Kant would have said that the
principles of such a man would become cosmic laws; sin would be the
estrangement from God, the will to draw away from God.
The profound and only mission of religion is the endowment of man in
this hurly-burly of life with the consciousness of eternity. Religion
places our transient life under the aspect of eternity, and therefore it
must, in its essence, remain a stranger to things temporal. Only that
moment in the life of a man can be called religious which lifts him
beyond himself, out of his petty, narrow existence, conditioned by and
subject to accidents, into timeless, universal life; which gives him the
certainty that historical events can never be regarded as definite and
ultimate--that moment which has the power to set free, to deliver, to
save. Thus it is irreligious to regard an event which occurred on the
temporal plane--and were it the greatest event which ever befell on
earth--as the pivot of metaphysical value for all men; to link the
salvation of the world to an occurrence which was relatively accidental,
to base the consciousness of eternity on the knowledge of a fact.
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