Having made a desert all about it, the ego could not immediately create anew, out of the depths of its inner consciousness, nature and art, nation and state; the awful process which now went on, the only activity of which it was now capable, was the absorption into itself of all that had hitherto had life in the world. The ego was now everything; and yet it was a void. It had become the universal power, and yet as it brooded over the ruins of the world it was filled with horror at itself and with despair at all that it had lost. The ego which had devoured all things and was still a void now shuddered at itself. Under the oppression of this awful power the education of mankind has been going on; under this grim task‐master it has been preparing for true freedom, preparing to rouse itself from the depths of its distress, to escape from its opposition to itself and cast out that alien ego which is wasting its substance. Odysseus has now returned to his home, not by favour of the gods, not laid on the shore in sleep, but awake, by his own thought and his own strength. Perchance, as of yore, he will have need to fight with the suitors who have devoured his substance and sought to rob him of all he holds most dear. Odysseus must string the bow once more. The baleful charm of the self‐alienated ego is broken the moment any one proves to the religious sense of mankind that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels is its creation and ceases to exist as soon as this is recognised. The formation of the Church and the arising of the idea that the Jesus of the Gospels is the Messiah are not two different things, they are one and the same thing, they coincide and synchronise; but the idea was only the imaginative conception of the Church, the first movement of its life, the religious expression of its experience. The question which has so much exercised the minds of men—whether Jesus was the historic Christ (= Messiah)—is answered in the sense that everything that the historical Christ is, everything that is said of Him, everything that is known of Him, belongs to the world of imagination, that is, of the imagination of the Christian community, and therefore has nothing to do with any man who belongs to the real world. The world is now free, and ripe for a higher religion in which the ego will overcome nature, not by self‐alienation, but by penetrating it and ennobling it. To the theologian we may fling as a gift the shreds of his former science, when we have torn it to pieces; that will be something to occupy himself with, that time may not hang heavy upon his hands in the new world whose advent is steadily drawing nearer.