If this is true of Protestant orthodoxy it is even more true of that form of Protestantism which thinks it can maintain Christianity apart from its metaphysical doctrine of redemption because this doctrine is "no longer suitable to the age." Liberal Protestantism is and wishes to be nothing but a mere faith in the historical personality of a man who is supposed to have been born 1,900 years ago in Palestine, and through his exemplary life to have become the founder of a new religion; being crucified and dying in conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem, being raised up then as a God in the minds of his enthusiastic disciples. It is a faith in the "loving God the Father," because Jesus is supposed to have believed in him; in the personal immortality of man, because this is supposed to have been the presupposition of Jesus' appearance and doctrines; in the "incomparable" value of moral instructions, because they stand in a book which is supposed to have been produced under the immediate influence of the prophet of Nazareth. Liberal Protestantism supports morality on this, that Jesus was such a good man, and that for this reason it is necessary for each individual man to follow the call of Jesus. But it bases the faith in Jesus once and for all on the historical significance of the Gospels; though it cannot conceal from itself, after careful consideration, that the belief in their historical value rests on extremely weak grounds, and that we know nothing of that Jesus, not even that he ever lived. In any case we know nothing which could be of influential religious significance, and which could not be put together just as well or better from other less doubtful sources. [510] It is pierced to the heart by the denial of the historical personality of Jesus, not, like Catholicism, merely as a Church, but in its very essence, as a Religion. And as to its real religious kernel it consists in a few fine-sounding phrases and some scattered references to a metaphysics which was once living, but which is now degraded into a mere ornament for modest minds. And after disposing of its would-be historical value there is left only a dimly smouldering spark of "homeless sentiments," which would suit any style of religious faith. Liberal Protestantism proclaims itself as the really "modern" Christianity. Confronted by the philosophic spirit of our day, it lays stress upon having no philosophy. It sets aside all religious speculation as "Myth," if possible with reference to Kant, as this is "modern," without noticing that it is itself most deeply imbedded in mythology with its "historical" Jesus. It believes that, in its exclusive reverence for the man Jesus, it has brought Christianity to the "height of present culture." As to this Stendel justly says: "Of the whole apologetic art with which the modern Jesus-theology undertakes to save Christianity for our time, it can be said that there is no historical religion which could not