“If our age and our religion have not apprehended the greatness of Jesus and have [pg 051] been frightened back by the eschatological colour of his thought, this was due only in part to the fact that they could not accommodate themselves to the strangeness of it all. The decisive reason was another. They lacked the strong and clear stamp of a will and a hope directed towards the moral consummation of the world, which are decisive for Jesus and for his _Weltanschauung._ They were devoid of eschatology,—using the word here in its broadest and most general sense. They found in themselves no equivalents for the thoughts of Jesus, and were therefore not in a position to transpose his _Weltanschauung_ from the late-Jewish terms of thought into their own. “There was no answering chord of sympathy. Hence the historical Jesus had to remain strange to them to a very great extent, and that not only with respect to his thought material but also with respect to his very nature. His ethical enthusiasm and the immediateness and might which characterised his thought seems to them excessive because they know nothing that corresponds to it in their own thought and experience. So they were constantly intent upon making out of the “enthusiast” a modern man and theologian duly observant of metes and bounds [pg 052] in all his doings. Conservative theology, like the older orthodoxy to which it is akin, was not able to do anything with the historical Jesus, because it likewise makes far too little of the great moral ideas which in his eschatology were struggling for life and practical expression. “It was therefore the lack of an inward tuning to the same pitch of will and hope and desire which made it impossible to attain a real knowledge of the historical Jesus and a comprehensive religious relationship with him. Between him and a generation which was lacking in all immediateness and in all enthusiasm directed towards the final aims of humanity and of being, there could be no lively and far-reaching fellowship. For all its progress in historical perception it really remained more estranged from him than was the rationalism of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, which was brought closer to him by its enthusiastic faith in the possibility of rapid progress towards the moral perfection of humanity.”