e as to
the strictly vicarious and juridical character of the whole.) And the
Risen Life is an objectively real, profoundly operative life--the
visions of the Risen One were effects of the truly living Jesus, the
Christ.

The Second Christian Stage, the Johannine writings, are fully
understandable only as posterior to St. Paul--the most enthusiastic and
influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert,
from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly
Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly
Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced. Saul, the man of
violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in
a substantially _pneumatic_ manner, is henceforth absorbed, not in the
past Jewish Messiah, but in the present universal Christ; not in the
Kingdom of God, but in Pneuma, the Spirit. Christ, the second Adam, is
here a life-giving Spirit, an element that surrounds and penetrates the
human spirit; we are baptized, dipped, into Christ, Spirit; we can drink
Christ, the Spirit. And this Christ-Spirit effects and maintains the
universal brotherhood of mankind, and articulates in particular posts
and functions the several human spirits, as variously necessary members
of the one Christian society and Church.

Now the Johannine Gospel indeed utilizes considerable Synoptic
materials, and does not, as St. Paul, restrict itself to the Passion and
Resurrection. Yet it gives us, substantially, the Spirit-Christ, the
Heavenly Man; and the growth, prayer, temptation, appeal for sympathy,
dereliction, agony, which, in the Synoptists, are still so real for the
human soul of Jesus Himself, appear here as sheer condescensions, in
time and space, of Him who, as all things good, descends from the
Eternal Above, so that we men here below may ascend thither with Him.
On the other hand, the Church and the Sacraments, still predominantly
implicit in the Synoptists, and the subjects of costly conflict and
organization in the Pauline writings, here underlie, as already fully
operative facts, practically the entire profound work. The great
dialogue with Nicodemus concerns Baptism; the great discourse in the
synagogue at Capernaum, the Holy Eucharist--in both cases, the strict
need of these Sacraments. And from the side of the dead Jesus flow blood
and water, as those two great Sacraments flow from the everliving
Christ; whilst at the Cross's foot He leaves