piring centres of more or less organized groups.

History teaches us, in fact, that God most often educates men through
men. We most easily recognize Spirit when it is perceived transfiguring
human character, and most easily achieve it by means of sympathetic
contagion. Though the new light may flash, as it seems, directly into
the soul of the specially gifted or the inspired, this spontaneous
outbreaking of novelty is comparatively rare; and even here, careful
analysis will generally reveal the extent in which environment,
tradition, teaching literary or oral, have prepared the way for it.
There is no aptitude so great that it can afford to dispense with human
experience and education. Even the noblest of the sons and daughters of
God are also the sons and daughters of the race; and are helped by those
who go before them. And as regards the generality, not isolated effort
but the love and sincerity of the true spiritual teacher--and every man
and woman of the Spirit is such a teacher within his own sphere of
influence--the unselfconscious trust of the disciple, are the means by
which the secret of full life has been handed on. "One loving spirit,"
said St. Augustine, "sets another on fire"; and expressed in this phrase
the law which governs the spiritual history of man. This law finds
notable expression in the phenomena of the Religious Order; a type of
association, found in more or less perfection in every great religion,
which has not received the attention it deserves from students of
psychology. If we study the lives of those who founded these
Orders--though such a foundation was not always intended by them--we
notice one general characteristic: each was an enthusiast, abounding in
zest and hope, and became in his lifetime a fount of regeneration, a
source of spiritual infection, for those who came under his influence.
In each the spiritual world was seen "through a temperament," and so
mediated to the disciples; who shared so far as they were able the
master's special secret and attitude to life. Thus St. Benedict's sane
and generous outlook is crystallized in the Benedictine rule. St.
Francis' deep sense of the connection between poverty and freedom gave
Franciscan regeneration its peculiar character. The heroisms of the
early Jesuit missionaries reflected the strong courageous temper of St.
Ignatius. The rich contemplative life of Carmel is a direct inheritance
from St. Teresa's mystical experience. The great Ord