l ideal
of humanity. This identification of Jesus with the moral ideal is
complete and unquestioning with Schleiermacher. It is visible in the
interchangeable use of the titles Jesus and Christ. Our saving
consciousness of God could proceed from the person of Jesus only if that
consciousness were actually present in Jesus in an absolute measure.
Ideal and person in him perfectly coincide.

As typical and ideal man, according to Schleiermacher, Jesus was
distinguished from all other founders of religions. These come before us
as men chosen from the number of their fellows, receiving, quite as much
for themselves as for others, that which they received from God. It is
nowhere implied that Jesus himself was in need of redemption, but rather
that he alone possessed from earliest years the fulness of redemptive
power. He was distinguished from other men by his absolute moral
perfection. This excluded not merely actual sin, but all possibility of
sin and, accordingly, all real moral struggle. This perfection was
characterised also by his freedom from error. He never originated an
erroneous notion nor adopted one from others as a conviction of his own.
In this respect his person was a moral miracle in the midst of the
common life of our humanity, of an order to be explained only by a new
spiritually creative act of God. On the other hand, Schleiermacher says
squarely that the absence of the natural paternal participation in the
origin of the physical life of Jesus, according to the account in the
first and third Gospels, would add nothing to the moral miracle if it
could be proved and detract nothing if it should be taken away. Singular
is this ability on the part of Schleiermacher to believe in the moral
miracle, not upon its own terms, of which we shall speak later, but upon
terms upon which the outward and physical miracle, commonly so-called,
had become, we need not say incredible, but unnecessary to
Schleiermacher himself. Singular is this whole part of Schleiermacher's
construction, with its lapse into abstraction of the familiar sort, of
which, in general, the working of his mind had been so free. For surely
what we here have is abstraction. It is an undissolved fragment of
metaphysical theology. It is impossible of combination with the
historical. It is wholly unnecessary for the religious view of salvation
which Schleiermacher had distinctly taken. It is surprising how slow men
have been to learn that the absolute can