 Whereas the metaphysical predicates, which “serve only as external points of support to religion” (WC 62/25), can be thought of as ones that apply to the first person of the Trinity (i.e., God in his abstract universality), the second person of the Trinity, by virtue of his having subjected himself for the salvation of humanity to a humble birth and an ignominious death, “is the sole, true, first person in religion” (WC 106/51). The doctrine of the Incarnation, Feuerbach argues against Hegel, is for the Christian believer not a symbolic representation of the eternal procession and return of infinite spirit into, and back from, its finite manifestations, but rather “a tear of divine compassion [Mitleid]” (WC 102/50), and, as such, the act of a sacred heart that is able to sympathize with human suffering. That God was compelled by his love for humanity to renounce his divinity and become human Feuerbach takes as proof that “Man was already in God, was already God himself, before God became man” (ibid.), i.e., that belief in divine compassion involves the attribution or projection onto God of a moral sentiment that can only be experienced by a being capable of suffering, which “God as God” is not.