§ 173. Education must superintend the development of the religious consciousness towards an insight into the necessary consequence of its different stages. Nothing is more absurd than for the educator to desire to avoid the introduction of a positive religion, or a definite creed, as a middle stage between the natural beginning of religious feeling and its end in philosophical culture. Only when a man has lived through the entire range of one-sided phases--through the crudeness of such a concrete individualizing of religion, and has come to recognize the universal nature of religion in a special form of it which excludes other forms--only when the spirit of a congregation has taken him into its number, is he ripe to criticize religion in a conciliatory spirit, because he has then gained a religious character through that historical experience. The self-comprehending universality must have such a solid basis as this in the life of the man; it can never form the beginning of one's culture, but it may constitute the end which turns back again to the beginning. Most men remain at the historical stand-point. The religion of reason, as that of the minority, constitutes in the different religions the invisible church, which seeks by progressive reform to purify these religions from superstition and unbelief. It is the duty of the state, by making all churches equal in the sight of the law, to guard religion from the temptation of impure motives, and, through the granting of such freedom to religious individuality, to help forward the unity of a rational insight into religion which is distinct from the religious feeling only in its form, not in its content. Not a philosopher, but Jesus of Nazareth freed the world from all selfishness and all bondage.
§ 174. With this highest theoretical and practical emancipation, the general work of education ends. It remains now to be shown how the general idea of Education shapes its special elements into their appropriate forms. From the nature of Pedagogics, which concerns itself with man in his entirety, this exposition belongs partly to the history of culture in general, partly to the history of religion, partly to the philosophy of history. The pedagogical element in it always lies in the ideal which the spirit of a nation or of an age creates out of itself, and which it seeks to realize in its youth.