On lower levels, and through the inspiration of lesser teachers, history
shows us the phenomena of primitive Christianity repeated again and
again; both within and without the Christian circle of ideas. Every
religion looks for, and most have possessed, some revealer of the
Spirit; some Prophet, Buddha, Mahdi, or Messiah. In all, the
characteristic demonstrations of the human power of transcendence--a
supernatural life which can be lived by us--have begun in one person,
who has become a creative centre mediating new life to his fellow-men:
as were Buddha and Mohammed for the faiths which they founded. Such
lives as those of St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox, Wesley,
Booth are outstanding examples of the operation of this law. The parable
of the leaven is in fact an exact description of the way in which the
spiritual consciousness--the supernatural urge--is observed to spread in
human society. It is characteristic of the regenerate type, that he
should as it were overflow his own boundaries and energize other souls:
for the gift of a real and harmonized life pours out inevitably from
those who possess it to other men. We notice that the great mystics
recognize again and again such a fertilizing and creative power, as a
mark of the soul's full vitality. It is not the personal rapture of the
spiritual marriage, but rather the "divine fecundity" of one who is a
parent of spiritual children; which seems to them the goal of human
transcendence, and evidence of a life truly lived on eternal levels, in
real union with God. "In the fourth and last degree of love the soul
brings forth its children," says Richard of St. Victor.[53] "The last
perfection to supervene upon a thing," says Aquinas, "is its becoming
the cause of other things."[54] In a word, it is creative. And the
spiritual life as we see it in history is thus creative; the cause of
other things.

History is full of examples of this law: that the man or woman of the