It is, indeed, not the least service of the eschatological school that it compels modern theology, which is so much preoccupied with history, to reveal what is its own as its own. Eschatology makes it impossible to attribute modern ideas to Jesus and then by way of “New Testament Theology” take them back from Him as a loan, as even Ritschl not so long ago did with such _naïveté_. Johannes Weiss, in cutting himself loose, as an historian, from Ritschl, and recognising that “the real roots of Ritschl’s ideas are to be found in Kant and the illuminist theology,”(171) introduced the last decisive phase of the process of separation between historical and “modern” theology. Before the advent of eschatology, critical theology was, in the last resort, without a principle of discrimination, since it possessed no reagent capable of infallibly separating out modern ideas on the one hand and genuinely ancient New Testament ideas on the other. The application of the criterion has now begun. What will be the issue, the future alone can show. But even now we can recognise that the separation was not only of advantage to historical theology; for modern theology, the manifestation of the modern spirit as it really is, was still more important. Only when it became conscious of its own inmost essence and of its right to exist, only when it freed itself from its illegitimate historical justification, which, leaping over the centuries, appealed directly to an historical exposition of the New Testament, only then could it unfold its full wealth of ideas, which had been hitherto root‐bound by a false historicity. It was not by chance that in Bousset’s reply a certain affirmation of life, something expressive of the genius of Protestantism, cries aloud as never before in any theological work of this generation, or that in Haupt’s work German mysticism interweaves its mysterious harmonies with the Johannine _motif_. The contribution of Protestantism to the interpretation of the world had never been made so manifest in any work prior to Weiss’s. The modern spirit is here breaking in wreaths of foam upon the sharp cliffs of the rock‐bound eschatological world‐view of Jesus. To put it more prosaically, modern theology is at last about to become sincere. But this is so far only a prophecy of the future.