“I suppose that is the reason why the small, old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a bookstall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness; while expensive sermons and treatises newly issued leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle, trust and triumph--not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains at all times a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother, who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced--in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours--but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness.” This is the opinion of one who has deprived the _Imitation_ of its supernatural element. And even from the purely natural point of view, what more beautiful than the teachings of à Kempis on the true conduct of life? But this is not its characteristic charm, and one suspects that it is not the purely natural element in à Kempis that fascinates the positivist humanitarians; it is the supernatural element; and the attraction is but the strong cry of their spiritual nature revolting against the materialism to which their “positive” tenets lead; just as that same need for a religion led the best of them, even at the cost of inconsistency, to establish with much ritual and fantastic aberrations the cult of Humanity.