The life of the Saviour was naught else than this practice,—neither was his death. He no longer required any formulæ, any rites for his relations with God—not even prayer. He has done with all the Jewish teaching of repentance and of atonement; he alone knows the _mode_ of life which makes one feel “divine,” “saved,” “evangelical,” and at all times a “child of God.” _Not_ “repentance,” _not_ “prayer and forgiveness” are the roads to God: the _evangelical mode of life alone_ leads to God, it _is_ “God.”—That which the gospels abolished was the Judaism of the concepts “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “salvation through faith,”—the whole doctrine of the Jewish church was denied by the “glad tidings.” The profound instinct of how one must live in order to feel “in Heaven,” in order to feel “eternal,” while in every other respect one feels by _no_ means “in Heaven”: this alone is the psychological reality of “Salvation.”—A new life and _not_ a new faith.... 34 If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this that he regarded only _inner_ facts as facts, as “truths,”—that he understood the rest, everything natural, temporal, material and historical, only as signs, as opportunities for parables. The concept “the Son of Man,” is not a concrete personality belonging to history, anything individual and isolated, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol divorced from the concept of time. The same is true, and in the highest degree, of the _God_ of this typical symbolist, of the “Kingdom of God,” of the “Kingdom of Heaven,” and of the “Sonship of God.” Nothing is more un-Christlike than the _ecclesiastical crudity_ of a personal God, of a Kingdom of God that is coming, of a “Kingdom of Heaven” beyond, of a “Son of God” as the second person of the Trinity. All this, if I may be forgiven the expression, is as fitting as a square peg in a round hole—and oh! what a hole!—the gospels: a _world-historic_ cynicism in the scorn of symbols.... But what is meant by the signs “Father” and “Son,” is of course obvious—not to everybody, I admit: with the word “Son,” _entrance_ into the feeling of the general transfiguration of all things (beatitude) is expressed, with the word “Father,” _this feeling itself_ the feeling of eternity and of perfection.—I blush to have to remind you of what the Church has done with this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of immaculate conception into the bargain?... _But by so doing it defiled conception._——