sfiguration is never
for themselves alone, they impart it to all who follow them. But the
downward falling movement ever dogs the emerging life of spirit; and
tends to drag back to the average level the group these have vivified,
when their influence is withdrawn. Hence the history of the Spirit--and,
incidentally, the history of all churches--exhibits to us a series of
strong movements towards completed life, inspired by vigorous and
transcendent personalities; thwarted by the common indolence and
tendency to mechanization, but perpetually renewed. We have no reason to
suppose that this history is a closed book, or that the spiritual life
struggling to emerge among ourselves will follow other laws.

We desire then, if we can, to discover what it was that these
transcendent personalities possessed. We may think, from the point at
which we now stand, that they had some things which were false, or, at
least, were misinterpreted by them. We cannot without insincerity make
their view of the universe our own. But, plainly, they also possessed
truths and values which most of us have not: they obtained from their
religion, whether we allow that it had as creed an absolute or a
symbolic value, a power of living, a courage and clear vision, which we
do not as a rule obtain. When we study the character and works of these
men and women, observing their nobility, their sweetness, their power of
endurance, their outflowing love, we must, unless we be utterly
insensitive, perceive ourselves to be confronted by a quality of being
which we do not possess. And when we are so fortunate as to meet one of
them in the flesh, though his conduct is commonly more normal than our
own, we know then with Plotinus that the soul _has_ another life. Yet
many of us accept the same creedal forms, use the same liturgies,
acknowledge the same scale of values and same moral law. But as
something, beyond what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the
great artist from the visible world, and he at this encounter becomes
more vividly alive; so for these there was and is in religion a new,
intenser life which they can reach. They seem to represent favourable
variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels; a type of life
and of greatness, which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the
race.

Now the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two
groups:

First, _Type._ What are the characters which mark this life of the