Yet many of us accept the same creedal forms, use the same liturgies, acknowledge the same scale of values and same moral law.

But as something, beyond what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the great artist from the visible world, and he at this encounter becomes more vividly alive; so for these there was and is in religion a new, intenser life which they can reach.

They seem to represent favourable variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels; a type of life and of greatness, which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the race.
Now the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two groups: First, _Type._ What are the characters which mark this life of the Spirit?
Secondly, _Process._ What is the line of development by which the individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters?
First, then, the _Spiritual Type._ What we see above all in these men and women, so frequently repeated that we may regard it as classic, is a perpetual serious heroic effort to integrate life about its highest factors.

Their central quality and real source of power is this single-mindedness.

They aim at God: the phrase is Ruysbroeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the Spirit.