is perceived as the only sphere where
spiritual experience may exercise itself and draw out its own hidden
potencies. Tribulation is to be found in the world; but a standpoint
_above_ the world, gained by cutting a path right through the world, is
possible. When such a standpoint is reached, the world is seen as it
ought to be seen and used as it ought to be used. But this aspect of the
meaning of the world in the Christian religion will be dealt with later.
It is sufficient to state here that Eucken considers Christianity
superior to all other religions by virtue of the fact that it overcomes
the world, not by fleeing from it, but by transforming it. It views the
physical world as a stage upon which the life of the spirit has to
realise all its possibilities; the world and all that is within it take
a secondary place: the primary place is now accorded to the world of
ideals and values as these merge into love and the conception of the
Godhead.

The question of the finality of the Christian religion in its purely
historical sense has been discussed by Eucken in his _Truth of Religion,
Christianity and the New Idealism_, and _Koennen wir noch Christen sein_?
In these three works he arrives at the conclusion that no one religion
has a claim to the name "absolute religion," because even Christianity
itself cannot be more than a partial, though the highest, manifestation
of the Divine. And what Christianity has been and is in [p.178] itself
as a force in the history of the Western world cannot be the same as
what it was in the personal experience of its Founder. It is not
something which descended once and for all into the world, and so
remains its permanent inheritance. It is the most priceless inheritance
we possess; but such an inheritance has to be discovered again and
again. All this cannot come about without calling up to-day the same
spiritual energies as were needful for the tasks that were present when
Christianity started to conquer the world. Its aspects of "world-denial
and world-renewal" render Christianity the very religion we need. "It is
the religion of religions," but a statement of this fact does not mean
the realisation of the fact. The same energy and aspiration are needful
to-day as in the days of yore. Christianity, whenever it has lived on
its highest levels, has struggled for two tremendous facts at least: the
insufficiency of the world and the regeneration of the world in the
light of the Divine. I