And when the spiritual life creates an entrance into this _over-world_
something happens which makes a fundamental difference in the life. The
life may again and again sink back to its old level, but what has
happened will never allow it to remain satisfied on that level. "We fall
to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake" (Browning). Life
now becomes [p.56] alternately _a quest and a fruition_.[12] The
individual has to gather his whole energies together because something
great is at stake. This is nothing less than the possession of a new
kind of reality. The struggle has yielded a conquest for the time being.
He tastes and "eats his pot of honey on the grave" of enemies within and
without. This fruition means no less than a taste of "eternal life in
the midst of time" (Harnack), and the relegating of the whole world of
phenomena to a subsidiary place.

This is the kernel of Eucken's _Truth of Religion_. The book deals with
the most subtle psychological problems of the soul, and reaches the
conclusion of an entrance by man into a divine world. All this is far
removed from the ordinary traditional conception either of God or of
religion. Perhaps the majority of mankind is not as yet ready for such a
presentation of religion. But I think it may be safely said that it is
through some such mode of conceiving religion as this that the "great
and good ones" of the world found an entrance into a divine world and
grasped the conception of the evolution of the soul as a process which
begins where organic evolution ends.


* * * * *


CHAPTER III [p.57]