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 universe as well as the inauguration of a new reality. Man has emerged out of the darkness of nature and remains afflicted with the afflictions of nature; yet at the same time, with his appearance upon the earth the darkness begins to illumine, and [p.204] 'nature kindles within him a light' (Schopenhauer); he who is a mere speck on the face of a boundless expanse can yet aspire to a participation in the whole of Infinity; he who stands in the midst of the flux of time yet possesses an aspiration after infinite truth; he who forms but a mere piece of nature constructs at the same time a new world within the spiritual life over against it all; he who finds himself confined by contradictions of all kinds, which immediate existence in no way can solve, yet struggles after a further depth of reality and after the 'narrow gate' which opens into religion. Through and beyond all the particular problems of life and the world, it behoves us to raise the spiritual life to a level of full independence, to make it simultaneously superior to man as an individual and to bring it back into his soul. When this comes to be there is at the same time a transformation of his inmost being, and for the first time he becomes capable of genuine greatness.... These final conclusions strengthen the aspiration after a religion of the spiritual life.... Such a religion is in no way new, and Christianity has proclaimed it and clung to it from the very beginning. But it has been interwoven with traditional forms which are now seen through by so many as pictorial ideas of epochs and times. Earlier times could allow the Essence and the Form to coalesce without discovering any incongruity in this.