tting life
of penitence and recollection. Fox and Wesley, abounding in labours, yet
never relaxed the tension of their soul's effort to correspond with a
transcendent Reality. These and many other examples warn us that only by
such a sustained and double movement can the man of the Spirit actualize
all his possibilities and do his real work. He must, says Ruysbroeck,
"both ascend and descend with love."[149] On any other basis he misses
the richness of that fully integrated human existence "swinging between
the unseen and the seen" in which the social and individual,
incorporated and solitary responses to the demands of Spirit are fully
carried through. Instead, he exhibits restriction and lack balance. This
in the end must react as unfavourably on the social as on the personal
side of life: since the place and influence of the spiritual life in the
social order will depend entirely on its place in the individual
consciousness of which that social order will be built, the extent in
which loyalty to the one Spirit governs their reactions to common daily
experience.

Here then, as in so much else, the ideal is not an arbitrary choice but
a struck balance. First, a personal contact with Eternal Reality,
deepening, illuminating and enlarging all of our experience of fact, all
our responses to it: that is, faith. Next, the fullest possible sense of
our membership of and duty towards the social organism, a completely
rich, various, heroic, self-giving, social life: that is, charity. The
dissociation of these two sides of human experience is fatal to that
divine hope which should crown and unite them; and which represents the
human instinct for novelty in a sublimated form.

It is of course true that social groups may be regenerated. The success
of such group-formations as the primitive Franciscans, the Friends of
God, the Quakers, the Salvation Army, demonstrates this. But groups, in
the last resort, consist of individuals, who must each be regenerated
one by one; whose outlook, if they are to be whole men, must include in
its span abiding values as well as the stream of time, and who, for the
full development of this their two-fold destiny, require each a measure
both of solitude and of association. Hence it follows, that the final
answer to the repeated question: "Does God save men, does Spirit work
towards the regeneration of humanity (the same thing), one by one, or in
groups?" is this: that the proposed alternative is i