This feeling, filial in regard to God, fraternal in regard to man, is that which makes a Christian, and consequently it is the common trait of all Christians. It should be added that this principle of Christianity admirably corresponds to the two fundamental affirmations of the Christian consciousness already established. The contradiction that appeared to us so menacing is thus resolved and reconciled. On the one hand, Christianity, by this filial union with God, is seen to be the ideal and perfect religion; on the other, it appears as a real fact in the consciousness of Jesus Christ, so that this religious reality comes to us with the imperative character of the ideal. Through prejudice men may neglect religion, but if they desire to have one they can neither desire nor imagine a relation at once closer and more moral, more sacred and more joyous, freer and more trustful, than that which was inaugurated in the filial consciousness of Jesus Christ. What can they have in the shape of life superior to the life of perfect and reciprocal affection,--God giving Himself to man and realising in him His paternity, man giving himself to God without fear, and realising in Him his humanity? Is not religious evolution accomplished when these two terms, God and man, opposed to each other at the origin of conscious life on earth, interpenetrate each other till they reach the moral unity of love, in which God becomes interior to man and lives in him, in which man becomes interior to God and finds in God the full expansion of his being? Christianity is therefore the absolute and final religion of mankind. At the same time, this filial piety in the person of Jesus and His followers is an observable phenomenon; so that the ideally perfect religion has manifested itself from the beginning as an historical and positive religion. It is not an abstract ideal, a theoretical doctrine, floating above humanity, but a principle and a tradition of new life, an inexhaustibly fruitful germ inserted in human life to raise it, not in idea but in fact, to a higher form. That which the first human consciousness was on earth, separating itself from its maternal animality, and bringing with it the kingdom of man, the initiative consciousness of Christ, issuing from the bosom of antique humanity, has been, and it has founded on our humble planet the kingdom of God, the kingdom, _i.e._, of free, pure spirit, of righteousness and love. We are no longer therefore in face of a rational doctrine or a speculative view, but of a positive force, of a power of life with which no one can break (I do not say in form and from without, but in fact and in the inner man) without at the same time breaking with the higher life of spirit as well as with all hope and joy, and health of soul. * * * * * 3. _The Gospel of Jesus_