The comparative method helps us towards this; and is thus not, as some would pretend, the servant of scepticism, but rightly used the revealer of the Spirit of Life in its variety of gifts.

In this connection we might remember that time--like space--is only of secondary importance to us.

Compared with the eons of preparation, the millions of years of our animal and sub-human existence, the life of the Spirit as it appears in human history might well be regarded as simultaneous rather than successive.

We may borrow the imagery of Donne's great discourse on Eternity and say, that those heroic livers of the spiritual life whom we idly class in comparison with ourselves as antique, or mediaeval men, were "but as a bed of flowers some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight--all in one morning in respect of this day."[46] Such a view brings them more near to us, helps us to neglect mere differences of language and appearance, and grasp the warmly living and contemporary character of all historic truth.

It preserves us, too, from the common error of discriminating between so-called "ages of faith" and our own.