had become, we need not say incredible, but unnecessary to Schleiermacher himself.  Singular is this whole part of Schleiermacher’s construction, with its lapse into abstraction of the familiar sort, of which, in general, the working of his mind had been so free.  For surely what we here have is abstraction.  It is an undissolved fragment of metaphysical theology.  It is impossible of combination with the historical.  It is wholly unnecessary for the religious view of salvation which Schleiermacher had distinctly taken.  It is surprising how slow men have been to learn that the absolute cannot be historic nor the historic absolute.

Surely the claim that Jesus was free from error in intellectual conception is unnecessary, from the point of view of the saving influence upon character which Schleiermacher had asserted.  It is in contradiction with the view of revelation to which Schleiermacher had already advanced.  It is to be accounted for only from the point of view of the mistaken assumption that the divine, even in manifestation, must be perfect, in the sense of that which is static and not of that which is dynamic.  The assertion is not sustained from the Gospel itself.  It reduces many aspects of the life of Jesus to mere semblance.  That also which is claimed in regard to the abstract impossibility of sin upon the part of Jesus is in hopeless contradiction with that which Schleiermacher had said as to the normal and actual development of Jesus, in moral as also in all other ways.  Such development is impossible without struggle.  Struggle is not real when failure is impossible.  So far as we know, it is in struggle only that character is made.  Even as to the actual commission of sin on Jesus’ part, the assertion of the abstract necessity of his sinlessness, for the work of moral redemption, goes beyond anything which we know.  The question of the sinlessness of Jesus is not an a priori question.  To say that he was by conception free from sin is to beg the question.  We thus form a conception and then read the Gospels to find evidence to sustain it.  To say that he did, though tempted in all points like as we are, yet so conduct himself in the mystery of life as to remain unstained, is indeed to allege that he achieved that which, so far us we know, is without parallel in the history of the race.  But it is to leave him true man, and so the moral redeemer of men who would be true.  To say that, if he were true man, he must have sinned, is again to beg the question.  Let us repeat that the question is one of evidence.  To say that he was, though true man, so far as we have any evidence in fact, free from sin, is only to say that his humanity was uniquely penetrated by the spirit of God for the purposes of the life which he had to live.  That heart-broken recollection of his own sin which one hears in The Scarlet Letter, giving power to the preacher who would reach men in their sins, has not the remotest parallel in any reminiscence