life to doctrine, from morals to metaphysics, from goodness to orthodoxy.  The change was portentous.  The aspect of pessimism is, however, removed when one recognises the inevitableness of some such process, if Christianity was ever to wield an influence in the world at all.  Again, one must consider that the process of the recovery of pure Christianity must begin at exactly this point, namely, with the recognition of how much in current Christianity is extraneous.  It must begin with the sloughing off of these extraneous elements, with the recovery of the sense for that which original Christianity was.  Such a recovery would be the setting free again of the power of the religion itself.

The constant touchstone and point of reference for every stage of the history of the Church must be the gospel of Jesus.  But what was the gospel of Jesus?  In what way did the very earliest Christians apprehend that gospel?  This question is far more difficult for us to answer than it was for those to whom the New Testament was a closed body of literature, externally differentiated from all other, and with a miraculous inspiration extending uniformly to every phrase in any book.  These men would have said that they had but to find the proper combination of the sacred phrases.  But we acknowledge that the central inspiration was the personality of Jesus.  The books possess this inspiration in varying degree.  Certain of the books have distinctly begun the fusion of Christian with other elements.  They themselves represent the first stages of the history of doctrine.  We acknowledge that those utterances of Jesus which have been preserved for us, shaped themselves by the antitheses in which Jesus stood.  There is much about them that is palpably incidental, practically relevant and unquestionably only relative.  In a large sense, much of the meaning of the gospel has to be gathered out of the evidence of the operation of its spirit in subsequent ages of the Christian Church, and from remoter aspects of the influence of Jesus on the world.  Thus the very conception of the gospel of Jesus becomes inevitably more or less subjective.  It becomes an ideal construction.  The identification of this ideal with the original gospel proclamation becomes precarious.  We seem to move in a circle.  We derive the ideal from the history, and then judge the history by the ideal.

Is there any escape from this situation, short of the return to the authority of Church or Scripture in the ancient sense?  Furthermore, even the men to whom the gospel was in the strictest sense a letter, identified the gospel with their own private interpretation of this letter.  Certainly the followers of Ritschl who will acknowledge no traits of the gospel save those of which they find direct witness in the Gospels, thus ignore that the Gospels are themselves interpretations.  This undue stress upon the documents which we are fortunate enough to possess, makes us forget the limitations