life for the sake of something that life is to participate in or to avoid in the future; they agree that a change must happen within the soul in this world, and that this change only comes about through the aid of a supernatural power.  But these two religions differ fundamentally in their different ways of looking at the world.  To the Indian religions, the existence of the world is an evil; the world is itself a kingdom of illusions.  “All in it is transient [p.176] and unreal; nothing in it has duration; happiness and love are merely momentary, and men are as two pieces of wood floating on the face of an infinite ocean which pass by one another, never to meet again.  Fruitless agitation and painful deception have fallen upon him who mistakes such a transient semblance for a reality and who hangs his heart upon it.  Therefore it behoves man to free himself from such an unholy arena.  This emancipation will take place when the semblance is seen through as semblance, and when the soul has gained an insight right into the foundation of things.  Then the world loses its power over man; the whole kingdom of deception with its evanescent values goes to the bottom, all the excited affections caused by the world are extinguished, and life becomes a still and holy calm; it reaches the depth of a dreamless sleep, enters, through its immersion into an eternal essence, beyond the shadows; it passes, according to Buddhism in its most definite interpretation, into a state of entire unconsciousness."[62]

How different a spirit from all this breathes in Christianity!  In Christianity the world is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.  Something of the revelation of the Divine may be discovered within it, but this is only a segment of a greater whole which comes to realisation within the soul.  Here, the world is not cast away, despite all its limitations, but [p.177] is perceived as the only sphere where spiritual experience may exercise itself and draw out its own hidden potencies.  Tribulation is to be found in the world; but a standpoint above the world, gained by cutting a path right through the world, is possible.  When such a standpoint is reached, the world is seen as it ought to be seen and used as it ought to be used.  But this aspect of the meaning of the world in the Christian religion will be dealt with later.  It is sufficient to state here that Eucken considers Christianity superior to all other religions by virtue of the fact that it overcomes the world, not by fleeing from it, but by transforming it.  It views the physical world as a stage upon which the life of the spirit has to realise all its possibilities; the world and all that is within it take a secondary place:  the primary place is now accorded to the world of ideals and values as these merge into love and the conception of the Godhead.