They want a "crowd-compeller" to lift them above themselves.

Thus the history of Christianity is the history of successive spiritual group-formations, and their struggle to survive; from the time when Jesus of Nazareth formed His little flock with the avowed aim of "bringing in the Kingdom of God"-- transmuting the mentality of the race, and so giving it more abundant life.
Christians appeal to the continued teaching and compelling power of their Master, the influence and infection of His spirit and atmosphere, as the greatest of the regenerative forces still at work within life: and this is undoubtedly true of those devout spirits able to maintain contact with the eternal world in prayer.

The great speech of Serenus de Cressy in "John Inglesant" described once for all the highest type of Christian spirituality.[55] But in practice this link and this influence are too subtle for the mass of men.

They must constantly be re-experienced by ardent and consecrated souls; and by them be mediated to fresh groups, formed within or without the institutional frame.

Thus in the thirteenth century St.Francis, and in the fourteenth the Friends of God, created a true spiritual society within the Church, by restoring in themselves and their followers the lost consistency between Christian idea and Christian life.