The battle that every morally well-disposed human being must withstand in this life, under the leadership of the good principle, against the attacks of the evil principle, can procure him, however hard he tries, no greater advantage than freedom from the dominion of evil. That he be free, that he “relinquish the bondage under the law of sins, to live for righteousness,” this is the highest prize that he can win. He still remains not any the less exposed to the assaults of the evil principle; and, to assert his freedom, which is constantly under attack, he must henceforth remain forever armed for battle.

The human being is nevertheless in this perilous state through his own fault; hence he is bound at least to apply as much force as he can muster in order to extricate himself from it. But how? That is the question. – If he searches for the causes and the circumstances that draw him into this danger and keep him there, he can easily convince himself that they do not come his way from his own raw nature, so far as he exists in isolation, but rather from the human beings to whom he stands in relation or association. It is not the instigation of nature that arouses what should properly be called the passions, which wreak such great devastation in his originally good predisposition. His needs are but limited, and his state of mind in providing for them moderate and tranquil. He is poor (or considers himself so) only to the extent that he is anxious that other human beings will consider him poor and will despise him for it. Envy, addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations associated with these, assail his nature, which on its own is undemanding, as soon as he is among human beings. Nor is it necessary to assume that these are sunk into evil and are examples that lead him astray: it suffices that they are there, that they surround him, and that they are human beings, and they will mutually corrupt each other's moral disposition and make one another evil.

It is already a beginning of the dominion of the good principle and a sign “that the Kingdom of God is at hand,” if even just the principles of its constitution begin to become public; for in the world of the understanding something is already there when the causes, which alone can bring it to pass, have taken root generally, even though the complete development of its appearance in the world of the senses is postponed to an unseen distance. We have seen that to unite in an ethical community is a duty of a special kind (officium sui generis), and that, though we each obey our private duty, we might indeed thereby derive an accidental agreement of all in a common good, without any special organization being necessary for it, yet that such a universal agreement is not to be hoped for, unless a special business is made of resisting the attacks of the evil principle (which human beings themselves otherwise tempt each other to serve as tools) by the union of all with one another for one and the same end, and the establishment of one community under moral laws, as a federated and therefore stronger force. – We have also seen that such a community, as a Kingdom of God, can be undertaken by human beings only through religion, and, finally, that in order for religion to be public (a requisite for a community), this Kingdom is represented in the visible form of a church, the founding of which therefore devolves on human beings as a work which is entrusted to them and can be required of them.

To erect a church as a community under religious laws, however, seems to require more wisdom (of insight as well as of good disposition) than human beings can be thought capable of; it seems that the moral goodness especially, which is aimed at through such an organization, must for this purpose be presupposed in them already. Nonsensical is in fact even the expression that human beings should found a Kingdom of God (as we might well say of them that they can establish the kingdom of a human monarch); God must himself be the author of his Kingdom.