If we are still to use the language of the past, and to call the divine essence of mankind the immanent Godhead, "Christ," then any advance of religion can only consist in the development and working out of this "inner Christ," that is, of the spiritual-moral tendencies dwelling in mankind, in the carrying of it back to its absolute and divine basis, but not in the historical personification of this inner human nature. Any reality of the God-man consequently consists in "Christ's" activity in Man, in the proving of his "true self," of his personal, spiritual essence, in the raising of one's self to personality on the ground of Man's divine nature, but not in the magical efficacy of an external divine personality. This, indeed, is nothing but the religious ideal of mankind, which men have projected on to an historical figure, in order to assure themselves of the "reality" of the ideal. It is not true that it is "essential" to the religious consciousness to consider its ideal in human form, and that for this reason the historical Jesus is indispensable for the religious life. Were this true, religion would not be, in principle, in a position to raise itself above the mythical and primitive stage of God's externality and appearance to the senses, and to conquer these Gods, working them more and more into the forms of an inner nature. This, however, is the essence of religious development. Religion would otherwise be confined to a lower province in the human life of the spirit; and it would be overthrown whenever the fiction of that projection and separation of God from one's own self was seen through. It is only to orthodox Christianity that it is necessary to represent the God in Man as a God outside of Man, as the "unique" personality of a historical God-man; and that because it still remains with one foot in religious naturalism and mythology, and the historical circumstances of another age occasioned the choice of that representation and falsification of the idea of the God-man.