accept the same creedal forms, use the same liturgies, acknowledge the same scale of values and same moral law.  But as something, beyond what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the great artist from the visible world, and he at this encounter becomes more vividly alive; so for these there was and is in religion a new, intenser life which they can reach.  They seem to represent favourable variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels; a type of life and of greatness, which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the race.

Now the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two groups: 

First, Type. What are the characters which mark this life of the Spirit?

Secondly, Process. What is the line of development by which the individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters?

First, then, the Spiritual Type.

What we see above all in these men and women, so frequently repeated that we may regard it as classic, is a perpetual serious heroic effort to integrate life about its highest factors.  Their central quality and real source of power is this single-mindedness.  They aim at God:  the phrase is Ruysbroeck’s, but it pervades the real literature of the Spirit.  Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that “the householder must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions."[48] Thus the Sufi says he has but two laws—­to look in one direction and to live in one way.[49] Christians call this, and with reason, the Imitation of Christ; and it was in order to carry forward this imitation more perfectly that all the great Christian systems of spiritual training were framed.  The New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the central fact of Our Lord’s life was His abiding sense of direct connection with and responsibility to the Father; that His teaching and works of charity alike were inspired by this union; and that He declared it, not as a unique fact, but as a possible human ideal.  This Is not a theological, but a historical statement, which applies, in its degree to every man and woman who has been a follower of Christ:  for He was, as St. Paul has said, “the eldest in a vast family of brothers.”  The same single-minded effort and attainment meet us in other great faiths; though these may lack a historic ideal of perfect holiness and love.  And by a paradox repeated again and again in human history, it is this utter devotion to the spiritual and eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abundant fruits in the temporal sphere; giving not only the strength to do difficult things, but that creative charity which “wins and redeems the unlovely by the power of its love."[50] The man or woman of prayer, the community devoted to it, tap some deep source of power and use it in the most practical ways.  Thus, the only object of the Benedictine rule was the fostering of goodness in those who adopted it, the education of the soul; and it became one of the chief instruments