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.  It is not a repetition of what the Founder said concerning religion.  What the Founder said cost him enormous labour to discover and to possess.  We shall gain so much and no more of the same spiritual substance as we put the same kind of energy in motion.  In order that we may unravel the complexities of our day, a spirit similar to his spirit must become ours.  When such a spirit ceases to exist, Christianity will become merely a [p.179] name; its power will have disappeared, and men can delude themselves into believing that they possess it when in fact they are the possessors of but little of its spirit and of much of its form.  But the possession of the same spirit as that of Jesus constitutes the further development of Christianity, and this further development is nothing other than what we have already seen—­the experience and efficacy of an eternal order of things in the midst of all the changes of time.  Thus we are thrown back once more, not upon our bare individual selves, but upon the presence of the Divine within the spiritual life itself.  Christianity is therefore not something that has been completed in the past, but the highest mode of conceiving and of experiencing Life in the present; it becomes an inward, personal and spiritual experience; and its duration and expansion depend upon the increase and depth of such a spiritual inwardness.

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CHAPTER XI [p.180]