Note 2 — Chapter XVI · THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND HEATHENISM.

To Christianity the individual was the object of an immediate providence, that is, an immediate object of the Divine Being. The heathens believed in a providence for the individual only through his relation to the race, through law, through the order of the world, and thus only in a mediate, natural, and not miraculous providence;2 but the Christians left out the intermediate process, and placed themselves in immediate connection with the prescient, all-embracing, universal Being; i.e., they immediately identified the individual with the universal Being.