of it, as a mere chronicle
of past events; and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens
exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less
picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete
thickness of the modern world. We are not to think of spiritual epochs
now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from us; of saints as
some peculiar species, God's pet animals, living in an incense-laden
atmosphere and less vividly human and various than ourselves. Such
conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense;
and when we are dealing with the accredited heroes of the Spirit--that
is to say, with the Saints--they are particularly common and
particularly poisonous. As Benedetto Croce has observed, the very
condition of the existence of real history is that the deed celebrated
must live and be present in the soul of the historian; must be
emotionally realized by him _now,_ as a concrete fact weighted with
significance. It must answer to a present, not to a past interest of the
race, for thus alone can it convey to us some knowledge of its inward
truth.

Consider from this point of view the case of Richard Rolle, who has been
called the father of English mysticism. It is easy enough for those who
regard spiritual history as dead chronicle and its subjects as something
different from ourselves, to look upon Rolle's threefold experience of
the soul's reaction to God--the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of
his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his
austere, self-giving life[43]--as the probable result of the reaction of
a neurotic temperament to mediaeval traditions. But if, for instance the
Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque
fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student--another Oxford
undergraduate, separated from him only by an interval of time--who gave
up that university and the career it could offer him, under the
compulsion of another Wisdom and another Love, then he re-enters the
living past. If, standing by him in that small hut in the Yorkshire
wolds, from which the urgent message of new life spread through the
north of England, he hears Rolle saying "Nought more profitable, nought
merrier than grace of contemplation, the which lifteth us from low
things and presenteth us to God. What thing is grace but beginning of
joy? And what is perfection of joy but grace complete?"[44]--if, I say,
he so re-e