separated from him only by an interval of time—­who gave up that university and the career it could offer him, under the compulsion of another Wisdom and another Love, then he re-enters the living past.  If, standing by him in that small hut in the Yorkshire wolds, from which the urgent message of new life spread through the north of England, he hears Rolle saying “Nought more profitable, nought merrier than grace of contemplation, the which lifteth us from low things and presenteth us to God.  What thing is grace but beginning of joy?  And what is perfection of joy but grace complete?"[44]—­if, I say, he so re-enters history that he can hear this as Rolle meant it, not as a poetic phrase but as a living fact, indeed life’s very secret—­then, his heart may be touched and he may begin to understand.  And then it may occur to him that this ardour, and the sacrifice it impelled, the hard life which it supported, witness to another level of being; reprove his own languor and comfort, his contentment with a merely physical mental life, and are not wholly to be accounted for in terms of superstition or of pathology.

When the living spirit in us thus meets the living spirit of the past, our time-span is enlarged, and history is born and becomes contemporary; thus both widening and deepening our vital experience.  It then becomes not only a real mode of life to us; but more than this, a mode of social life.  Indeed, we can hardly hope without this re-entrance into the time stream to achieve by ourselves, and in defiance of tradition, a true integration of existence.  Thus to defy tradition is to refuse all the gifts the past can make to us, and cut ourselves off from the cumulative experiences of the race.  The Spirit, as Croce[45] reminds us, is history, makes history, and is also itself the living result of all preceding history; since Becoming is the essential reality, the creative formula, of that life in which we find ourselves immersed.

It is from such an angle as this that I wish to approach the historical aspect of the life of Spirit; re-entering the past by sympathetic imagination, refusing to be misled by superficial characteristics, but seeking the concrete factors of the regenerate life, the features which persist and have significance for it—­getting, if we can, face to face with those intensely living men and women who have manifested it.  This is not easy.  In studying all such experience, we have to remember that the men and women of the Spirit are members of two orders.  They have attachments both to time and to eternity.  Their characteristic experiences indeed are non-temporal, but their feet are on the earth; the earth of their own day.  Therefore two factors will inevitably appear in those experiences, one due to tradition, the other to the free movements of creative life:  and we, if we would understand, must discriminate between them.  In this power of taking from the past and pushing on to the future, the balance maintained between stability and novelty, we find one of their abiding characteristics.  When this balance is broken—­when there is either too complete a submission to tradition and authority, or too violent a rejection of it—­full greatness is not achieved.