intenser life which they can reach. They seem to represent favourable
variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels; a type of life
and of greatness, which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the
race.

Now the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two
groups:

First, _Type._ What are the characters which mark this life of the
Spirit?

Secondly, _Process._ What is the line of development by which the
individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters?

First, then, the _Spiritual Type._

What we see above all in these men and women, so frequently repeated
that we may regard it as classic, is a perpetual serious heroic effort
to integrate life about its highest factors. Their central quality and
real source of power is this single-mindedness. They aim at God: the
phrase is Ruysbroeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the
Spirit. Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that "the householder
must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions."[48] Thus the Sufi says
he has but two laws--to look in one direction and to live in one
way.[49] Christians call this, and with reason, the Imitation of Christ;
and it was in order to carry forward this imitation more perfectly that
all the great Christian systems of spiritual training were framed. The
New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the central fact of Our Lord's
life was His abiding sense of direct connection with and responsibility
to the Father; that His teaching and works of charity alike were