sides to every case, democratic government and absolutism, freedom of
religion and authority, the individualistic and the social principles, a
materialistic and a spiritual interpretation of the universe. Only
things which are dead have ceased to have this tide and alternation.
Christ is for living religion now a man, now God, revelation now
natural, now supernatural. Religion in the eternal conflict between
reason and faith, morals the struggle of good and evil, God now
mysterious and now manifest.

Fichte had said: The essence of the universe is spirit. Hegel said: Yes,
but the true notion of spirit is that of the resolution of
contradiction, of the exhibition of opposites as held together in their
unity. This is the meaning of the trinity. In the trinity we have God
who wills to manifest himself, Jesus in whom he is manifest, and the
spirit common to them both. God's existence is not static, it is
dynamic. It is motion, not rest. God is revealer, recipient, and
revelation all in one. The trinity was for Hegel the central doctrine of
Christianity. Popular orthodoxy had drawn near to the assertion of three
Gods. The revolt, however, in asserting the unity of God, had made of
God a meaningless absolute as foundation of the universe. The orthodox,
in respect to the person of Christ, had always indeed asserted in
laboured way that Jesus was both God and man. Starting from their own
abstract conception of God, and attributing to Jesus the qualities of
that abstraction, they had ended in making of the humanity of Jesus a
perfectly unreal thing. On the other hand, those who had set out from
Jesus's real humanity had been unable to see that he was anything more
than a mere man, as their phrase was. On their own assumption of the
mutual exclusiveness of the conceptions of God and man, they could not
do otherwise.