the Godhead.  The reality of the over-individual norms and the conception of the Divine as Infinite Love thus induce in us a conviction of the possibility of an evolution of the spirit and of a reality beyond sense and time.  The Eternal thus enters into Time and overcomes Time.  This is Eucken’s final conclusion in regard to the Christian religion and the destiny of man.  But all this has to be experienced before it [p.202] can be realised.  “The task to-day is to work energetically, to labour with a free mind and a joyful courage, so that the Eternal may not lose its efficient power by our rigid clinging to temporal and antiquated forms, so that what we have recognised as human may not bar the way to the Divine as that Divine is revealed in our own day.  The conditions of the present time afford the strongest motives for such work.  For once again, in spite of all the contradictions which appear on the surface of things, the religious problem rises up mightily from the depth of life; from day to day it moves minds more and more; it induces endeavour and kindles the spirit of man.  It becomes ever plainer to all who are willing to see that mere secular culture is empty and vain, and is powerless to grant life any real content or fill it with genuine love.  Man and humanity are pressed ever more forcibly forward into a struggle for the meaning of life and the deliverance of the spiritual self.  But the great tasks must be handled with a greatness of spirit, and such a spirit demands freedom—­freedom in the service of truth and truthfulness.  Let us therefore work together, let us work unceasingly with all our strength as long as the day lasts, in the conviction that ’he who wishes to cling to the Old that ages not must leave behind him the old that ages’ (Runeberg), and that an Eternal of the real kind cannot [p.203] be lost in the flux of Time, because it overcomes Time by entering into it."[69]

Eucken is aware of the various Life-systems which present themselves on every side as all-inclusive.  But he sees no hope for a real spiritual education of mankind until every Life-system shall seek for a depth beyond the natural man and all his wants.  And such a movement is visible amongst us to-day.  It needs to be possessed and proclaimed.  The redemption of the world depends upon its success.  The Christian religion is such a Gospel.  “But a movement towards a more essential and soul-stirring culture—­to a progressive superiority of a complete life beyond all individual activities—­cannot arise without bringing the problem of religion once more to the foreground.  Our life is not able to find its bearings within this deep or to gather its treasures into a Whole unless it realises how many acute opposites it carries within itself.  Life will either be torn in pieces by these opposites, or it must somehow be raised above them all.  It is the latter alone that can bring about a thorough transformation of our first and shallow view of the