It is not in fact tenable, for the opposite view has at its disposal inexhaustible reserves of world‐renouncing, world‐contemning sayings, and the few utterances which might possibly be interpreted as expressing a purely positive joy in the world, desert and go over to the enemy, because they textually and logically belong to the other set of sayings. Finally, the promise of earthly happiness as a reward, to which Bousset had denied a position in the teaching of Jesus, also falls upon his rear, and that in the very moment when he is seeking to prove from the saying, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you,” that for Jesus this world’s goods are not in themselves evil, but are only to be given a secondary place. Here the eudaemonism is written on the forehead of the saying, since the receiving of these things—we must remember, too, the “hundredfold” in another passage—is future, not present, and will only “come” at the same time as the Kingdom of God. All present goods, on the other hand, serve only to support life and render possible an undistracted attitude of waiting in pious hope for that future, and therefore are not thought of as gains, but purely as a gift of God, to be cheerfully and freely enjoyed as a foretaste of those blessings which the elect are to enjoy in the future Divine dispensation. The loss of this position decides the further point that if there is any suggestion in the teaching of Jesus that the future Kingdom of God is in some sense present, it is not to be understood as implying an anti‐ eschatological acceptance of the world, but merely as a phenomenon indicative of the extreme tension of the eschatological consciousness, just in the same way as His joy in the world. Bousset has a kind of indirect recognition of this in his remark that the presence of the Kingdom of God is only asserted by Jesus as a kind of paradox. If the assertion of its presence indicated that acceptance of the world formed part of Jesus’ system of thought, it would be at variance with His eschatology. But the paradoxical character of the assertion is due precisely to the fact that His acceptance of the world is but the last expression of the completeness with which He rejects it. But what do critical cavils matter in the case of a book of which the force, the influence, the greatness, depends upon its spirit? It is great because it recognises—what is so rarely recognised in theological works—the point where the main issue really lies; in the question, namely, whether Jesus preached and worked as Messiah, or whether, as follows if a prominent place is given to eschatology, as Colani had long ago recognised, His career, historically regarded, was only the career of a prophet with an undercurrent of Messianic consciousness.