The life which must serve as an example consists in love and humility; in the abundance of hearty emotion which does not even exclude the lowliest; in the formal renunciation of all desire of making its rights felt; in conquest, in the sense of triumph over oneself; in the belief in salvation in this world, despite all sorrow, opposition, and death; in forgiveness and the absence of anger and contempt; in the absence of a desire to be rewarded; in the refusal to be bound to anybody; abandonment to all that is most spiritual and intellectual;—in fact, a very proud life controlled by the will of a servile and poor life.
Once the Church had allowed itself to take over all the Christian practice, and had formally sanctioned the State,—that kind of life which Jesus combats and condemns,—it was obliged to lay the sense of Christianity in other things than early Christian ideals—that is to say, in the faith in incredible things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. etc. The notions "sin," "forgiveness," "punishment," "reward"—everything, in fact, which had nothing in common with, and was quite absent from, primitive Christianity, now comes into the foreground.
An appalling stew of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judgments and condemnations; the order of rank, etc.
170.
Christianity has, from the first, always transformed the symbolical into crude realities:
(1) The antitheses "true life" and "false life" were misunderstood and changed into "life here" and "life beyond."
(2) The notion "eternal life," as opposed to the personal life which is ephemeral, is translated into "personal immortality";
(3) The process of fraternising by means of sharing the same food and drink, after the Hebrew-Arabian manner, is interpreted as the "miracle of transubstantiation."
(4) "Resurrection" which was intended to mean the entrance to the "true life," in the sense of being intellectually "born again," becomes an historical contingency, supposed to take place at some moment after death;
(5) The teaching of the Son of man as the "Son of God,"—that is to say, the life-relationship between man and God,—becomes the "second person of the Trinity," and thus the filial relationship of every man—even the lowest—to God, is done away with;