s the whole history of the Gospel to the
present day. The eschatological view is certainly very severely
repressed, but it always breaks out here and there, and still guards the
spiritual from the secularisation which threatens it. But the
possibility of uniting the two conceptions in complete harmony with each
other, and on the other hand, of expressing them antithetically, has
been the very circumstance that has complicated in an extraordinary
degree the progress of the development of the history of dogma. From
this follows the antithesis, that from that conception which somehow
recognises salvation itself in a present spiritual possession, eternal
life in the sense of immortality may be postulated as final result,
though not a glorious kingdom of Christ on earth; while, conversely, the
eschatological view must logically depreciate every blessing which can
be possessed in the present life.

It is now evident that the theology, and, further, the Hellenising, of
Christianity, could arise and has arisen in connection, not with the
eschatological, but only with the other conception. Just because the
matters here in question were present spiritual blessings, and because,
from the nature of the case, the ideas of forgiveness of sin,
righteousness, knowledge, etc., were not so definitely outlined in the
early tradition, as the hopes of the future, conceptions entirely new
and very different, could, as it were, be secretly naturalised. The
spiritual view left room especially for the great contrast of a
religious and a moralistic conception, as well as for a frame of mind
which was like the eschatological in so far as, according to it, faith
and knowledge were to be only preparatory blessings in contrast with the
peculiar blessing of immortality, which of course was contained in them.
In this frame of mind the illusion might easily arise that this hope of
immortality was the very kernel of those hopes of the future for which
old concrete forms of expression were only a temporary shell. But it
might further be assumed that contempt for the transitory and finite as
such, was identical with contempt for the kingdom of the world which the
returning Christ would destroy.

The history of dogma has to shew how the old eschatological view was
gradually repressed and transformed in the Gentile Christian
communities, and how there was finally developed and carried out a
spiritual conception in which a strict moralism counterbalanced a