It is, then, the ethic of active self-devotion taught by Jesus which makes it possible for Christianity to do what is suggested by the spirit of the modern age, and modulate from the pessimistic to the optimistic world-view. This result finds expression in the way the new conception of Christianity, when it has to come to an understanding with the old one, contrasts itself as “the religion of Jesus” with “the Christianity of dogma.” A way is prepared, then, in Erasmus and individual representatives of the Reformation, shyly at first but then more and more clearly, for an interpretation of the teaching of Jesus which corresponds to the spirit of modern times, an interpretation which conceives the teaching as a religion of action in the world. Historically and in actual fact this is a wrong interpretation, for the world-view of Jesus is, so far as concerns the future of the natural world, thoroughly pessimistic. His religion is not a religion of world-transforming effort, but the religion of awaiting the end of the world. His ethic is characterised by activity only so far as it commands men to practise unbounded devotion to their fellow-men if they would attain to that inner perfection [pg 067] which is needed for entrance into the supernatural kingdom of God. An ethic of enthusiasm, and therefore presumably focused upon an optimistic world-view, forms part of a pessimistic world-view! That is the magnificent paradox in the teaching of Jesus. But the modern age was right in overlooking this paradox and in assuming in Jesus an optimistic world-view which corresponded to an ethic of enthusiasm and met with a welcome the spirit of Late Stoicism and of modern times. For the progress of the spiritual life of Europe this mistake was a necessity. What crises the latter must have gone through, if it had not been able without embarrassment to place the new world-view under the authority of the great personality of Jesus! The mistake was such a natural one that till the end of the nineteenth century it was never seriously shaken. When historical criticism, at the beginning of the twentieth century, proclaimed its discovery that Jesus, in spite of his activist ethic, thought and acted under a pessimistic world-view dominated by the expectation of the end of the world, it aroused indignation. It was accused of degrading Jesus to a mere enthusiast, while it after all only put an end to the false modernising of his personality._(_10_)_ What we at the present time have to do is to go through the critical experience of being obliged to think as modern men under a world-view of world- and life-affirmation, and yet let the ethic of Jesus speak to us from out of a pessimistic world-view. Of this problem which is disclosing itself to-day the early period of the modern age suspects nothing. Jesus and the moralists of Late Stoicism together are its authorities for an ethical world- and life-affirmation.