ventured to carry to its completion. The Messianic consciousness of the uniquely great Man of Nazareth sets up a struggle between the present and the beyond, and introduces that resolute absorption of the beyond by the present, which in looking back we recognise as the history of Christianity, and of which we are conscious in ourselves as the essence of religious progress and experience -a process of which the end is not yet in sight.
In this sense Jesus did "accept the world" and did stand in conflict with Judaism. Protestantism was a step-a step on which hung weighty consequences-in the progress of that "acceptance of the world" which was constantly developing itself from within. By a mighty revolution which was in harmony with the spirit of that great primal act of the consciousness of Jesus, though in opposition to some of the most certain of His sayings, ethics became world-accepting. But it will be a mightier revolution still when the last remaining ruins of the supersensuous other-worldly system of thought are swept away in order to clear the site for a new spiritual, purely real and present world. All the inconsistent compromises and constructions of modern theology are merely an attempt to stave off the final expulsion of eschatology from religion, an inevitable but a hopeless attempt. That proleptic Messianic consciousness of Jesus, which was in reality the only possible actualisation of the Messianic idea, carries these consequences with it inexorably and unfailingly. At that last cry upon the cross the whole eschatological supersensuous world fell in upon itself in ruins, and there remained as a spiritual reality only that present spiritual world, bound as it is to sense, which Jesus by His all-powerful word had called into being within the world which He contemned. That last cry, with its despairing abandonment of the eschatological future, is His real acceptance of the world. The "Son of Man" was buried in the ruins of the falling eschatological world; there remained alive only Jesus "the Man." Thus these two Aramaic synonyms include in themselves, as in a symbol of reality, all that was to come.
If theology has found it so hard a task to arrive at an historical comprehension of the secret of this self-designation, this is due to the fact that the question is not a purely historical one. In this word there lies the transformation of a whole system of thought, the inexorable consequence of the elimination of eschatology from religion. It was only in this future form, not as actual, that Jesus spoke of His Messiahship. Modern theology keeps on endeavouring to discover in the title of Son of Man, which is bound up with the future, a humanised present Messiahship. It does so in the conviction that the recognition of a purely future reference in the Messianic consciousness of Jesus would lead in the last result to a modification of the historic basis of our faith which has itself become
