discovery in the life of prayer.  It shows a failure to appreciate the stern, heroic aspect of Reality; the element of austerity in all genuine religion, the distinction between love and sentimentalism, the rightful place of risk, effort, even suffering, in all full achievement and all joy.  If we are surrendered in love to the purposes of the Spirit, we are committed to the bringing out of the best possible in life; and this is a hard business, involving a quite definite social struggle with evil and atavism, in which some one is likely to be hurt.  But surely that manly spirit of adventure which has driven men to the North Pole and the desert, and made them battle with delight against apparently impossible odds, can here find its appropriate sublimation?

If anyone who has followed these arguments, and now desires to bring them from idea into practice, asks:  “What next?” the answer simply is—­Begin.  Begin with ourselves; and if possible, do not begin in solitude.  “The basal principles of all collective life,” says McDougall, “are sympathetic contagion, mass suggestion, imitation":[153] and again and again the history of spiritual experience illustrates this law, that its propagation is most often by way of discipleship and the corporate life, not by the intensive culture of purely solitary effort.  It is for those who believe in the spiritual life to take full advantage now of this social suggestibility of man; though without any detraction from the prime importance of the personal spiritual life.  Therefore, join up with somebody, find fellowship; whether it be in a church or society, or among a few like-minded friends.  Draw together for mutual support, and face those imperatives of prayer and work which we have seen to be the condition of the fullest living-out of our existence.  Fix and keep a reasonably balanced daily rule.  Accept leadership where you find it—­give it, if you feel the impulse and the strength.  Do not wait for some grand opportunity, and whilst you are waiting stiffen in the wrong shape.  The great opportunity may not be for us, but for the generation whose path we now prepare:  and we do our best towards such preparation, if we begin in a small and humble way the incorporation of our hopes and desires as for instance Wesley and the Oxford Methodists did.  They sought merely to put their own deeply felt ideas into action quite simply and without fuss; and we know how far the resulting impulse spread.  The Bab movement in the East, the Salvation Army at home, show us this principle still operative; what a “little flock” dominated by a suitable herd-leader and swayed by love and adoration can do—­and these, like Christianity itself, began as small and inconspicuous groups.  It may be that our hope for the future depends on the formation of such groups—­hives of the Spirit—­in which the worker of every grade, the thinker, the artist, might each have their place:  obtaining from incorporation the herd-advantages of mutual protection and unity of aim, and forming nuclei to which others could adhere.