Having speculatively reached the ideal of the Abso- lute Being, and being forced by the heaii to assume that this Being is objectively real, the philosopher is now ready for the predicate of this highest reality. This Being would not be perfect if he had not the lib- erty of positing himself outside of himself; but this is a liberty, and not a necessity. God is, before the world, master of the world; that is, he is able to posit it or not to posit it. The world is therefore a consequence, not of the divine nature, but of the divine will. But God does not posit himself into the world. (Jod does not be- come 7-eal in consequence of creation ; and yet he would not be real without the power of creation. Monotheism is true, but not in the sense of theism. Theism admits God as a personality, but this personality is an empty
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uudiffereiUiated infinitj', and has within itself no poten- tialiiv. no basis for a world outside of God. God is per se a plurality of potencies, and he is the totality o/' these potencies. And the great error of pantheism is not that it holds that there is no being outside of God, and that all existence is God's existence, " for all hearts cheer- fullj' and joyously concede this;" but it consists in as- signing to God a necessarj' and involuntary identity with whatsoever is. It is only from this idea of mono- theism as distinguished from theism and pantlieism that a transition to the truth of the trinity is possible. The entire God — that is, God as the totality of the divine potencies — is the Creator, the Father; and he is Father only in that he confronts the possibilitj' of what is to be; and his fatherhood is fully realized only with the fuU actualization of creation. In the act of creation the absolute personality evolves its own self-existing es- sence out of itself. This act of creation is a generating, and the divine essence so evolved is the Son. A second evolution constitutes tlie Spirit. The fatherly potency furnishes the material of creatural objects; the Sou their form ; the Spirit their perfection.
Revelation in the Old Test, lingers under the forms of mythology. In the New Test, these forms are en- tirely dispensed with. The focus of the new religion is the person of Christ, not as teacher or legislator, but as content. The person of Christ is both historical and pre- historical; as prehistorical he presided over pre-Chris- tian history ; as historical he laid aside his glory and identified himself with man in order to raise human nature into communion with God. Christ resumed the glory which he had laid aside only gradually and by moral process. This process began at his baptism. It is only on the complete victory of Christ over death that he could send the Spirit as comforter.
Schelling closes his philosophy of revelation with a glance at the history of the Church. He distinguishes here a prehistorical, a historical, and a post-historical Church. The latter will not appear in the present .-eon. The condition of the prehistorical is that of a merely subjective (negative) unity; that of the historical is a state of division as preparatory to its transition to a state of free, positive unity. The historical stage of the Church begins at the point where Christianity attains to domination in the Koman empire. Here it had to face, under a new form, all the might of the once defeat- ed Evil Spirit. In giving itself an outer constitution, the Churcli appeared at first as a mere realistic, mate- rial, formal unity; as such it was of a merely authori- tative legal character, and the more rigidh' this legal character developed itself, so much the more was the ideal (spiritual) character driven into the background. But at the Reformation the ideal element came to open revolt with the realistic, and it tlien inaugurated a new phase of (Jhurch history. Both Christ and the apostles place the advance of the Church in a growtli in knowl- edge; anil the character of this new phase is, and will be, that mankind recognise more and more the supreme fact that Christianity is the highest stadium of human science. The three conditions of the Church are typi- fied in the three apostles— Peter, Paul, and .John. Peter has the violent, aggressive nature that characterizes ev- ery beginning; Paul is steady and constructive; John has the gentle repose of maturity. The true Church is neither of the three, but the synthesis of all ; its founda- tion was laid by Peter; its body was editicd by Paul; its content was breathed into it by John. Even as Go(i consists not simplj' of one person, so the Churcli is not embodied simply in one apostle. Peter is rather the apostle of the Father : he sees most deeply into tlie past. Paul is really the apostle of tlie Son: he is full of light. John is the mouth-piece of the Spirit: he has the deep "words" of spiritual truth and warmth.
As a whole, no system of modern philosophy has more fully allied itself with Christianity than that of Schel- ling; ho, of all the great s|)eculatisfs, has alone treated this religion as "real history." To Schelling Chris-