Far more important in the British world are the groups of the mixed type, partly traditional and partly purposive, groups having a long history and origins shrouded in the mists of antiquity, but having some strong and more or less definite common purpose. Of such groups the Christian Church is the greatest example. In the Roman Church, whose history has been so little interrupted, tradition attains its fullest power, and the regard for the past is strengthened and supplemented by the prospect of an indefinitely prolonged future directed towards the same ends. Its organisation has grown gradually under the one continued overshadowing purpose, every addition becoming embodied and established in the great tradition, the strength of which is perpetually maintained by ritual. And this traditional organisation is not only borne in the minds of each generation of members of the Church, but, in an ever increasing degree, has embodied itself in a material system of stone and glass and metal and printed words; these constitute a visible and enduring presentment which, though entirely disconnected and heterogeneous in a merely material sense, yet provides fixed points in the whole organisation, contributing immensely to its stability, and aiding greatly in bringing home to the minds of its members the unity of the whole group in the past, the present, and the future. Many groups or sects having the same essential purpose as the Roman Church have aimed to establish a tradition without the aid of such material embodiments: but their ephemeral histories illustrate the wisdom of the mother Church which, in building up her vast organisation, has recognised the limitations and the frailties of the human mind and has not scorned to adapt herself to them in order to overcome them. On a smaller scale our ancient universities and their colleges illustrate the same great type of the partly traditional partly purposive group, and the same great principles of collective life,—namely, the stability derived from the continuity of tradition, from its careful culture, and its partial embodiment in ritual and material structure. An essential weakness of all such groups in a progressive community is that tradition tends to overshadow purpose; hence every such group tends towards the rigidity and relative futility of the purely traditional group. Its organisation tends to set so rigidly that it is incapable of adapting itself to the changing needs of the present and the future; the maintenance of tradition, which is but a means towards the acknowledged end, becomes an end in itself to which the primary purpose of the whole is in danger of being subordinated.