As to the Passion and Death, and the Risen Life, four points appear to be central and secured. Neither the Old Testament nor Jewish Theology really knew of a Suffering Messiah. Jesus Himself clearly perceived, accepted, and carried out this profound new revelation. This suffering and death were conceived by Him as the final act and crown of His service--so in Mark x. 44, 45 and Luke xxii. 24-7. (All this remains previous to, and independent of, St. Paul's elaborated doctrine as to the strictly vicarious and juridical character of the whole.) And the Risen Life is an objectively real, profoundly operative life--the visions of the Risen One were effects of the truly living Jesus, the Christ. The Second Christian Stage, the Johannine writings, are fully understandable only as posterior to St. Paul--the most enthusiastic and influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert, from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced. Saul, the man of violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in a substantially _pneumatic_ manner, is henceforth absorbed, not in the past Jewish Messiah, but in the present universal Christ; not in the Kingdom of God, but in Pneuma, the Spirit. Christ, the second Adam, is here a life-giving Spirit, an element that surrounds and penetrates the human spirit; we are baptized, dipped, into Christ, Spirit; we can drink Christ, the Spirit. And this Christ-Spirit effects and maintains the universal brotherhood of mankind, and articulates in particular posts and functions the several human spirits, as variously necessary members of the one Christian society and Church.