into clerics, the brethren into laity
held in tutelage, miracles and healings into nothing, or into
priestcraft, the fervent prayers into a solemn ritual, renunciation of
the world into a jealous dominion over the world, the "spirit" into
constraint and law?

There can be no doubt about the answer: these formations are as old in
their origin as the detachment of the Gospel from the Jewish Church. A
religious faith which seeks to establish a communion of its own in
opposition to another, is compelled to borrow from that other what it
needs. The religion which is life and feeling of the heart cannot be
converted into a knowledge determining the motley multitude of men
without deferring to their wishes and opinions. Even the holiest must
clothe itself in the same existing earthly forms as the profane if it
wishes to found on earth a confederacy which is to take the place of
another, and if it does not wish to enslave, but to determine the
reason. When the Gospel was rejected by the Jewish nation, and had
disengaged itself from all connection with that nation, it was already
settled whence it must take the material to form for itself a new body
and be transformed into a Church and a theology. National and
particular, in the ordinary sense of the word, these forms could not be:
the contents of the Gospel were too rich for that; but separated from
Judaism, nay, even before that separation, the Christian religion came
in contact with the Roman world and with a culture which had already
mastered the world, viz., the Greek. The Christian Church and its
doctrine were developed within the Roman world and Greek culture in
opposition to the Jewish Church. This fact is just as important for the
history of dogma as the other stated above, that this Church was
continuously nourished on the Old Testament. Christendom was of course
conscious of being in opposition to the empire and its culture, as well
as to Judaism; but this from the beginning--apart from a few
exceptions--was not without reservations. No man can serve two masters;
but in setting up a spiritual power in this world one must serve an
earthly master, even when he desires to naturalise the spiritual in the
world. As a consequence of the complete break with the Jewish Church
there followed not only the strict necessity of quarrying the stones for
the building of the Church from the Graeco-Roman world, but also the idea
that Christianity has a more positive relation to that