When such creative personalities appear and such groups are founded by them, the phenomena of the spiritual life reappear in their full vigour, and are disseminated.  A new vitality, a fresh power of endurance, is seen in all who are drawn within the group and share its mind.  This is what St. Paul seems to have meant, when he reminded his converts that they had the mind of Christ.  The primitive friars, living under the influence of Francis, did practice the perfect poverty which is also perfect joy.  The assured calm and willing sufferings of the early Christians were reproduced in the early Quakers, secure in their possession of the inner light.  We know very well the essential characters of this fresh mentality; the power, the enthusiasm, the radiant joy, the indifference to pain and hardship it confers.  But we can no more produce it from these raw materials than the chemist’s crucible can produce life.  The whole experience of St. Francis is implied in the Beatitudes.  The secret of Elizabeth Fry is the secret of St. John.  The doctrine of General Booth is fully stated by St. Paul.  But it was not by referring inquirers to the pages of the New Testament that the first brought men fettered by things to experience the freedom of poverty; the second faced and tamed three hundred Newgate criminals, who seemed at her first visit “like wild beasts”; or the third created armies of the redeemed from the dregs of the London Slums.  They did these things by direct personal contagion; and they will be done among us again when the triumphant power of Eternal Spirit is again exhibited, not in ideas but in human character.

I think, then, that history justifies us in regarding the full living of the spiritual life as implying at least these three characters.  First, single-mindedness:  to mean only God.  Second, the full integration of the contemplative and active sides of existence, lifted up, harmonized, and completely consecrated to those interests which the self recognizes as Divine.  Third, the power of reproducing this life; incorporating it in a group.  Before we go on, we will look at one concrete example which illustrates all these points.  This example is that of St. Benedict and the Order which he founded; for in the rounded completeness of his life and system we see what should be the normal life of the Spirit, and its result.

Benedict was born in times not unlike our own, when wars had shaken civilization, the arts of peace were unsettled, religion was at a low ebb.  As a young man, he experienced an intense revulsion from the vicious futility of Roman society, fled into the hills, and lived in a cave for three years alone with his thoughts of God.  It would be easy to regard him as an eccentric boy:  but he was adjusting himself to the real centre of his life.  Gradually others who longed for a more real existence joined him, and he divided them into groups of twelve, and settled them in small houses; giving them a time-table by which