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 establishes evermore a tribunal over the world; and the majesty of such an effective bar of judgment supersedes all the development of external power."[68]

We may bring this chapter to a close by once more pointing out Eucken’s insistence on the Spiritual Substance of Christianity and the need of a new Existential-form.  The Substance was present in the life of the Founder; mankind has to turn to that fact for one of [p.201] the experimental proofs of the Divine.  But such a fact is not sufficient.  It is something which happened in someone else, and not in ourselves.  The fact is to serve as an inspiration that something similar shall and can happen in ourselves.  When this is realised, we become conscious of the power of the Divine within the soul; and the problems of our own day are seen and interpreted in the same spirit as that in which Jesus faced and interpreted the problems of his day.  Such a spiritual experience will become a power to use all the good of life, and thus sanctify it in the very using of it.  The over-personal norms and standards have now become our own possession; they enable us to see the world as it ought to be seen and to work for the realisation of the vision; and the norms mean even more than this, for we have already seen that they point to something beyond themselves and yet continuous with themselves.  They point to Infinite Love as the very essence of