Some people never get beyond this vague appreciation of the spiritual until perhaps some great trial or temptation, a long illness or sad bereavement falls to their lot. Then they feel the need for a religion that is more satisfying than the Universal Religion with which they have in the past been content. They want to get nearer to God; they feel the need of a personal God who is interested in their trials and troubles. They are no longer satisfied with the conception of a God that is far away, they thirst for His presence. This feeling leads the individual to search for a more definite form of religion, in which the God is regarded as supremely real, and reigns on the throne of love. The personality enters into the greater depths of religion, and it becomes a much more real and powerful influence in his life. He has no longer a mere indefinite conception of a Deity, but he thinks of God as real and personal. Instead of adopting a changed attitude towards the world of nature, he comes to demand a new world. He is now a denizen of the spiritual world, and there results "a life of pure inwardness," which draws its power and inspiration from the infinite resources of the Universal Spiritual Life in which he finds his being. This type of religion Eucken calls _Characteristic Religion_. The historical religions would seem to represent, to some extent, the attempts of humankind to arrive at a religion of this kind. A further distinction arises between the historical forms of religion, of which one at most, if any, can express the final truth, and the Absolute form of religion, which if not yet conceived, must ultimately express the truth in the matter of religion. Eucken is never more brilliant than he is in the examination he makes of the historical forms of religion, for the purpose of formulating the Absolute and final form; some account of this must be given in the next chapter. CHAPTER VIII RELIGION: HISTORICAL AND ABSOLUTE In examining the various historical forms of religion, Eucken, as we should expect, is governed by the conclusions he has arrived at concerning the solution of the great problem of life, and especially of the place of religion in life. A religion which emphasised the need for a break with the world, and of fight and action for spiritual progress, the possibility of a new higher life of freedom and of personality, and the superiority of the spiritual over the material, and which presented God as the ultimate spiritual life, in which the human personality found its real self, would thus meet with highest favour, while a form of religion that failed to do so would necessarily fail to satisfy the tests that he would apply.