Note 33 — THE DOGMATIC IMPORT OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

Science opens its attack on the proposition, that the ideal man was historically manifested in the person of Christ. It did not escape Schleiermacher himself that this was a dangerous point. No sooner has he put forth the above proposition, than he reflects on the difficulty of supposing that the ideal should be realized in one historical individual; since, in other cases, we never find the ideal realized in a single appearance, but only in an entire cycle of appearances, which reciprocally complete each other. It is true that this theologian does not hold the character of Christ, as the ideal man, to extend to the manifold relations of human life, so as to be the archetype for all the science, art, and policy, that are developed in human society; he confines it to the domain of the consciousness of God. But, as Schmid has justly observed, this does not alter the case, for the consciousness of God also, being, in its development and manifestation, subject to the conditions of finiteness and imperfection; the supposition that even in this department exclusively, the ideal was manifested in a single historical individual, involves a violation of the laws of nature by a miracle. This, however, is far from alarming Schleiermacher; on the contrary, he maintains that this is the place, and the only place, in which the Christian doctrine must necessarily admit a miracle, since the originating of the person of Christ can only be conceived as the result of a special divine act of creation. It is true, he limits the miraculous to the first introduction of Christ into the series of existences, and allows the whole of his further development to have been subject to all the conditions of finite existence: but this concession cannot repair the breach, which the supposition only of one miracle makes in the scientific theory of the world. Still less can any help be derived from vague analogies like the following: as it is still possible that matter should begin to agglomerate and thence to revolve in infinite space; so science must admit, that there may be in the domain of spiritual life an appearance, which in like manner we can only explain as the commencement, the first point, in a higher process of development.33