his transcendental contacts with Beauty, Power or Love. Thus, as the
tracking-out of a concrete life, a Man, from Nazareth to Calvary, made
of Christianity a veritable human revelation of God and not a Gnostic
answer to the riddle of the soul; so the real and solid men and women of
the Spirit--eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the
circumstances of their own time--are the earnests of our own latent
destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to "grow taller in
Christ."[42] These powers--that ability--are factually present in the
race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which
may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow.

In order, then, that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of
vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection and keep tight hold
on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the
quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic
spirituality, and the movements which they initiated. It is true that we
can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who
have followed on highest levels a normal course; the upstanding types,
varying much in temperament but little in aim and achievement, of that
form of life which is re-made and controlled by the Spirit, entinctured
with Eternal Life. If such a use of history is indeed to be educative
for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it, as a mere chronicle
of past events; and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens
exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less
picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete
thickness of the modern world. We are not to think of spiritual epochs
now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from us; of saints as
some peculiar species, God's pet animals, living in an incense-laden
atmosphere and less vividly human and various than ourselves. Such
conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense;