cial. It was in the beginning just the busy useful life of an Italian
farm, lived in groups--in monastic families, under the rule and
inspiration not of a Master but of an Abbot; a Father who really was the
spiritual parent of his monks, and sought to train them in the humility,
obedience, self-denial and gentle suppleness of character which are the
authentic fruits of the Spirit. This ideal, it seems to me, has
something still to say to us; some reproof to administer to our hurried
and muddled existence, our confusion of values, our failure to find time
for reality. We shall find in it and its creator, if we look, all those
marks of the regenerate life of the Spirit which history has shown to us
as normal: namely the transcendent aim, the balanced career of action
and contemplation, the creative power, and above all the principle of
social solidarity and discipleship.

We go on to ask history what it has to tell us on the second point, the
process by which the individual normally develops this life of the
Spirit, the serial changes it demands; for plainly, to know this is of
practical importance to us. The full inwardness of these changes will be
considered when we come to the personal aspect of the spiritual life.
Now we are only concerned to notice that history tends to establish the
constant recurrence of a normal process, recognizable alike in great and
small personalities under the various labels which have been given to
it, by which the self moves from its usually exclusive correspondence
with the temporal order to those full correspondences with reality, that
union with God, characteristic of the spiritual life. This life we must
believe in some form and degree to be possible for all; but we study it
best on heroic levels, for here its moments are best marked and its
fullest records survive.

The first moment of this process seems to be, that man falls out of love
with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it.
Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his
nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he
has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict,
disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; in St. Francis,
abandoning his gay and successful social existence; in Richard Rolle,
turning suddenly from scholarship to a hermit's life; in the restless
misery of St. Catherine of Genoa; in Fox, desperately seeking