Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION XCVI.

Where the love to God is true God-fearing, there it is also a firm trusting in God. Trusting is the reverse side of this fearing. Man-fearing is devoid of trust; God-fearing is per se also God-trusting. In relation to all that is evil, I fear God, who will bring it to naught and me with it; in relation to all that is good, I trust God, who will not permit me to come to naught, but will gloriously accomplish that which I begin in his name. God-fearing love is full of confidence in the results of its moral strivings; because it fears God, it has no reason to fear any power that is hostile to God. Certain of its victory, and certain that it works in God and for God, and hence that it accomplishes divine and imperishable work, it becomes enthusiasm, which is the highest and truest moral motive, and the only sufficient power where there is involved a moral working for general interests that transcend all temporal individual interests,—where the temporal happiness of the person must be sacrificed to a moral principle,—which, however, is conceivable only where sin is dominant.

Trusting in God is faith, love, and hope at the same time; primarily, however, it is not a result of moral self-culture. but it is simply the germ of that threefold life that is antecedent to all actual moral life. As the awakening consciousness of the child expresses itself in an, as yet, obscure trust to its mother, so is it with man’s first life-relation to God. Man attains a trust not simply through faith and through love, but faith and love are per se, and of necessity, trust already; and hence trust is a necessary antecedent condition of all moral life. Trust relates to the idea of an end; the mere desire of an end is not a sufficient motive to inspire moral effort toward it; it may be a hopeless, and hence an inactive, desire; doubting Peter sinks in the waves; it is only an unshaken trust that confirms courage and awakens strength [Psa. xviii, 31 sqq.; xxvii, 14; xxxiv, 9; xxxvii, 3 sqq.; lxii, 6 sqq.; lxxxiv, 13; Prov. xvi, 20, and elsewhere].—There is no enthusiasm for evil,—at furthest only a Satanic pleasure in evil, but this pleasure is attended with fear and malice, but not enthusiasm. Man as sinful may err as to what is good or evil, and he may therefore have enthusiasm for a folly, but only from the fact that he takes it for something good and noble. Nor can the merely individual and temporal awaken enthusiasm; nothing but the ideal can do this,—that which is, or is conceived of as, absolutely valid, as eternal truth, and hence of divine significancy, in a word that in the victory and permanent endurance of which the person has entire confidence. For that which is merely individual or useful I may indeed have energy or passion, but not enthusiasm. Only the absolutely good, the divine, is free from all doubt. Doubt is death to enthusiasm; without faith it is not possible morally to battle for the divine. Without enthusiasm there can be but a cold, calculating working for temporal ends, but no effort for the divine and eternal; hence whatever is not of faith is sin, for it is non-moral, whereas man ought constantly to be moral. The apostles had indeed, during Christ’s earthly life, a warm love for their Master, so that they were ready even to die with him [John xi, 16], but they had enthusiasm only after the pouring out of the .