To think of the world's activity as God's activity; of mankind's development, filled with struggles and sufferings, as the story of a divine struggle and Passion; of the world-process as the process of a God, who in each individual creature fights, suffers, conquers and dies, so that he may overcome the limitations of the finite in the religious consciousness of man and anticipate his future triumph over all the suffering of the world--that is the real Christian doctrine of redemption. To revive in this sense the fundamental conception from which Christianity sprang--and which is independent of any historical reference--is, indeed, to return to this religious starting-point. Protestantism, on the contrary, which repudiates Paul's religion and sets up the Gospels as the foundation of its belief, nevertheless does not go behind Christianity's development into the Church, back to the origin of Christianity, but remains always within this development, and deceives itself if it thinks that it can prevail over the Church from the point of view of the Gospel. [515] In such an interpretation and development of the Christian conception of redemption "historical continuity" is preserved just as decidedly as it is in the one-sided making into history of that thought on the side of liberal Protestantism. What is in opposition to it is, on the one hand, completely unhistorical belief in an historical Jesus; on the other hand, the prejudice against the "immanent God," or against Pantheism. But this prejudice is based entirely on that fiction of an historical "mediator" and the hypothesis contained therein of a dualistic separation of world and God. The representatives of the monistic conception--who began to organise themselves a short time ago--should be clearer as to the significance of that conception than they are for the most part even at the present day. They must perceive that the true doctrine of unity can only be the doctrine of the all in one. There must be an idealistic monism in opposition to the naturalistic monism of Haeckel, which is prevalent even to-day. This monism must not exclude but include God's existence; and its present unfruitful negation of all religion must deepen into a positive and religiously valuable view of the world. Then, and not till then, will it be able to effect a genuine separation from the Church, and the monistic movement, still in its childhood, may lead to an inner improvement and renovation of our spiritual life in general. It requires much short-sightedness on the part of the exponents of a purely historical Christianity to suppose that the soulless and poor faith in the personal, or as it is considered better expressed to-day, in the "living" God, in freedom and immortality, supported by the authority of the "unique" personality of a man Jesus who died two thousand years ago, will be in a position permanently to satisfy religious needs, even when the metaphysic of redemption,