le and blessed life of
Jesus Christ, who has overcome the world and called sinners to himself.

In making this attempt to put together the fundamental features of the
Gospel, I have allowed myself to be guided by the results of this Gospel
in the case of the first disciples. I do not know whether it is
permissible to present such fundamental features apart from this
guidance. The preaching of Jesus Christ was in the main so plain and
simple, and in its application so manifold and rich, that one shrinks
from attempting to systematise it, and would much rather merely narrate
according to the Gospel. Jesus searches for the point in every man on
which he can lay hold of him and lead him to the Kingdom of God. The
distinction of good and evil--for God or against God--he would make a
life question for every man, in order to shew him for whom it has become
this, that he can depend upon the God whom he is to fear. At the same
time he did not by any means uniformly fall back upon sin, or even the
universal sinfulness, but laid hold of individuals very diversely, and
led them to God by different paths. The doctrinal concentration of
redemption on sin was certainly not carried out by Paul alone; but, on
the other hand, it did not in any way become the prevailing form for the
preaching of the Gospel. On the contrary, the antitheses, night, error,
dominion of demons, death and light, truth, deliverance, life, proved
more telling in the Gentile Churches. The consciousness of universal
sinfulness was first made the negative fundamental frame of mind of
Christendom by Augustine.

II. Details.

1. Jesus announced the Kingdom of God which stands in opposition to the
kingdom of the devil, and therefore also to the kingdom of the world, as
a future Kingdom, and yet it is presented in his preaching as present;
as an invisible, and yet it was visible--for one actually saw it. He
lived and spoke within the circle of eschatological ideas which Judaism
had developed more than two hundred years before: but he controlled them
by giving them a new content and forcing them into a new direction.
Without abrogating the law and the prophets he, on fitting occasions,
broke through the national, political and sensuous eudaemonistic forms in
which the nation was expecting the realisation of the dominion of God,
but turned their attention at the same time to a future near at hand, in
which believers would be delivered from the oppression of evil and s