"The excellent textual critic [Kritiker] but philosophically less well-advised writer of the famous Life of Jesus, David Friedrich Strauss, in the publication of his old age The Old Faith and the New, throws out the question: ‘‘Are we still Christians?” and answers it with a clear and decisive No. But he who is able to remove the philosophical kernel from the historical and therefore accidental shell, he who no longer holds to mere words and is able to recognize a thing when it appears under a different name and in new clothing, he will, even in the wake of all the achievements in historical research, natural science and philos- ophy answer Strauss’s question: Are we still Christians? With an equally clear and decisive Yes. For the essence of Christianity extends far wider than its name and consists in an idea, which is as eternal as the world and will never be extinguished: it is the Indian-Platonic- Christian idea, that our life on earth is not an end in itself... that indeed the highest task of life consists in ... separating ourselves from all inborn egotism ..."