such an ecstasy as may reflect the surrender and victory over pain, the fruition, in short, of the Divine Presence in the temple of the soul. If, on the contrary, the art of sculpture seeks to give a visible form to such a content, it will inevitably find itself less qualified to depict this ecstasy of soul-life at this strain of its intensity with such a concentrated power, and will consequently be compelled to emphasize that aspect of pain and laceration in so far as it declares itself in its full force on the bodily frame. (_γ_) _Thirdly_, it is to be observed that in the kind of examples with which we are now dealing it is not merely the existence of Nature and immediate finite conditions which is affected by this attitude of self-abnegation and endurance, but the impulse of the soul is transported by such feelings to an extreme point of this heavenly rapture to such an extent, in fact, that what is merely human and of the world, even when it is essentially beyond reproach on ethical or rational grounds, is none the less thrust behind and scorned. In other words, just in proportion as the Spirit, which here makes vivid to itself the idea of its conversion, is in the first instance deficient in an educated sense, to that extent it will with so much the more uncontrollable and logical frenzy--the entire force of its piety being concentrated on this one object--turn its back on everything which as finite opposes this bare and abstract infinitude of its religious fanaticism, that is to say, on every definite human emotion, all the manifold ethical impulses, relations, and obligations of the heart. For the moral life of the family, the bonds of friendship, of blood, of love, of the State, and a man's calling, every one of them belong to the things of the world; and all that is of the world, in so far as it is not as yet suffused with the absolute conceptions of faith and developed in unity and harmony with the same, appears to this form of abstract spiritual intensity of the soul of faith so far from being something acceptable to its emotional life and sense of obligation, that it is, on the contrary, a thing of no worth at all, and therefore both hostile and hurtful to its religious state. The moral organism of the human world is consequently not as yet respected, because its significant features and duties are not as yet recognized as necessary, integrated members in the concatenation of an essentially rational reality, in which nothing, it is true, ought to assert itself in a one-sided and independent isolation, yet, none the less, as an essential factor in the organic process, must be maintained as such and not be sacrificed. In this respect the religious reconciliation remains itself _one-sided_, and declares itself in the truly simple heart as an intensity of belief which is deficient in comprehensiveness, that is, as the piety of the self-secluded soul, which has not yet attained in its growth to the