ion of God in His infinitude, but, taking
the Epistle to the Ephesians as his authority, as the contemplation of
God in the harmony of the creature with Christ. The commerce with all
the saints was, according to him, essential to the content of eternal
happiness. It was the realization of the kingdom of God, which thus
comes to be the kingdom of Man. And in his exposition of these doctrines
of the two pietists, Ritschl confesses _(op. cit._, iii., Sec. 46) that
both witnesses have with these doctrines contributed something to
Protestantism that is of like value with the theological method of
Spener, another pietist.

We see, therefore, that the Christian, mystical, inward longing ever
since St. Paul, has been to give human finality, or divine finality, to
the Universe, to save human consciousness, and to save it by converting
all humanity into a person. This longing is expressed in the
anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things, all things in earth
and in heaven, the visible and the invisible, in Christ, and also in the
apocatastasis, the return of all things to God, to consciousness, in
order that God may be all in all. And does not God's being all in all
mean that all things shall acquire consciousness and that in this
consciousness everything that has happened will come to life again, and
that everything that has existed in time will be eternalized? And within
the all, all individual consciousnesses, those which have been, those
that are, and those that will be, and as they have been, as they are,
and as they will be, will exist in a condition of society and
solidarity.

But does not this awakening to consciousness of everything that has
been, necessarily involve a fusion of the identical, an amalgamation of
like things? In this conversion of the human race into a true society in
Christ, a communion of saints, a kingdom of heaven, will not individual
differences, tainted as they are with deceit and even with sin, be
obliterated, and in the perfect society will that alone remain of each
man which was the essential part of him? Would it not perhaps result,
according to Bonnefon's supposition, that this consciousness that lived
in the twentieth century in this corner of this earth would feel itself
to be the same with other such consciousnesses as have lived in other
centuries and perhaps in other worlds?

And how can we conceive of an effective and real union, a substantial
and intimate union, soul with sou