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116
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
church ") ranks as sacred, and this feeling and con-
sciousness that the word of the Bible is sacred is called
--conscience. With this, then, sacredness is " laid
upon one's conscience." If one does not free himself
from conscience, the consciousness of the sacred, he
may act unconscientiously indeed, but never
consciencelessly.
The Catholic finds himself satisfied when he fulfils
the command; the Protestant acts according to his
" best judgment and conscience." For the Catholic is
only a layman; the Protestant is himself a clergyman*
Just this is the progress of the Reformation period
beyond the Middle Ages, and at the same time its
curse,--that the spiritual became complete.
What else was the Jesuit moral philosophy than a
continuation of the sale of indulgences ? only that the
man who was relieved of his burden of sin now gained
also an insight into the remission of sins, and con-
vinced himself how really his sin was taken from him,
since in this or that particular case (Casuists) it was
so clearly no sin at all that he committed. The sale
of indulgences had made all sins and transgressions
permissible, and silenced every movement of con-
science. All sensuality might hold sway, if it was
only purchased from the church. This favoring of
sensuality was continued by the Jesuits, while the
strictly moral, dark, fanatical, repentant, contrite,
praying Protestants (as the true completers of Chris-
tianity, to be sure) acknowledged only the intellectual
and spiritual man. Catholicism, especially the
* [Geistlicher, literally " spiritual man "]
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 117
Jesuits, gave aid to egoism in this way, found involun-
tary and unconscious adherents within Protestantism
itself, and saved us from the subversion and extinction
of sensuality. Nevertheless the Protestant spirit
spreads its dominion farther and farther; and, as,
beside it the " divine," the Jesuit spirit represents
only the " diabolic" which is inseparable from every-
thing divine, the latter can never assert itself alone,
but must look on and see how in France, e. g., the
Philistinism of Protestantism wins at last, and mind is
on top.
Protestantism is usually complimented on having
brought the mundane into repute again, e. g. mar-
riage, the State, etc. But the mundane itself as mun-
dane, the secular, is even more indifferent to it than to
Catholicism, which lets the profane world stand, yes,
and relishes its pleasures, while the rational, consist-
ent Protestant sets about annihilating the mundane
altogether, and that simply by hallowing it. So mar-
riage has been deprived of its naturalness by becoming
sacred, not in the sense of the Catholic sacrament,
where it only receives its consecration from the church
and so is unholy at bottom, but in the sense of being
something sacred in itself to begin with, a sacred re-
lation. Just so the State, etc. Formerly the pope
gave consecration and his blessing to it and its prin-
ces; now the State is intrinsically sacred, majesty is
sacred without needing the priest's blessing. The or-
der of nature, or natural law, was altogether hallowed
as " God's ordinance." Hence it is said e. g. in the
Augsburg Confession, Art. 11: "So now we reason-
ably abide by the saying, as the jurisconsults have