“The historical foundation of Christianity, as rationalism, liberalism, and modern theology count it, exists no longer,—which, however, is not to say that Christianity has therefore lost its historical foundation. The work which historical theology believed it must carry out, and which it sees falling to pieces at the very moment when the completion was near, is only the terra cotta veneer of the true, indestructible, historical foundation, which is independent of any historical [pg 029] knowledge and proof—simply because it is there, it exists. “Jesus is something to our world because a mighty stream of spiritual influence has gone forth from him and has penetrated our age also. This fact will be neither shaken nor confirmed by an historical knowledge. “One fancied he could be more to our time by the fact that he entered it vitally as a man of our humanity. That, however, is not possible. For one reason, because this Jesus never so existed. Also, because historical knowledge, though it can clarify spiritual life already existing, can never awaken life. It is able to reconcile the present with the past; to a certain degree it can transport the present into the past; but to construct the present is not within its power. “One cannot estimate highly enough what the study of the life of Jesus has accomplished. It is a great and unique demonstration of veracity and love of the truth,—one of the most significant occurrences in the whole spiritual life of mankind. What the modern-liberal and the popularising investigation has done, in spite of all its errors, for the present and for the coming state of religion can only be measured when one takes [pg 030] into comparison the Roman Catholic—or more broadly the Latin—culture and literature which has been touched little or not at all by the influence of these spirits. “And yet the disillusion had to come. We modern theologians are too proud of our historical learning, too proud of our historical Jesus, too confident in our faith in what our historical theology can spiritually contribute to the world. The notion that by historical knowledge we can construct a new and vigorous Christianity and let loose spiritual forces in the world dominates us like a fixed idea and does not permit us to perceive that all we have done thereby is to assail, not the great religious problem itself, but one of the problems of general culture which is entrenched in front of it, and which we would solve as well as we can. We thought that we had to lead our age as it were through a by-path, through the historical Jesus, in order that it might come to Jesus who is present spiritual power. The by-path is now barred by real history. “We were in danger of putting ourselves between men and the Gospels and not leaving the individual any longer alone with the sayings of Jesus.