The principle of the essentially infinite subjective consciousness possesses for the content of faith and art in the first instance, as we have already discovered, the Absolute itself, in other words the Spirit of God as it is mediated and reconciled with the conscious spirit of man and thereby is first itself independently free. This romantic mysticism in its self-limitation to the sense of blessedness in the Absolute Presence remains a mode of spiritual inwardness which is abstract, because it confronts the things of the world in opposition and rejects the same. Faith is, in an abstraction of this kind, alienated from life, from the concrete reality of human existence, removed from the positive relations of mankind to one another, who only know and love each other in faith, and for the sake of their belief as completely bound together in yet a third association, namely, the spirit of the Christ community. This association is alone the clear spring in which the image of that blessedness is reflected, without it being necessary for man to look his brother first in the face, to enter into any direct relation with another, or to experience the unity of love, of trust, of confidence, of mutual aims and actions in contact with the living concrete presence. That which constitutes the hope and yearning of the inner life man here, in this sense of exclusive religious intimacy, can only discover as actual life in the kingdom of God, in the society of the Church. He has not as yet[241] withdrawn this single identity in a third factor from his conscious life in order that he may possess all that he is really himself in his entire spiritual concreteness no less before his eyes directly in the knowledge and volition of that other whole. The collective religious content, it is true, assumes the mode of real existence, but it is still an existence which is located in the ideal world of an imagination which consumes the expanding boundaries of actual life. It is still far away from attempting to satisfy its own life also in that abundance which it receives from the world and its realization in the world as the higher demand in the medium of life itself.