The Life Of Jesus Christ In Its Historical Connexion

What, then, is the special presupposition with which we must approach the contemplation of the Life of Christ? It is one on which hangs the very being of the Christian as such; the existence of the Christian Church, and the nature of Christian consciousness. [25] It is one at whose touch of power the dry bones of the old world sprung up in all the vigour of a new creation. It gave birth to all that culture (the modern as distinguished from the ancient) from which the Germanic nations received their peculiar intellectual life, and from which the emancipation of the mind, grown too strong for its bonds, was developed in the Reformation. It is the very root and ground of our modern civilization; and the latter, even in its attempts to separate from this root, must rest upon it: indeed, should such attempts succeed, it must dissolve into its original elements, and assume an entirely new form. It is, in a word, the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God in a sense which cannot be predicated of any human being, -- the perfect image of the personal God in the form of that humanity that was estranged from him; that in him the source of the Divine life itself in humanity appeared; that by him the idea of humanity was realized