a personal Christ-spirit should at the same time inhabit a number of individual spirits; and which did not differentiate between the one, or rather the continual, act of redemption by God and its continual temporal repetition in the individual. We can understand this only if the Pauline Christ is a purely metaphysical being. It is, on the contrary, quite incomprehensible if Paul is supposed to have gained his idea of the mediator of salvation from any experience of an historical Jesus and his actual death. Only because in his doctrine of the saving power of the Christ-spirit Paul had thought of no particular human personality could he imagine the immanence of the divine in the world to be mediated by that spirit. Only because he connected no other idea with the personality of Jesus than the Book of Wisdom or Philo did with their particular immanence principles, does he declare that Christ brings about salvation. So that Christ, as the principle of redemption, is for Paul only an allegorical or symbolical personality and not a real one. He is a personality such as were the heathen deities, who passed as general cosmic powers without prejudice to their appearing in human form. Personality is for Paul only another mode of expressing the supernatural spirituality and directed activity of the principle of redemption, in distinction from the blindly working powers and material realities of religious naturalism. It serves merely to suggest spirituality to an age which could only represent spirit as a material fluid. It corresponds simply to the popular conception of the principle of redemption, which treated this as bound up with the idea of a human being. But it in no way referred to a real historical individual, showing, in fact, just by the uncertainty and fluctuation of the idea, how far the Christ of the Pauline doctrine of redemption was from being connected with a definite historical reality.