nted and living German.

The religious genius of a single individual had created Christianity.
But from the very beginning it was misunderstood; the salvation of the
world was linked to the person of a man who had aspired to be an example
to the whole race. The term, "Son of God," was understood in the sense
of the hero-cult of antiquity; possibly the Jewish faith in a Messiah,
the politico-national hope of the Children of Israel, was a good deal to
blame for this. A historical event was translated into metaphysic. The
only truly religious man was made the centre of a new mythology and
naively worshipped. It may sound like a paradox, but it is a fact that
the whole of the first millenary was inwardly irreligious; it concealed
its want of metaphysical intuition behind the falsification of
historical events. The entire mediaeval (and a large proportion of the
Protestant) theology laboured to obtain an intellectual grasp of the
doctrine of a unique historical salvation of humanity and frame it into
a dogma. And thus occurred that unparalleled misunderstanding (a
misunderstanding which never clouded the mind of India) which based
religion, the timeless metaphysical treasure of the soul, on the
historical record of an event which had happened in Asia Minor, and had
come down to us in a more or less garbled--some say entirely
falsified--version. This was the great sin of Christianity: It regarded
a historical event, revealing the very essence of religion, and
consequently capable of being formulated, as a divine intervention for
the purpose of bringing about the salvation of the world, instead of
recognising in the sublime figure of the founder of the Christian
religion a great, perhaps even perfect, incarnation of the eternally
new relationship between God and the soul. It promulgated the strange
thought that only the one soul, the soul of the founder, was divine, and
instead of teaching the divinity of humanity, it taught the divinity of
this one man only--Jesus became a God who could no longer be looked upon
as the perfect specimen and prototype of the race, but before whom it
behoved man to kneel and pray for salvation. Perhaps it was not possible
to understand the new doctrine in any other way; before men can conceive
the idea of their divinity, they must have become conscious of their
souls.

This complete misunderstanding and externalising of religion which took
place in the first millenary, and which can never now be