nters history that he can hear this as Rolle meant it, not as
a poetic phrase but as a living fact, indeed life's very secret--then,
his heart may be touched and he may begin to understand. And then it may
occur to him that this ardour, and the sacrifice it impelled, the hard
life which it supported, witness to another level of being; reprove his
own languor and comfort, his contentment with a merely physical mental
life, and are not wholly to be accounted for in terms of superstition
or of pathology.

When the living spirit in us thus meets the living spirit of the past,
our time-span is enlarged, and history is born and becomes contemporary;
thus both widening and deepening our vital experience. It then becomes
not only a real mode of life to us; but more than this, a mode of social
life. Indeed, we can hardly hope without this re-entrance into the time
stream to achieve by ourselves, and in defiance of tradition, a true
integration of existence. Thus to defy tradition is to refuse all the
gifts the past can make to us, and cut ourselves off from the cumulative
experiences of the race. The Spirit, as Croce[45] reminds us, is
history, makes history, and is also itself the living result of all
preceding history; since Becoming is the essential reality, the creative
formula, of that life in which we find ourselves immersed.

It is from such an angle as this that I wish to approach the historical
aspect of the life of Spirit; re-entering the past by sympathetic
imagination, refusing to be misled by superficial characteristics, but
seeking the concrete factors of the regenerate life, the features which
persist and have significance for it--getting, if we can, face to face
with those intensely living men and women who have manifested it. This
is not easy. In studying all such experience, we have to remember that
the men and women of the Spirit are members of two orders. They have
attachments both to time and to eternity. Their characteristic
experiences indeed are non-temporal, but their feet are on the earth;
the earth of their own day. Therefore two factors will inevitably appear
in those experiences, one due to tradition, the other to the free
movements of creative life: and we, if we would understand, must
discriminate between them. In this power of taking from the past and
pushing on to the future, the balance maintained between stability and
novelty, we find one of their abiding characteristics. When this balance
is