istianity. Even Blake's prophetic
system, when closely examined, is found to have many historic and
Christian connections. And all these regarded themselves far less as
bringers-in of novelty, than as restorers of lost truth. So we must be
prepared to discriminate the element of novelty from the element of
stability; the reality of the intuition, the curve of growth, the moral
situation, from the traditional and often symbolic language in which it
is given to us. The comparative method helps us towards this; and is
thus not, as some would pretend, the servant of scepticism, but rightly
used the revealer of the Spirit of Life in its variety of gifts. In this
connection we might remember that time--like space--is only of secondary
importance to us. Compared with the eons of preparation, the millions of
years of our animal and sub-human existence, the life of the Spirit as
it appears in human history might well be regarded as simultaneous
rather than successive. We may borrow the imagery of Donne's great
discourse on Eternity and say, that those heroic livers of the spiritual
life whom we idly class in comparison with ourselves as antique, or
mediaeval men, were "but as a bed of flowers some gathered at six, some
at seven, some at eight--all in one morning in respect of this day."[46]

Such a view brings them more near to us, helps us to neglect mere
differences of language and appearance, and grasp the warmly living and
contemporary character of all historic truth. It preserves us, too, from
the common error of discriminating between so-called "ages of faith" and
our own. The more we study the past, the more clearly we recognize that
there are no "ages of faith." Such labels merely represent the arbitrary
cuts which we make in the time-stream, the arbitrary colours which we
give to it. The spiritual man or woman is always fundamentally the same
kind of man or woman; always reaching out with the same faith and love
towards the heart of the same universe, though telling that faith and
love in various tongues. He is far less the child of his time, than the
transformer of it. His this-world business is to bring in novelty, new
reality, fresh life. Yet, coming to fulfil not to destroy, he uses for
this purpose the traditions, creeds, even the institutions of his day.
But when he has done with them, they do not look the same as they did
before. Christ himself has been well called a Constructive
Revolutionary,[47] yet each single