Perhaps it is in those contemplatives who lived within and were obedient to the rule of the great monastic orders, that we can see most easily the nature of the link between the individual soul and the religious group within which it does or should develop; the enormous value to it of tradition, that huge accumulation of tendencies, ideals, systems, wisdom both speculative and practical, which is preserved in the corporate consciousness. Here the influence of the religious family, the rule of life, the ideal held out, the severe education in self-control administered to every novice, can always be traced; conditioning, and, I believe, helping and bracing the character of that communion with the Transcendent which the individual mystic enjoys. As the baby at birth enters into a civilization prepared for him, and is at once supported, educated, even clothed by a tradition prepared by countless generations of the past; so the novice, whose spiritual childhood begins within a great monastic family, receives—supposing, of course, that the order is true to its ideals—the support and benefits of a tradition evolved during previous generations in response to the needs of other similar souls; and he is by so much the better off than he would be were he a solitary, or a deliberate rebel who refuses to accept the heritage of the past. He finds a life beautifully adjusted to his needs; yet which, being greater and older than his own, keeps his rampant individualism in check, nurtures and cultivates his growing spiritual consciousness, and opposes—by its perpetual demands on humility, obedience, and unselfishness—the vice of pride which the mystical individualist seldom escapes. Such a mystical consciousness would not necessarily die without the support of this corporate tradition, any more than the baby would necessarily die did it emerge into the conditions of the paleolithic cave instead of into those of the modern nursery. But in both cases the environment would be unfavourable, and the effort required to attain that position into which the child of tradition enters at birth would be an enormous drain upon the powers of the organism.