notice one general characteristic:  each was an enthusiast, abounding in zest and hope, and became in his lifetime a fount of regeneration, a source of spiritual infection, for those who came under his influence.  In each the spiritual world was seen “through a temperament,” and so mediated to the disciples; who shared so far as they were able the master’s special secret and attitude to life.  Thus St. Benedict’s sane and generous outlook is crystallized in the Benedictine rule.  St. Francis’ deep sense of the connection between poverty and freedom gave Franciscan regeneration its peculiar character.  The heroisms of the early Jesuit missionaries reflected the strong courageous temper of St. Ignatius.  The rich contemplative life of Carmel is a direct inheritance from St. Teresa’s mystical experience.  The great Orders in their purity were families, inheriting and reproducing the salient qualities of their patriarch; who gave, as a father to his children, life stamped with his own characteristics.

Yet sooner or later after the withdrawal of its founder, the group appears to lose its spontaneous and enthusiastic character.  Zest fails.  Unless a fresh leader be forthcoming, it inevitably settles down again towards the general level of the herd.  Thence it can only be roused by means of “reforms” or “revivals,” the arrival of new, vigorous leaders, and the formation of new enthusiastic groups:  for the bulk of men as we know them cannot or will not make the costing effort needed for a first-hand participation in eternal life.  They want a “crowd-compeller” to lift them above themselves.  Thus the history of Christianity is the history of successive spiritual group-formations, and their struggle to survive; from the time when Jesus of Nazareth formed His little flock with the avowed aim of “bringing in the Kingdom of God”—­transmuting the mentality of the race, and so giving it more abundant life.

Christians appeal to the continued teaching and compelling power of their Master, the influence and infection of His spirit and atmosphere, as the greatest of the regenerative forces still at work within life:  and this is undoubtedly true of those devout spirits able to maintain contact with the eternal world in prayer.  The great speech of Serenus de Cressy in “John Inglesant” described once for all the highest type of Christian spirituality.[55] But in practice this link and this influence are too subtle for the mass of men.  They must constantly be re-experienced by ardent and consecrated souls; and by them be mediated to fresh groups, formed within or without the institutional frame.  Thus in the thirteenth century St. Francis, and in the fourteenth the Friends of God, created a true spiritual society within the Church, by restoring in themselves and their followers the lost consistency between Christian idea and Christian life.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Fox and Wesley possessed by the same essential vision, broke away from the institution which was no longer supple enough to meet their needs, and formed their fresh groups outside the old herd.