After the annihilation of faith Feuerbach thinks to put in to the supposedly safe harbor of _love_. "The first and highest law must be the love of man to man. _Homo homini Deus est_--this is the supreme practical maxim, this the turning point of the world's history."[37] But, properly speaking, only the god is changed,--the _deus_; love has remained: there love to the superhuman God, here love to the human God, to _homo_ as _Deus_. Therefore man is to me--sacred. And everything "truly human" is to me--sacred! "Marriage is sacred of itself. And so it is with all moral relations. Friendship is and must be _sacred_ for you, and property, and marriage, and the good of every man, but sacred _in and of itself_."[38] Haven't we the priest again there? Who is his God? Man with a great M! What is the divine? The human! Then the predicate has indeed only been changed into the subject, and, instead of the sentence "God is love," they say "love is divine"; instead of "God has become man," "Man has become God," etc. It is nothing more or less than a new--_religion_. "All moral relations are ethical, are cultivated with a moral mind, only where of themselves (without religious consecration by the priest's blessing) they are counted _religious_." Feuerbach's proposition, "Theology is anthropology," means only "religion must be ethics, ethics alone is religion."
Altogether Feuerbach accomplishes only a transposition of subject and predicate, a giving of preference to the latter. But, since he himself says, "Love is not (and has never been considered by men) sacred through being a predicate of God, but it is a predicate of God because it is divine in and of itself," he might judge that the fight against the predicates themselves, against love and all sanctities, must be commenced. How could he hope to turn men away from God when he left them the divine? And if, as Feuerbach says, God himself has never been the main thing to them, but only his predicates, then he might have gone on leaving them the tinsel longer yet, since the doll, the real kernel, was left at any rate. He recognizes, too, that with him it is "only a matter of annihilating an illusion";[39] he thinks, however, that the effect of the illusion on men is "downright ruinous, since even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man[40] only for God's sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, _this_ man for _this_ man's sake, or for morality's sake, for _Man's_ sake, and so--for _homo homini Deus_--for God's sake?
