In its reconstruction of Christian truth, however, fewer will coincide. Following out the same principles; in the same manner as he regarded the intuitions of human nature to be the last appeal of truth in art or morals, so he made the collective Christian consciousness the last standard of appeal in Christianity. The dependence therefore on apostolic teaching was not the appeal to an external authority, but merely to that which was the best exponent of the early religious consciousness of Christendom in its purest age.(765) The Christian church existed before the Christian scriptures. The New Testament was written for believers, appealing to their religious consciousness, not dictating to it. Inspiration is not indeed thus reduced to genius, but to the religious consciousness, and is different only in degree, and not in kind, from the pious intuitions of saintly men. The Bible becomes the record of religious truth, not its vehicle; a witness to the Christian consciousness of apostolic times, not an external standard for all time. In this respect Schleiermacher was not repeating the teaching of the reformation of the sixteenth age, but was passing beyond it, and abandoning its reverence for scripture. From this point we may see how his views of doctrine as well as his criticism of scripture were affected by this theory. For in his view of fundamental doctrines, such as sin, and the redeeming work of Christ, inasmuch as his appeal was made to the collective consciousness, those aspects of doctrine only were regarded as important, or even real, which were appropriated by the consciousness, or understood by it.(766) Sin was accordingly presented rather as unholiness than as guilt before God;(767) redemption, rather as sanctification than as justification; Christ’s death as a mere subordinate act in his life of self-sacrifice, not the one oblation for the world’s sin;(768) atonement regarded to be the setting forth of the union of God with man; and the mode of arriving at a state of salvation,(769) to be a realisation of the union of man with God, through a kind of mystical conception of the brotherhood of Christ.(770)