 Despite his criticisms of, and challenges to, Christianity, Bosanquet believed that the world had benefitted from Christian civilisation and culture, and that Christianity was a progress over earlier stages of religion. Moreover, he not only frequently employed allusions to Christian religious belief and practice to illustrate his general views, but retained elements from Christian doctrine, such as the ideas of the atonement and of justification by faith—though in a highly modified form. The doctrines of the atonement (to which Bosanquet often referred, using the words of Goethe, as ‘dying in order to live’) and of ‘justification by faith’ (which emphasised the presence of religious consciousness in ‘works’) have a practical rather than a doctrinal significance. The former reflected the notion of ‘self-sacrifice’, involved in the achievement of self-realisation—where one had to ‘die’ to the desires of one’s ‘private will’ in order to ‘live’ as a more complete moral agent. And the latter was a reminder that one’s actions could have a moral and spiritual character only so far as they were carried out, out of a set of “dominant ideas” to which one was committed.