History is full of examples of this law:  that the man or woman of the spirit is, fundamentally, a life-giver; and all corporate achievement of the life of the spirit flows from some great apostle or initiator, is the fruit of discipleship.  Such corporate achievement is a form of group consciousness, brought into being through the power and attraction of a fully harmonized life, infecting others with its own sharp sense of Divine reality.  Poets and artists thus infect in a measure all those who yield to their influence.  The active mystic, who is the poet of Eternal Life, does it in a supreme degree.  Such a relation of master and disciples is conspicuous in every true spiritual revival; and is the link between the personal and corporate aspects of regeneration.  We see it in the little flock that followed Christ, the Little Poor Men who followed Francis, the Friends of Fox, the army of General Booth.  Not Christianity alone, but Hindu and Moslem history testify to this necessity.  The Hindu who is drawn to the spiritual life must find a guru who can not only teach its laws but also give its atmosphere; and must accept his discipline in a spirit of obedience.  The S[=u]fi neophyte is directed to place himself in the hands of his sheikh “as a corpse in the hands of the washer”; and all the great saints of Islam have been the inspiring centres of more or less organized groups.

History teaches us, in fact, that God most often educates men through men.  We most easily recognize Spirit when it is perceived transfiguring human character, and most easily achieve it by means of sympathetic contagion.  Though the new light may flash, as it seems, directly into the soul of the specially gifted or the inspired, this spontaneous outbreaking of novelty is comparatively rare; and even here, careful analysis will generally reveal the extent in which environment, tradition, teaching literary or oral, have prepared the way for it.  There is no aptitude so great that it can afford to dispense with human experience and education.  Even the noblest of the sons and daughters of God are also the sons and daughters of the race; and are helped by those who go before them.  And as regards the generality, not isolated effort but the love and sincerity of the true spiritual teacher—­and every man and woman of the Spirit is such a teacher within his own sphere of influence—­the unselfconscious trust of the disciple, are the means by which the secret of full life has been handed on.  “One loving spirit,” said St. Augustine, “sets another on fire”; and expressed in this phrase the law which governs the spiritual history of man.  This law finds notable expression in the phenomena of the Religious Order; a type of association, found in more or less perfection in every great religion, which has not received the attention it deserves from students of psychology.  If we study the lives of those who founded these Orders—­though such a foundation was not always intended by them—­we