The entire mediaeval (and a large proportion of the
Protestant) theology laboured to obtain an intellectual grasp of the
doctrine of a unique historical salvation of humanity and frame it into
a dogma. And thus occurred that unparalleled misunderstanding (a
misunderstanding which never clouded the mind of India) which based
religion, the timeless metaphysical treasure of the soul, on the
historical record of an event which had happened in Asia Minor, and had
come down to us in a more or less garbled--some say entirely
falsified--version. This was the great sin of Christianity: It regarded
a historical event, revealing the very essence of religion, and
consequently capable of being formulated, as a divine intervention for
the purpose of bringing about the salvation of the world, instead of
recognising in the sublime figure of the founder of the Christian
religion a great, perhaps even perfect, incarnation of the eternally
new relationship between God and the soul. It promulgated the strange
thought that only the one soul, the soul of the founder, was divine, and
instead of teaching the divinity of humanity, it taught the divinity of
this one man only--Jesus became a God who could no longer be looked upon
as the perfect specimen and prototype of the race, but before whom it
behoved man to kneel and pray for salvation.
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