Every ethical form of Jesus, be it never so perfect, leads therefore only up to the frontier of the Kingdom of God, while every trace of a path disappears so soon as one advances upon the new territory. There one needs it no more. [pg 103] We have a prejudice against this conception of conditional ethics. It is an unjustified prejudice if it is due to a suspicion that Jesus’ ethics is thereby disparaged. Exactly the opposite is the case. For this conditionality springs from an absolute ethical idealism, which postulates for the expected state of perfection conditions of existence which are themselves ethical. In our unconditional and self-sufficing ethics we, however, assume that the conflict between good and evil must go on forever, as belonging constantly to the nature of the ethical. Ethics and theology do not stand for us in the same lively relationship as they do with Jesus. The vividness of the colours of the absolute ethical idealism has been faded by history. So, to render the ethics of Jesus unconditional and self-sufficing is not only unhistorical, but it means also the degradation of his ethical idealism. On one point, however, our ethical sentiment is justified in its prejudice. If ethics has to do only with the expectation of the supernatural consummation, its actual worth is diminished, since it is merely individual ethics and is concerned only with the relation of each single person to the Kingdom of God. The thought, however, that the moral community [pg 104] which has been constituted by Jesus’ preaching must as such be in some way the effective first stage in the realisation of the Kingdom of God—this thought belongs not alone to _our_ ethical sentiment, but it animated also the preaching of Jesus, for he wrought out in strong relief the social character of his ethics. This explains the reluctance one feels to admit that the eschatological idea of the Kingdom of God lay at the basis of Jesus’ preaching from beginning to end, since _then_ one cannot explain how the new moral community which he formed about himself was in his thought organically connected with the Kingdom which was supernaturally to appear. One glides here unintentionally into a modern line of thought. The idea of development furnishes what we want, allowing us to conceive of the moral community as an initial stage which by constant growth, extensive and intensive, is ever approaching the final stage. The gradually widening circle represents, however, a modern way of viewing history. It is completely foreign to Jesus. Yet even though he cannot have made use of this explanation of ours, the _fact_ that this new community stands in an organic relation with the final stage was for him as [pg 105] certain as for us. But because he expected this final stage as a purely supernatural event the connection was not to be apprehended by human reflection, rather it was a _divine secret,_ which he illuminated only by pointing to analogies in the processes of nature.