The most demoralising of all principles of belief was the discouraging teaching that human nature was fallen and incapable of reaching holiness by its own effort--the teaching that one could only come through grace and forgiveness of sins into a proper relation with temporal and eternal things. For those below the ordinary level, this position of grace produced spiritual stagnation, not to speak of the business people, who daily allowed the blood of Jesus to wipe out their day's debit in the score of morality. Only those who were naturally superior increased in holiness on being convinced that they were children of God in Christ. Mankind, on the whole, showed the deep demoralisation of a double morality. This dualism commenced as soon as the first Christians ceased to expect the return of Jesus,--an expectation which brought their life into real unity with his teaching. But this double morality has for nineteen hundred years retained man's soul and the social order in practical heathenism. Although some pure and great spirits really received aid from Christianity in their longings for infinity, and although in the Middle Ages many strong hearts tried seriously to realise its teaching, yet the majority of mankind lived and lives still in wavering irresolution. This is the result of having no place to anchor to while the citizens of antiquity had an ethic, which could be translated into reality and could turn them into sincere, steadfast personalities. Since nineteen hundred years have proved that there is no possibility, in a humanly constructed society, of living according to the teaching of Jesus, as a practical, infallible rule of holiness, man can escape this immoral duplicity only in one way: the way already travelled over by many separate individuals, who with Prometheus cry out, "Hast thou not, thyself, completed all, O holy glowing heart!" In other words, these individuals have become convinced that Christianity is the product of humanity. Just as little as any other product of humanity does it exhaust absolute and eternal truth.