Here then, as in so much else, the ideal is not an arbitrary choice but a struck balance.  First, a personal contact with Eternal Reality, deepening, illuminating and enlarging all of our experience of fact, all our responses to it:  that is, faith.  Next, the fullest possible sense of our membership of and duty towards the social organism, a completely rich, various, heroic, self-giving, social life:  that is, charity.  The dissociation of these two sides of human experience is fatal to that divine hope which should crown and unite them; and which represents the human instinct for novelty in a sublimated form.

It is of course true that social groups may be regenerated.  The success of such group-formations as the primitive Franciscans, the Friends of God, the Quakers, the Salvation Army, demonstrates this.  But groups, in the last resort, consist of individuals, who must each be regenerated one by one; whose outlook, if they are to be whole men, must include in its span abiding values as well as the stream of time, and who, for the full development of this their two-fold destiny, require each a measure both of solitude and of association.  Hence it follows, that the final answer to the repeated question:  “Does God save men, does Spirit work towards the regeneration of humanity (the same thing), one by one, or in groups?” is this:  that the proposed alternative is illusory.  We cannot say that the Divine action in the world as we know it, is either merely social or merely individual; but both.  And the next question—­a highly practical question—­is, “How both?” For the answer to this, if we can find it, will give us at last a formula by which we can true up our own effort toward completeness of self-expression in the here-and-now.

How, then, are groups of men moved up to higher spiritual levels; helped to such an actual possession of power and love and a sound mind as shall transfigure and perfect their lives?  For this, more than all else, is what we now want to achieve.  I speak in generalities, and of average human nature, not of these specially sensitive or gifted individuals who are themselves the revealers of Reality to their fellow-men.

History suggests, I think, that this group-regeneration is effected in the last resort through a special sublimation of the herd-instinct; that is, the full and willing use on spiritual levels of the characters which are inherent in human gregariousness.[150] We have looked at some of these characters in past chapters.  Our study of them suggests, that the first stage in any social regeneration is likely to be brought about by the instinctive rallying of individuals about a natural leader, strong enough to compel and direct them; and whose appeal is to the impulsive life, to an acknowledged of unacknowledged lack or craving, not to the faculty of deliberate choice.  This leader, then, must offer new life and love, not intellectual solutions.  He must be able to share with his