But again as respects the historic tradition of the church our author is not less emphatic. He values the record of an actual, real, and tangible experience of this manifested life of God in man. The "progressives" may repudiate the mere Jesus of "the flesh," in favour of one who comes by water only (_i. e._ in the outpouring of the Spirit in baptism), and not by the blood of the cross. For the doctrine of the cross was a special stumbling-block to Doketists, who rejected the sacrament of the bread and wine.[28] The actual sending of God's only-begotten Son into the world, the real "propitiation" for our sins (so lightly denied by the illuminati), is a vital point to the writer. The sins "of the whole world" were atoned for in Jesus' blood actually shed on Calvary. The church possesses, then, in this story a record of fact of infinite significance to the world. The Doketists are playing fast and loose with this record of the historic Jesus. They deny any value to the "flesh" in which the æon Christ had merely tabernacled as its "receptacle" between the period of the baptism and the ascension--an event which they date _before_ the death on the cross.[29] They are met here with a peremptory challenge and declaration. The experience of contact with the earthly Jesus which the Church cherishes as its most inestimable treasure is the assurance, and the only assurance that we have, of real fellowship with the Father; for "the life, the eternal life" of God in man, the Logos--to borrow frankly the Stoic expression--is known not by mere mystical dreams, but by the historic record of those who personally knew the real Jesus. The manifestation of God, in short, is objective and historical, and not merely inward and self-conscious; and that outward and objective manifestation may be summed up in what we of the Christian brotherhood have seen and known of Jesus. Footnote 28: In the _Acts of John_ the Christ spirit which had been resident in Jesus comes to John after he has fled to a cave on the Mount of Olives from the posse that arrested the Lord. The sweet voice of the invisible Christ informs him there that the blinded multitude below had tortured a mere bodily shape which they took to be Christ, "while I stood by and laughed." In the _Gospel of Peter_ Jesus hung upon the cross "as one who feels no pain" and was "taken up" before the end. Footnote 29: See note preceding.