 Christian compassion, like contrition and gratitude, does have an element faintly reminiscent of Schleiermacher’s feeling of absolute dependence. And again, it comes from the gratitude that is in the near vicinity of compassion. Unlike the subject of tragic compassion, the subject of Christian compassion construes herself as having been first the object of God’s compassion. One might say that Mother Teresa’s compassion towards poor sufferers springs from her gratitude to Christ for his compassion towards her and all humankind. But the reminiscence is only faint. Gratitude is not what Schleiermacher calls the feeling of absolute dependence. Indeed, the feeling of absolute dependence does not seem to be the essence of any of the Christian emotions. Rudolf Otto’s stress on fear (tremor) or blank wonder (stupor) also seems not to express the essence of Christian compassion. Christian doctrine does teach that God is fearsome and wonderful, but other attributes of God are much more to the fore in the emotion of compassion: God’s fatherly nurturing tenderness and forgiveness, his long-suffering love. William James’s critique of the essentialist tendency in the religious philosophy of the emotions seems on target: God has a variety of attributes, and these are reflected in a variety of emotion-types, none of which has any more claim than the others to constitute the essence of religious emotion. The diverse emotion types have in common that their grammar makes reference to God, but the attributes of God that they cite vary with the emotion types.