women of the Spirit—­eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the circumstances of their own time—­are the earnests of our own latent destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to “grow taller in Christ."[42] These powers—­that ability—­are factually present in the race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow.

In order, then, that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection and keep tight hold on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic spirituality, and the movements which they initiated.  It is true that we can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who have followed on highest levels a normal course; the upstanding types, varying much in temperament but little in aim and achievement, of that form of life which is re-made and controlled by the Spirit, entinctured with Eternal Life.  If such a use of history is indeed to be educative for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it, as a mere chronicle of past events; and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete thickness of the modern world.  We are not to think of spiritual epochs now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from us; of saints as some peculiar species, God’s pet animals, living in an incense-laden atmosphere and less vividly human and various than ourselves.  Such conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense; and when we are dealing with the accredited heroes of the Spirit—­that is to say, with the Saints—­they are particularly common and particularly poisonous.  As Benedetto Croce has observed, the very condition of the existence of real history is that the deed celebrated must live and be present in the soul of the historian; must be emotionally realized by him now, as a concrete fact weighted with significance.  It must answer to a present, not to a past interest of the race, for thus alone can it convey to us some knowledge of its inward truth.

Consider from this point of view the case of Richard Rolle, who has been called the father of English mysticism.  It is easy enough for those who regard spiritual history as dead chronicle and its subjects as something different from ourselves, to look upon Rolle’s threefold experience of the soul’s reaction to God—­the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his austere, self-giving life[43]—­as the probable result of the reaction of a neurotic temperament to mediaeval traditions.  But if, for instance the Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student—­another Oxford undergraduate,