As the ancients worked toward the _conquest of the world_ and strove to release man from the heavy trammels of connection with _other things_, at last they came also to the dissolution of the State and giving preference to everything private. Of course community, family, etc., as _natural_ relations, are burdensome hindrances which diminish my _spiritual freedom_.
"If any man be in Christ, he is a _new creature_; the old is passed away, behold, all is become _new_."[11]
As it was said above, "To the ancients the world was a truth," we must say here, "To the moderns the spirit was a truth"; but here, as there, we must not omit the supplement, "a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of, and at last they really do."
A course similar to that which antiquity took may be demonstrated in Christianity also, in that the _understanding_ was held a prisoner under the dominion of the Christian dogmas up to the time preparatory to the Reformation, but in the pre-Reformation century asserted itself _sophistically_ and played heretical pranks with all tenets of the faith. And the talk then was, especially in Italy and at the Roman court, "If only the heart remains Christian-minded, the understanding may go right on taking its pleasure."
Long before the Reformation people were so thoroughly accustomed to fine-spun "wranglings" that the pope, and most others, looked on Luther's appearance too as a mere "wrangling of monks" at first. Humanism corresponds to Sophisticism, and, as in the time of the Sophists Greek life stood in its fullest bloom (the Periclean age), so the most brilliant things happened in the time of Humanism, or, as one might perhaps also say, of Machiavellianism (printing, the New World, etc.). At this time the heart was still far from wanting to relieve itself of its Christian contents.
But finally the Reformation, like Socrates, took hold seriously of the _heart_ itself, and since then hearts have kept growing visibly--more unchristian. As with Luther people began to take the matter to heart, the outcome of this step of the Reformation must be that the heart also gets lightened of the heavy burden of Christian faith. The heart, from day to day more unchristian, loses the contents with which it had busied itself, till at last nothing but empty _warm-heartedness_ is left it, the quite general love of men, the love of Man, the consciousness of freedom, "self-consciousness."