revolution in the ways of thinking and of acting common among men, a
heroic consistency and single-mindedness: but they can use for their own
fresh constructions and contacts with Eternal Life the material which
this life offers to them. The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis,
Fox or Wesley, were not therefore the natural products of ages of faith.
They each represented the revolt of a heroic soul against surrounding
apathy and decadence; an invasion of novelty; a sharp break with
society, a new use of antique tradition depending on new contacts with
the Spirit. Greatness is seldom in harmony with its own epoch, and
spiritual greatness least of all. It is usually startlingly modern, even
eccentric at the time at which it appears. We are accustomed to think of
"The Imitation of Christ" as the classic expression of mediæval
spirituality. But when Thomas à Kempis wrote his book, it was the
manifesto of that which was called the Modern Devotion; and represented
a new attempt to live the life of the Spirit, in opposition to
surrounding apathy.

When we re-enter the past, what we find, there is the persistent
conflict between this novelty and this apathy; that is to say between
man's instinct for transcendence, in which we discern the pressure of
the Spirit and the earnest of his future, and his tendency to lag
behind towards animal levels, in which we see the influence of his
racial past. So far as the individual is concerned, all that religion
means by grace is resumed under the first head, much that it means by
sin under the second head. And the most striking--though not the
only--examples of the forward reach of life towards freedom (that is, of
conquering grace) are those persons whom we call men and women of the
Spirit. In them it is incarnate, and through them, as it were, it
spreads and gives the race a lift: for their transfiguration is never
for themselves alone, they impart it to all who follow them. But the