I. The Path through the Gospels and The Path of Inner Experience

Then we are clear that it could not be otherwise, that those who wrote the Gospels must have received their knowledge from the same source which is now opening itself to humanity through the spiritual movement. This is just what now confronts us, what will come more and more, what will make a valid basis for the valuation of the Gospel documents. If this is so, we must say that men will be able to find along other ways what can be known through these documents. And so this knowledge begins to be more and more sacred to us through the spiritual cognition of the present day. It already worked through the force of the Gospels. Because the Gospels are suffused with the holiest knowledge, with the spiritual impulses of humanity, they had an influence even where they were taken in naively. Spiritual knowledge works not only abstractly, not only in theory, but works as a life-force, as life-blood of the soul. And ever more and more will men recognize how consolation and strength flow from this knowledge.