Between the religion of the prophets and the religion of Jesus, however, there is one more barrier to be broken down. In the "Kingdom of God," the idea of the nation must give place to the idea of humanity. The universal God must be represented as the immanent God, as present in every human soul. His seat and temple could not be in Jerusalem or in Palestine; it could only be in pure and humble hearts. A supreme crisis was necessary. The Hebrew nation must perish in order to free the human conscience from its Jewish yoke. A divine flower had been formed in the heart of Prophetism; but it would have been a barren ornament, had there not been deposited in its calix a living and a fruitful germ. The transformation of the piety of the prophets into a purely moral creation and a Covenant really new with God, this was the work of Jesus Christ. That is why Jesus is "He that should come," He whom the prophets half unconsciously desired, He in whom, to the profit of all mankind, was completed the religious development of Israel. Its whole history ends in Jesus. Apart from Him the inspiration of the prophets dies into rabbinical Talmudism or wanders into the vagaries and delirium of the apocalypses. After giving birth to the Gospel, Judaism dries up and withers like a tree that has borne its fruit and whose season is past. CHAPTER II THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 1. _The Problem_ We come at last to Christianity. What is its principle or essence? This question must be answered or we cannot judge of it aright. Now, during the eighteen centuries of its history, Christianity has taken so many and such various forms, it has received so many developments in every sense, it has become a thing so rich and luxuriant, that it is far from easy to discover beneath this thick growth of institutions, dogmas, ceremonies, and devotions the tap-root of the tree from which it all has sprung, and from which it still derives its nutriment. It would be next to useless to interrogate the Churches. They would each answer according to their official theologies and Confessions of Faith. This, they would say, is the essence of Christianity. The Catholics would say it is the institution and infallible authority of the Church, because everything rests on this first foundation, and because no one can be in Christian truth who is outside the Church. The Protestants would not be agreed: one would propose the dogma of Justification by Faith; another the authority of Scripture; a third the metaphysical divinity and the eternal pre-existence of Jesus Christ, under the pretext that they could not conceive the possibility of the subsistence of Christianity without these dogmas. In entering on this examination we enter on an interminable dispute.