The tragedy does not consist in the modification of primitive Christianity by eschatology, but in the fate of eschatology itself, which has preserved for us all that is most precious in Jesus, but must itself wither, because He died upon the cross with a loud cry, despairing of bringing in the new heaven and the new earth—that is the real tragedy. And not a tragedy to be dismissed with a theologian’s sigh, but a liberating and life‐giving influence, like every great tragedy. For in its death‐pangs eschatology bore to the Greek genius a wonder‐child, the mystic, sensuous, Early‐ Christian doctrine of immortality, and consecrated Christianity as the religion of immortality to take the place of the slowly dying civilisation of the ancient world. But it is not only those who want to find a way from the preaching of Jesus to early Christianity who are conscious of the peculiar difficulties raised by the recognition of its purely Jewish eschatological character, but also those who wish to reconstruct the connexion backwards from Jesus to Judaism. For example, Wellhausen and Schürer repudiate the results arrived at by the eschatological school, which, on its part, bases itself upon their researches into Late Judaism. Wellhausen, in his “Israelitish and Jewish History,”(173) gives a picture of Jesus which lifts Him out of the Jewish frame altogether. The Kingdom which He desires to found becomes a present spiritual entity. To the Jewish eschatology His preaching stands in a quite external relation, for what was in His mind was rather a fellowship of spiritual men engaged in seeking a higher righteousness. He did not really desire to be the Messiah, and in His inmost heart had renounced the hopes of His people. If He called Himself Messiah, it was in view of a higher Messianic ideal. For the people His acceptance of the Messiahship denoted the supersession of their own very differently coloured expectation. The transcendental events become immanent. In regard to the apocalyptic Judgment of the World, he retains only the sermon preserved by John about the inward and constant process of separation.