Greatness is seldom in harmony with its own epoch, and spiritual greatness least of all.

It is usually startlingly modern, even eccentric at the time at which it appears.

We are accustomed to think of "The Imitation of Christ" as the classic expression of mediaeval spirituality.

But when Thomas a Kempis wrote his book, it was the manifesto of that which was called the Modern Devotion; and represented a new attempt to live the life of the Spirit, in opposition to surrounding apathy.
When we re-enter the past, what we find, there is the persistent conflict between this novelty and this apathy; that is to say between man's instinct for transcendence, in which we discern the pressure of the Spirit and the earnest of his future, and his tendency to lag behind towards animal levels, in which we see the influence of his racial past.

So far as the individual is concerned, all that religion means by grace is resumed under the first head, much that it means by sin under the second head.