tinguished from other individuals, who is also
religious and directly connected with heaven, with God. The relations
which here prevail are still relations of faith. The religious spirit
is therefore not yet really secularized.

Moreover, the religious spirit cannot be really secularized, for what
in fact is it but the unworldly form of a stage in the development of
the human mind? The religious spirit can only be realized in so far as
the stage of development of the human mind, whose religious expression
it is, emerges and constitutes itself in its secular form. This is
what happens in the democratic State. It is not Christianity, but the
human basis of Christianity which is the basis of this State. Religion
remains the ideal, unworldly consciousness of its members, because it
is the ideal form of the human stage of development which it
represents.

The members of the political State are religious by virtue of the
dualism between the individual life and the generic life, between the
life of bourgeois society and the political life; they are religious
inasmuch as the individual regards as his true life the political life
beyond his real individuality, in so far as religion is here the
spirit of bourgeois society, the expression of the separation and the
alienation of man from man. The political democracy is Christian to
the extent that it regards every individual as the sovereign, the
supreme being, but it means the individual in his uncultivated,
unsocial aspect, the individual in his fortuitous existence, the
individual just as he is, the individual as he is destroyed, lost, and
alienated through the whole organization of our society, as he is
given under the dominance of inhuman conditions and elements, in a
word, the individual who is not yet a real generic being.

The sovereignty of the individual, as an alien being distinguished
from the real individual, which is the chimera, the dream, and the
postulate of Christianity, is under democracy sensual reality, the
present, and the secular maximum.

The religious and theological consciousness itself is heightened and
accentuated under a completed democracy, because it is apparently
without political significance, without earthly aims, an affair of
misanthropic feeling, the expression of narrow-mindedness, the product
of caprice, because it is a really other-worldly life. Here
Christianity achieves the practical expression of its universal
religious significance, i