and, in denying
immortality in the form of a bodily resurrection, failed to perceive the
truth of immortality, for whose recognition the premises and germs
existed in the religion of Israel, though not as yet developed. The
third party, that of the Essenes, was marked by quiet piety, and in many
respects also by excessive asceticism. In the midst of the Pharisaic
formalism, the unbelief of the Sadducees, and the pietism of the
Essenes, there was yet in Israel a seed of true worshipers, who, though
not above the dogmatic prejudices of their time, had heart and mind open
for the true religion, and who set the true blessing to be looked for
from the Messiah in the satisfying of their religious and moral needs.

3. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

The Israelitish religion, which reached its highest stage of development
in prophetism, but which among the later Jews after Ezra degenerated,
with the Pharisees into formalism and worship of the letter, with the
Essenes into mysticism and asceticism, and which with the Sadducees,
along with the sacrifice of the prophetic ideal of the future, was
subordinated to politics, developed in Christianity, but freed from once
cherished national expectations and outward forms, into a purely
spiritual knowledge and worship of God. Jesus fathomed the deep meaning
of the religion of his people, and its original fitness to become,
through higher development, the religion of the world. Jesus devoted
himself to the end of forming the human race into one great society (the
kingdom of heaven), of which religion should be the soul and life, and,
convinced of his calling, proclaimed himself as the Son of man, who, as
such, belonged not to Israel alone, but to mankind. Jesus combated both
the formalism and exclusiveness of the Pharisees, and the unbelief of
the Sadducees, and with word and deed preached a religion which,
independent of all outward form, took hold of the human heart, and
which, developing into an independent principle in man, was to find its
commission, not in the authority of Scripture or tradition, not even in
that of his name, but in its own power and truth. In him religion
appeared as the power of self-sacrificing love, which fears not even
death, and to which dying is not the losing of life, but the development
of life. In distinction from other religions, in which either God and
man are strangers to each other, and opposed to each other, or man's
personality is, as it were, sunk in G