d Christian all declare with more or less completeness a way of
life, a path, a curve of development which shall end in its attainment;
and history brings us face to face with the real and human men and women
who have followed this way, and found its promise to be true.

It is, indeed, of supreme importance to us that these men and women did
truly and actually thus grow, suffer and attain: did so feel the
pressure of a more intense life, and the demand of a more authentic
love. Their adventures, whatsoever addition legend may have made to
them, belong at bottom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not
of phantasy: and therefore speak not merely to our imagination but to
our will. Unless the spiritual life were thus a part of history, it
could only have for us the interest of a noble dream: an interest
actually less than that of great poetry, for this has at least been
given to us by man's hard passionate work of expressing in concrete
image--and ever the more concrete, the greater his art--the results of
his transcendental contacts with Beauty, Power or Love. Thus, as the
tracking-out of a concrete life, a Man, from Nazareth to Calvary, made
of Christianity a veritable human revelation of God and not a Gnostic
answer to the riddle of the soul; so the real and solid men and women of
the Spirit--eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the
circumstances of their own time--are the earnests of our own latent
destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to "grow taller in
Christ."[42] These powers--that ability--are factually present in the
race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which
may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow.

In order, then, that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of
vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection and keep tight hold
on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the
quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic
spirituality, and the movements which they initiated. It is true that we
can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who
have followed on highest levels a normal course; the upstanding types,
varying much in temperament but little in aim and achievement, of that
form of life which is re-made and controlled by the Spirit, entinctured
with Eternal Life. If such a use of history is indeed to be educative
for us, we must avoid the conventional view