The truth concerning these founders of religion seems to lie in the fact that they realised a depth of life beyond the world, the intellect, and the span of ordinary life. It is this fact that needs to be brought prominently forward in our day. And such a fact becomes an experimental proof of the presence and efficacy of the Divine within the soul and points to an upward direction the total-movement of the world. If such a fact does not succeed in holding for itself a primary place, other subsidiary facts will colour and weaken its true spiritual content and value. This is the road on which speculative and superstitious ideas have found an entrance into the historical religions. When such is the case, the spiritual reality is gradually weakened, is lowered to the level of intellectualistic dogma, until it ultimately becomes, though in the guise of religion, the worst enemy which spiritual religion has to encounter. All hard and fixed dogmatic settings of religion usurp the supremacy of the spiritual life itself. Eucken shows this in connection with religious institutions--institutions which were meant by their founders to be essential but [p.174] still subservient to the needs and aspirations of spiritual life. Thus, genuine religion is measured by a doctrinal standard or by a sacrament. These may possess an incalculable value in religion, when used as means and not as ends; but they may, and often do, issue in its degradation to a stage which is hardly a spiritual one. Every historical religion possesses some absolute truth, but does not possess the whole truth; and also each historical religion possesses some elements which have to pass away. But this matter will be dealt with in a later chapter. The main service of the historical religions is to bring home to us the fact that in the course of human history a spiritual life above the world has again and again dawned on mankind through the experiences and works of great personalities. To realise intensely such a fact is to realise the fact that all this can happen again in a more concentrated form than is actually presented in the slow and toilsome effects of the results of the collective life of the community.