this, will never enter into the deepest
depths of the teaching of Christ, good Christian as he may otherwise be,
and the Fourth Gospel in its deepest meaning does not exist for him. That
there was life in these words or things shining forth from God, we know,
and this life, be it what it may, was a light to man, the light of the
world, even though man had long been blind and imprisoned in darkness, and
did not understand the life, the light, the Word.

Now, in passing to the gospel story, the evangelist says that Jesus
brought or himself was the true light, while John's duty was merely to
announce his coming beforehand. This is certainly a great step--it is the
Christian recognition of the Word or of the Son of God in the historical
Jesus, whose historical character is confirmed by the character of John
the Baptist. The people believed in John, and John believed in Jesus. Of
course we must not assume that the philosophical significance of the Word,
or of the Logos, was ever clearly and completely present to the people in
the form worked out by the Neo-platonists. That was impossible at the
time, and it is so even now with the great mass of Christians. On the
other hand, the many subtleties and oddities which have made the later
Neo-platonism so repulsive to us, hardly existed for the consciousness of
the masses, which could only adopt the fundamental ideas of the Logos
system with a great effort. Religion is not philosophy; but there has
never been a religion, and there never can be, which is not based on
philosophy, and does not presuppose the philosophical notions of the
people. The highest aim, toward which all philosophy strives, is and will
always remain the idea of God, and it was this idea which Christianity
grasped in the Platonic sense, and presented to us most clearly in its
highest form, in the Fourth Gospel. To John, if for brevity we may so call
the author of the Fourth Gospel, God was no longer the Jewish Jehovah, who
had created the world in six days, formed Adam out of the dust, and every
living creature out of the ground; for him God had acquired a higher
significance, his nature was a spiritual nature, his creation was a
spiritual creation, and as for man the Word comprehends everything,
represents everything, realises everything that exists for him; so God was
conceived as being in the beginning, and then expressing Himself in the
Word, or as one with the Word. To God the Word, that is the
all-comprehe