a man’s habit of thought, a conscious and voluntary transference of a man’s intention to obey, from the superficial and selfish desires which he has followed, to the deep and spiritual ones which he will henceforth allow.  There is an epoch in a man’s life when he makes the transition.  He probably does it under the spell of personal influence, by the power of example, through the beauty of another personality.  To Kant salvation was character.  It was of and in and by character.  To no thinker has the moral participation of a man in the regeneration of his own character been more certain and necessary than to Kant.  Yet, the change in direction of the will generally comes by an impulse from without.  It comes by the impress of a noble personality.  It is sustained by enthusiasm for that personality.  Kant has therefore a perfectly rational and ethical and vital meaning for the phrase ‘new birth.’

For the purpose of this impulse to goodness, nothing is so effective as the contemplation of an historical example of such surpassing moral grandeur as that which we behold in Jesus.  For this reason we may look 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.