phets
were the "first fruits,"--a new and peculiar people, born from above,
recipients of a divine energizing power, partakers in the life of the
Spirit and capable of being guided on by progressive revelations into
all the truth. To be "spiritual" in their vocabulary meant to be a
participator in the Life of God, and to be a living member of a group
that was led and guided by a continuously self-revealing Spirit. This
Spirit was conceived, however, not as immanent and resident, not as the
{xiv} indwelling and permeative Life of the human spirit, but as
foreign and remote, and He was thought of as "coming" in sporadic
visitations to whom He would, His coming being indicated in
extraordinary and charismatic manifestations.

This type of "spiritual religion," though eventually stamped out in the
particular form of Montanism, reappeared again and again, with peculiar
local and temporal variations, in the history of Christianity.[6] To
the bearers of it, the historic Church, with its crystallized system
and its vast machinery, always seemed "unspiritual" and traditional.
They believed, each time the movement appeared, that _they_ had found
the way to more abundant life, that the Spirit had come upon them in a
special manner, and was through them inaugurating a higher order of
Christianity, and they always felt that their religion of direct
experience, of invading energy, of inspirational insights, of
charismatic bestowals, and of profound emotional fervour was distinctly
"spiritual," as contrasted with the historic Church which claimed
indeed a divine origin and divine "deposits," but which, as they
believed, lacked the continuous and progressive leadership of the
Spirit. They were always very certain that their religion was
characteristically "spiritual," and all other forms seemed to them
cold, formal, or dead. In their estimates, men were still divided into
spiritual persons and psychical persons--those who lived by the "heart"
and those who lived by the "head."

Parallel with the main current of the Protestant Reformation, a new
type of "spiritual religion" appeared and continued to manifest itself
with mutations and developments, throughout the entire Reformation era,
with a wealth of results which are still operative in the life of the
modern world. The period of this new birth was a time of profound
transition and ferment, and a bewildering variety of roads was tried to
spiritual Canaans and new Jerusalems, t