It is true that right through the history of Christian mysticism there has been a line of insurgent mystics who have made this refusal; whose direct vision of spiritual perfection has brought with it so overwhelming a sense of the imperfection, formalism, unreality, the dreadfulness of religious institutions, that it has forced them into a position of more or less acute revolt from the official church. So clear has been their own consciousness of the spiritual world that the soul’s life and growth, its actual and individual rebirth, have shone out for them as the only things that matter. Hence the dramatization of these things in ceremonial religion, the effort to give spiritual values a concrete form, has seemed to them like a blasphemous parody. Unable to harmonize the inward and the outward—the all-penetrating reality of religion as they understand it, with its crude outward expression in the external cult, where formal acts and intellectual assents so often seem to take the place of inward changes—in the end they solve the problem by repudiating the external and visible church. This rebel-type, victims of exaggerated individualism, which would make the special experiences of a few the standard for the whole race, has persisted side by side with the law-abiding type; who have preserved, if not always a perfect balance between liberty and obedience, at any rate a more reasonable proportion between them. Often the corruption of the times in which he lived has seemed to the mystic to make such rebellion inevitable. This is particularly true in the case of George Fox, whose ragings were directed far less against organized religion than against unreal religion; and who might, had he lived in fourteenth-century Germany, have found a congenial career as one of the Friends of God. Yet, even so, the careers of these rebels have been on the whole unfruitful, compared with those who remained within the institutional framework and effected their reforms from inside. They seldom quite escape the taint of arrogance. There is apt to be a touch of self-consciousness in their sanctity. We have only to compare the influence exerted by the outstanding figures of the two groups, to realize which type of spiritual life has had the best and most enduring influence on the spiritual history of the race; which, in fact, best stands the pragmatic test.