If we acknowledge the extent to which Grace, Spirit, God, works on man through personality, through specific men—as a communication of transcendent vitality to certain souls (“elect,” if you like) in order that they may bring forth new life, new vision, new goodness, may fertilize the race afresh—then shall we not expect to find that Christianity, being a vital, dynamic system, has exhibited and emphasized these facts throughout the whole of her great career? This outward thrust of great personalities from the social organism, these fresh unique saving contacts made by the individual in the name of the All, these sudden, incalculable, upward leaps of life, these changes in the national consciousness which the hero, poet, prophet can produce—we shall expect to find all this operative in the highest degree in the Christian Church. We shall expect to find her claiming for her greatest and most God-achieving spirits, not only special honour, but a special value, a special redeeming power in respect of the corporate body to which they belong; and this, of course, is exactly what we do find. The mystical saints, in fact, seem to provide us with a link between the doctrine of the Atonement—of the special racial value of the utterly surrendered life in God, which was once, and once only, perfectly achieved—and the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, or interpenetration and mutual help of all souls “in Christ.” From these two ideas there follows of necessity that further doctrine of the “prevailing merits” of the saints, their special “atoning” value for other men, the corporate social work done by heroic virtue flowering in individual souls, which the Catholic Church has always deduced from them. At the back of both ideas we find the same fact; that Life and Love, when supremely evoked within the temporal order, cannot keep themselves to themselves. Such life and such love have, in spite of their marked individuality, a profoundly social character; they are violently contagious; they spread, they interpenetrate, they transmute all selves that will receive them. They entincture the whole stream of duration, make good its shortcomings, make widening circles of splendour within the flux.