s we have already noticed, in its presentation of "a
world-denial and world-renewal" in a far higher degree than any of the
other religions, and also in the fact that it presents the union of the
human and the Divine in a clearer light than before. We have noticed,
too, how the Indian religions had to condemn the world in order to
penetrate to the very essence and bliss of religion. Mohammedanism
affirmed the world in too strong a manner, and its eternal world
constituted a kind of replica of the present material world on an
enlarged scale. The Jewish religion evolved through a series of stages
which finally culminated in Christianity. The Roman and the Greek
religions presented too many pluralistic aspects to be able ever to
reach the highest synthesis whereby the Many found their meaning,
interpretation, and value in the One.

Although the Christian religion cannot be designated as absolute
religion, still it may be designated as the highest and most perfect
manifestation of the Divine. The meaning of the term "absolute religion"
involves a conception impossible to maintain, on account of the fact
that in all religions some spiritual truth is discerned and realised.
The term "absolute religion" is also false on account of the fact that
no religion can contain the whole that is to be revealed and
experienced. Christianity [p.182] is best valued when it is seen, not as
a completion of the revelation of the Divine to man, but as a revelation
which has to be preserved, deepened, and carried farther. In the soul of
the Founder of Christianity there was doubtless present far more than is
expressed in the Biblical records, and far more than actually filtered
into the individual and collective consciousness of the earliest
Christian communities. But we cannot live on what has occurred in the
life of any other individual or community except in so far as this
enters also into our own individual and the collective consciousness. We
have already touched on this aspect of the impossibility of obtaining
sufficient strength for the warfare of the present in anything that
occurred in the past. Some measure of strength--and no psychology is
able to say how much--can be obtained from a vision of the spiritual
meaning and significance of the life of the Founder. But there is very
great danger in looking here alone for the sole source of all the help
we need. The spiritual principles of Christianity have been operating in
the world ever