It follows naturally from this, that Eucken does not think of evil as a means by which good is developed. He prefers to regard it as unexplained, and forever with us to be overcome. Its reduction to a means of realizing the good leads, he thinks, "to a weakening which threatens to transform the mighty world-struggle into an artistic arrangement of things and into an effeminate play, and which takes away that bitterness from evil without which there is no strenuousness in the struggle and no vitality in life. Thus it remains true that religion does not so much explain as presuppose evil." An attempt to explain evil, he says, belongs to speculation rather than to religion. That he has an inkling of the region to which speculation might lead him is shown when it is realized, that upon his explanation, as one critic of him has said, it might be possible to find "some reconciliation in the fact that this world with its negations had awakened the spiritual life to its absolute affirmation, which could, therefore, not be in absolute opposition." In leaving aside speculation and confining himself to what he considers the religious aspects of life, he no doubt strengthens himself as a leader of those whose speculative powers have not yet been developed, or who can put one side of the mind to sleep and accept with the other half-truths. The more developed mind, however, will prefer Browning's greater inclusiveness. To possess a complete view of life, man must live his own life as a human being struggling to overcome the evil, at the same time keeping in mind the fact that evil is in a sense the raw material provided by God, or the Absolute, or whatever name one chooses to give to the all-powerful and all-loving, from which the active soul of man is to derive a richness of beauty and harmony of development not otherwise possible. Eucken's attitude toward Jesus is summed up in a way which reminds one strongly of the position taken in the comment made at the end of "The Death in the Desert." He writes: "The position of the believer in the universal Christian Church is grounded upon a relation to God whose uniqueness emerges from the essential divinity of Jesus; only on this supposition can the personality of Christ stand as the unconditional Lord and Master to whom the ages must do homage. And while the person of Jesus retains a wonderful majesty apart from dogma, its greatness is confined to the realm of humanity, and whatever of new and divine life it brings to us must be potential and capable of realization in us all. We therefore see no more in this figure the normative and universally valid type of all human life, but merely an incomparable individuality which cannot be directly imitated. At any rate the figure of Jesus, thus understood in all its height and pure humanity, can no longer be an object of faith and divine honor. All attempts to take shelter in a mediating position are shattered against a relentless either--or.