_ itself. If, however, the consciousness of truth is the main point of importance it follows that the _beauty_ of the artistic reflection and presentation is of incidental value to which we may be comparatively indifferent, for the truth is present to mind quite independently of art. (_b_) From another point of view, however, the religious content comprises at the same time within its compass a certain aspect of this process, by virtue of which it not merely admits of artistic treatment, but, in a specific relation, admits of it as _necessary._ In the religious conception of romantic art, as we have more than once explained it, it is an inseparable concomitant of the content that it carries anthropomorphism to the verge of an extreme; and this is so because it is precisely this content which possesses for its main _centrum_ the complete coalescence of the Absolute and Divine with the human consciousness as a visible part of sensuous reality, in other words, as envisaged in the external bodily frame of man, and further, is compelled to represent the Divine in the form of individuality such as is associated with the deficiencies of Nature and the mode of finite phenomena. In this respect Art supplies to the consciousness which seeks to envisage the Divine manifestation, the definite presence of an individual and real human figure, a concrete image, moreover, of the exterior traits of events, in which the birth, life, sufferings, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ are more widely circulated to the glory of God; so that it is exclusively by Art that the real and visible presence of the Divine is for ever renewed over again in a permanent form.