such history; for here, if we try to enter by sympathy into the past, we
can see the life of the Spirit emerging and being lived in all degrees
of perfection and under many different forms. Here, through and behind
the immense diversity of temperaments which it has transfigured, we can
best realise its uniform and enduring character; and therefore our own
possibility of attaining to it, and the way that we must tread so to do.
History does not exhort us or explain to us, but exhibits living
specimens to us; and these specimens witness again and again to the fact
that a compelling power does exist in the world--little understood,
even by those who are inspired by it--which presses men to transcend
their material limitations and mental conflicts, and live a new creative
life of harmony, freedom and joy. Directly human character emerges as
one of man's prime interests, this possibility emerges too, and is never
lost sight of again. Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, Greek, Alexandrian,
Moslem and Christian all declare with more or less completeness a way of
life, a path, a curve of development which shall end in its attainment;
and history brings us face to face with the real and human men and women
who have followed this way, and found its promise to be true.

It is, indeed, of supreme importance to us that these men and women did
truly and actually thus grow, suffer and attain: did so feel the
pressure of a more intense life, and the demand of a more authentic
love. Their adventures, whatsoever addition legend may have made to
them, belong at bottom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not
of phantasy: and therefore speak not merely to our imagination but to
our will. Unless the spiritual life were thus a part of history, it
could only have for us the interest of a noble dream: an interest
actually less than that of great poetry, for this has at least been
given to us by man's hard passionate work of expressing in concrete
image--and ever the more concrete, the greater his art--the results of