“All men are therefore from the moment of His death set free, as He is Himself, from the hostile powers; and all are by His resurrection transferred into a condition of indestructible life.” The proof of this change is given by the Spirit. He represents in the redeemed the super-earthly life, as a “gift of the last times in which the powers of the world to come already exercise an influence upon the present existence.” This wholly “objective” conception of redemption is, Wrede admits, for our modern modes of thought rather impersonal and cold. “It takes place in a way which is wholly external to the individual man, and the events seem, as it were, to be only enacted in Christ.” Redemption is effected in the sacraments. “The ‘physical’ transformation is effected by physical processes.” Paul’s thought moves, therefore, among crude, unsubtilised conceptions. His statements about justification by faith and about the law are based upon this fundamental view, and represent merely the “controversial teaching” to which he was forced in order to maintain the cause of freedom from the law. The material of his world of thought was, therefore, Jewish. What was the transformation by which it became Christian? [pg 168] Paul’s conception of the Christ_(_133_)_ was fully formed before he came to believe in Jesus. At his conversion, by the vision on the road to Damascus, the only new element that he took up into his conception was that this heavenly being had temporarily assumed a human form of existence in order by His death and resurrection to redeem mankind and to bring in the new order of things. An influence of the teaching of Jesus upon the theology of the Apostle to the Gentiles is not to be recognised. Wrede makes the gap between the two as wide as possible, and insists that Paul’s gospel must be considered as independent of, and essentially different in character from, that of Jesus. The Apostle’s adoption of the view that the end of the law had come, is, according to Wrede, partly due to his experiences at his conversion, partly to the exigencies of the mission to the Gentiles. Of the value and the remarkable literary beauty of the book it is impossible to say too much. It belongs, not to theology, but to the literature of the world.