_Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis_ holds good for the eternal truths also, as soon as we follow their course in the stream of history, and watch them move on as elements in the world-picture of the generations that live and die. For each man, during the short space of his existence, the _one_ religion is eternal and true which Destiny, through the time and place of his birth, has ordained for him. With it he feels, out of it he forms, the views and convictions of his days. To its words and forms he holds fast, although what he means by them is constantly changing. In the world-as-nature there are eternal truths; in the world-as-history there is an eternally changing trueness. _A morphology of religious history_, therefore, is a task that the Faustian spirit alone could ever formulate, and one that it is only now, at this present stage of its development, fit to deal with. The problem is enunciated, and we must dare the effort of getting completely away from our own convictions and seeing before us everything indifferently as equally alien. And how hard it is! He who undertakes the task must possess the strength not merely to imagine himself in an illusory detachment from the truths of his world-understanding--illusory even to one for whom truths are just a set of concepts and methods--but actually to penetrate his own system physiognomically to its very last cells. And even then is it possible, in a single language, which structurally and spiritually carries the whole metaphysical content of its own Culture, to capture transmissible ideas of the truths of other-tongued men?