Spirit?

Secondly, _Process._ What is the line of development by which the
individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters?

First, then, the _Spiritual Type._

What we see above all in these men and women, so frequently repeated
that we may regard it as classic, is a perpetual serious heroic effort
to integrate life about its highest factors. Their central quality and
real source of power is this single-mindedness. They aim at God: the
phrase is Ruysbroeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the
Spirit. Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that "the householder
must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions."[48] Thus the Sufi says
he has but two laws--to look in one direction and to live in one
way.[49] Christians call this, and with reason, the Imitation of Christ;
and it was in order to carry forward this imitation more perfectly that
all the great Christian systems of spiritual training were framed. The
New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the central fact of Our Lord's
life was His abiding sense of direct connection with and responsibility
to the Father; that His teaching and works of charity alike were
inspired by this union; and that He declared it, not as a unique fact,
but as a possible human ideal. This Is not a theological, but a
historical statement, which applies, in its degree to every man and
woman who has been a follower of Christ: for He was, as St. Paul has
said, "the eldest in a vast family of brothers." The same single-minded
effort and attainment meet us in other great faiths; though these may
lack a historic ideal of perfect holiness and love. And by a paradox
repeated again and again in human history, it is this utter devotion to
the spiritual and eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abundant
fruits in the temporal sphere; giving not only the strength to do
difficult things, but that creative charity which "wins and redeems the
unlovely by the power of its love."[50] The man or woman of prayer, the
community devoted to it, tap some deep source of power and use it in the
most practical ways. Thus, the only object of the Benedictine rule was
the fostering of goodness in those who adopted it, the education of the
soul; and it became one of the chief instruments in the civilization of
Europe, carrying forward not only religion, but education, pure
scholarship, art, and industrial reform. The object of St. Bernard's
reform was the restoration of the life of prayer.