It is, indeed, of supreme importance to us that these men and women did truly and actually thus grow, suffer and attain: did so feel the pressure of a more intense life, and the demand of a more authentic love. Their adventures, whatsoever addition legend may have made to them, belong at bottom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not of phantasy: and therefore speak not merely to our imagination but to our will. Unless the spiritual life were thus a part of history, it could only have for us the interest of a noble dream: an interest actually less than that of great poetry, for this has at least been given to us by man's hard passionate work of expressing in concrete image--and ever the more concrete, the greater his art--the results of his transcendental contacts with Beauty, Power or Love. Thus, as the tracking-out of a concrete life, a Man, from Nazareth to Calvary, made of Christianity a veritable human revelation of God and not a Gnostic answer to the riddle of the soul; so the real and solid men and women of the Spirit--eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the circumstances of their own time--are the earnests of our own latent destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to "grow taller in Christ."[42] These powers--that ability--are factually present in the race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow. In order, then, that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection and keep tight hold on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic spirituality, and the movements which they initiated. It is true that we can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who have followed on highest levels a normal course; the upstanding types, varying much in temperament but little in aim and achievement, of that form of life which is re-made and controlled by the Spirit, entinctured with Eternal Life. If such a use of history is indeed to be educative for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it, as a mere chronicle of past events; and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete thickness of the modern world. We are not to think of spiritual epochs now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from us; of saints as some peculiar species, God's pet animals, living in an incense-laden atmosphere and less vividly human and various than ourselves. Such conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense; and when we are dealing with the accredited heroes of the Spirit--that is to say, with the Saints--they are particularly common and particularly poisonous. As Benedetto Croce has observed, the very