d, on the teleological view of nature, it is, on the
other, connected with moral need, and exercises, in addition, aesthetic
influences. By comforting the suffering, setting right the erring,
reclaiming and pacifying the sinner, warning, strengthening, and
encouraging the morally sound, religion brings the spirit into a new and
better land, shows it a higher order of things, the order of providence,
which, amid all the mistakes of men, still furthers the good. The religious
spirit always includes an ethical element, and the bond of the Church holds
men together even where the state is destroyed. Indispensable theoretically
as a supplement to our knowledge, and practically because of the moral
imperfection of men, who need it to humble, warn, comfort, and lift them
up, religion is, nevertheless, in its origin independent of knowledge
and moral will. Faith is older than science and morals: the doctrine of
religion did not wait for astronomy and cosmology, nor the erection of
temples for ethics. Before the development of the moral concepts religion
already existed in the form of wonder without a special object, of a gloomy
awe which ascribed every sudden inner excitement to the impulse of an
invisible power. Since a speculative knowledge of the nature of God is
impossible, the only task which remains for metaphysics is the removal of
improper determinations from that which tradition and phantasy have to
say on the subject. We are to conceive God as personal, extramundane, and
omnipotent, as the creator, not of the reals themselves, but of their
purposive coexistence (_Zusammen_). In order, however, to rise from the
idea of the original, most real, and most powerful being to that of the
most excellent being we need the practical Ideas, without which the former
would remain an indifferent theoretical concept. Man can pray only to a
wise, holy, perfect, just, and good God.

This, in essential outline, is the content of the scattered observations
on the philosophy of religion given by Herbart. Drobisch (_Fundamental
Doctrines of the Philosophy of Religion_, 1840), from the standpoint of
religious criticism and with a renewal of the moral argument, and Taute
(1840-52) and Fluegel (_Miracles and the Possibility of a Knowledge of God_,
1869) with an apologetic tendency and one toward a belief in miracles,
have, among others, endeavored to make up for the lack of a detailed
treatment of this discipline by Herbart--from which, moreov