to Jesus as the ideal of goodness presented to us in flesh and blood.
Yet the assertion that Jesus' historical personality altogether
corresponds with the complete and eternal ethical ideal is one which we
have no need to make. We do not possess in our own minds the absolute
ideal with which in that assertion we compare him.

The ethical ideal of the race is still in process of development. Jesus
has been the greatest factor urging forward that development. We
ourselves stand at a certain point in that development. We have the
ideals which we have because we stand at that point at which we do. The
men who come after us will have a worthier ideal than we do. Again, to
say that Jesus in his words and conduct expressed in its totality the
eternal ethical ideal, would make of his life something different from
the real, human life. Every real, human life is lived within certain
actual antitheses which call out certain qualities and do not call out
others. They demand certain reactions and not others. This is the
concrete element without which nothing historical can be conceived. To
say that Jesus lived in entire conformity to the ethical ideal so far as
we are able to conceive it, and within the circumstances which his own
time and place imposed, is the most that we can say. But in any case,
Kant insists, the real object of our religious faith is not the historic
man, but the ideal of humanity well-pleasing to God. Since this ideal is
not of our own creation, but is given us in our super-sensible nature,
it may be conceived as the Son of God come down from heaven.

The turn of this last phrase is an absolutely characteristic one, and
brings out another quality of Kant's mind in dealing with the Christian
doctrines. They are to him but symbols, forms into which a variety of
meanings may be run. He had no great appreciation of the historical
element in doctrine. He had no deep sense of the social element and of