possessed, empirical proofs are neither demanded nor desired. It is within one's own new and spiritual world that proofs are now discovered, and they are timeless and spaceless in their own intrinsic nature. "Do this, and thou shalt live." If the man has to negate all concerning the preservation of his natural individuality, the new world he has gained for his soul will have abundant affirmation within itself, without the support of any earthly props. It is his own highest life which testifies to him that "death does not count" at all. Eucken's whole plea is that spiritual life at the point of its highest manifestation should not be interpreted by anything below itself. [p.164] We have already noticed how, on lower levels, spiritual life was even there interpreted by its _norms_, and not by its connections with what was _below itself_. The disappearance of miracle in religion is an indispensable stage which must be passed over. It is necessary only on a mid-level of religion, and has really been far more of the nature of a symbol than of a fact. It is at our peril that in religion we give up such a symbol until a more "inward wonder" has happened within our own soul. When the self-subsistence of the spiritual life and the reality of the norms of the over-world, now all united in God, are experienced, all miraculous manifestations of the Divine, imaginary or real, are relegated to a secondary place. They all belong to a point which the man has passed; they are milestones to which he can never return. "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet." As Eucken points out, "This is no other than the sign of spiritual power and of a Divine message and greatness." The movement from signs and miracles is a movement from the outward to the inward, from percept to spirituality; and the essence of religion, as a reality in itself and as an experience of the soul, is to be found by taking such a step. The centre of gravity of life has now been shifted from the outward to the inward. To accomplish this means nothing less than a [p.165] struggle for _the governing centre of life_. Unless we succeed in this struggle, the inner life will reach no independence and subsistence of its own. Even when the struggle succeeds in gaining its longed-for depth, it has not removed for once and for all the contradictions from without and within. Difficulties, from the lower side, will accompany the spiritual life in its higher evolution, but once it has become conscious of its own Divine nature and certainty it will gain sufficiently in content and power to relegate them all to the periphery. Something has happened within the soul which can never be obliterated. As Eucken says: "The contradiction is now removed from the centre to the periphery of life; it can therefore only touch us from without, and is not able to overthrow what