The important truth as seen by John's dying eyes is that faith in a beautiful ideal has been born in the human soul. Whether the accounts of the exact means by which this faith arose were literally true is of little importance, the faith itself is no less God-given, as another passage will make clear: "Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect He could not, what he knows now, know at first; What he considers that he knows to-day, Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown; Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns Because he lives, which is to be a man, Set to instruct himself by his past self; First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind, Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law. God's gift was that man should conceive of truth And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake As midway help till he reach fact indeed." The defence of Christianity in this poem reminds one very strongly of the theology of Schleiermacher, a résumé of which the poet might have found in Strauss's "Life of Jesus." Although Schleiermacher accepted and even went beyond the negative criticism of the rationalists against the doctrines of the Church, he sought to retain the essential aspects of positive Christianity. He starts out from the consciousness of the Christian, "from that internal experience resulting to the individual from his connection with the Christian community, and he thus obtains a material which, as its basis of feeling, is more flexible and to which it is easier to give dialectically a form that satisfies science." Again, "If we owe to him [Jesus] the continual strengthening of the consciousness of God within us, this consciousness must have existed in him in absolute strength, so that it or God in the form of the consciousness was the only operative force within him." In other words, in Jesus was the supreme manifestation of God in human consciousness. This truth, first grasped by means which seemed miraculous, is finally recognized in man's developing consciousness as a consummation brought about by natural means. John's reasoning in the poem can lead to no other conclusion than this. Schleiermacher's theology has, of course, been objected to on the ground that if this incarnation of God was possible in one man, there is no reason why it should not frequently be possible. This is the orthodox objection, and it is voiced in the comment added by "One" at the end of the poem showing the weakness of John's argument from the strictly orthodox point of view.