ace to face with the meaning and value of the life and
death and spiritual resurrection [p.199] of the Founder of our
Christianity, we are face to face with an eternal reality revealed
within the soul of the "son of man." At such a depth of our nature, the
petty questions concerning how much or how little was present disappear
into the background of life, and we are able through such a vision to
pass to the Father. When emphasis is laid on such a fact as this,
Christianity will again become a religion of the spirit--a religion
which will unite all mankind at a point of unity beneath all close
intellectual determinations and differences. And Eucken points out that
it is not in the life of Jesus alone that we can obtain such a vision.
But we do not gain the vision by merely _saying_ this. If we know of any
other character who _was_ so much and who _did_ so much, probably we
shall obtain there what we need. But in the Western world at least we do
_not_ know any such character; the essence of his life and personality
has been always connected with the conception of God. But this is not
the sole conception and, as Eucken says, we cannot bind ourselves
entirely to this one point in Christianity. The narrow paths which lead
to religion are many; we have to draw help from all quarters where the
Divine has been revealed. But the danger lies in merely knowing so many
such paths while walking on none of them. The personality of Jesus will
remain in Christianity, and the world in its darkness will turn again
and [p.200] again to that palpable proof of the Divine seen on such a
summit, and endeavour to scale the same everlasting hill of God. "Here
we find a human life of the most homely and simple kind, passed in a
remote corner of the world, little heeded by his contemporaries, and,
after a short blossoming life, cruelly put to death. And yet, this life
had an energy of spirit which filled it to the brim; it had a Standard
which has transformed human existence to its very root; it has made
inadequate what hitherto seemed to bring entire happiness; it has set
limits to all petty natural culture; it has stamped as frivolity, not
only all absorption in the mere pleasures of life, but has also reduced
the whole prior circle of man to the mere world of sense. Such a
valuation holds us fast and refuses to be weakened by us when all the
dogmas and usages of the Church are detected as merely human
organisations. That life of Jesus establishe