stress on the words of Christ. They were genuine reformers, but they
were as much constrained by the historical facts as the Roman Catholic
Church, and their standpoint has to this day remained the standpoint of
the Protestant professions of faith.

The fact of this new conception attaching no importance to the
historical Jesus of Nazareth (had he never lived it would have made no
difference) made of it a new religion. By putting aside this external
and accidental moment, it placed the metaphysical and purely spiritual
core of Christianity, the fundamental conviction of the divinity of the
soul, and the will to eternal life, within the centre of religious
consciousness, and by so doing put itself beyond the reach of historical
criticism and scepticism, Eckhart, more than any other teacher, was
profoundly convinced of the freedom and eternal value of the soul. "I,
as the Son, am the same as my Heavenly Father." He taught that Christ is
born in the soul, that the divine spark is continuously re-kindled in
the soul: "It is the quality of eternity that life and youth are one,"
and that man must become more and more divine, more and more free from
all that is unessential and accidental until he no longer differs from
God. It is only a logical conclusion to say that a perfect man,
mystically speaking, is God; his being and his will are in nothing
differentiated from absolute, universal, divine will--German mysticism
agrees in this with the Upanishads. Kant would have said that the
principles of such a man would become cosmic laws; sin would be the
estrangement from God, the will to draw away from God.

The profound and only mission of religion is the endowment of man in
this hurly-burly of life with the consciousness of eternity. Religion
places our transient life under the aspect of eternity, and therefore it
must, in its essence, remain a stranger to things temporal. Only that
moment in the life of a man can be called religious which lifts him
beyond himself, out of his petty, narrow existence, conditioned by and
subject to accidents, into timeless, universal life; which gives him the
certainty that historical events can never be regarded as definite and
ultimate--that moment which has the power to set free, to deliver, to
save. Thus it is irreligious to regard an event which occurred on the
temporal plane--and were it the greatest event which ever befell on
earth--as the pivot of metaphysical value for all men; to link the