Such historical religions do not, then, originate in the collective experiences of humanity, but in what has actually happened in the life of unique personalities. These personalities have become, as it were, mediators between God and man. Such religions adopt the most diverse forms, because the personalities have given of the content of their own personal experiences, and no two experiences view anything from standpoints precisely identical. The historical religions may consequently be narrow in their outlook. The personalities are dependent upon their race, place, training, and inheritance for the particular intellectual presentation of their religion. Thus, each historical religion has its own view of the universe and its own morality. But the value of no historical religion is to be judged from this standpoint alone. Such views of the universe and such morality must have appeared to them somehow as a good--as [p.170] ways and means to what lay _beyond_. We may have outgrown such ways and means; other ways and means higher in their nature may have become our inheritance. But these higher ways and means could not have evolved out of their lower stages had not some element of the _beyond_ instilled itself into them. The historical religions could never have flourished on immorality and superstition, however much of these we may discover in them. It is the _beyond, over-personal_ element which has kept them alive, and this element has always had a hard struggle to overcome and transform _the here-and-now_ elements. Whenever the historical religions are traced back to their sources, there is discovered an element _above_ the world in the souls of their founders and of their immediate followers. As Eucken puts it: "To these founders the new kingdom was no vague outline and no feeble hope, but all stood clear in front of them; the kingdom was so real to their souls and filled them so exclusively that the whole sensuous world was reduced by them to a semblance and a shadow if they could not otherwise gain a new value from a superior power. The new world could attain to such immediacy and impressiveness only because a regal imagination wrestled for a unique picture in the tangled heap of life, and because it invested this picture with the clearest outlines and the most vivid colours. Thus the new world dawns on humanity with [p.171] fascinating power, rousing it out of the sluggishness of daily routine, binding it through a corporate aim, raising inspiring ardour through radiant promises and terrible threats, and creating achievements otherwise impossible. This prepared road into the kingdom of the invisible, this creation of a new reality which is no merely serene kind of play but a deep seriousness, this inversion of worlds which pushes sensuous existence down into a distance and which prepares a home for man within the kingdom of faith--all this is the greatest achievement that has ever been undertaken and that has ever worked upon human soil.