40 MORE IMPASSIONED AND REFLECTIVE MAN. 



remain single. A significant feature of the extraor- 

 dinary self-importance of the more active religious 

 characters is the belief that they are singled out 

 for notice, guidance, and employment by " the Ruler 

 of thirty million suns." 



As a genuinely self-important, rather than a self- 

 confident, man Thomas Becket stands probably without 

 a rival. He had crazes which are not passions. 

 Crazes, cranks, and fads are mental not emotional 

 peculiarities, and are mostly met with in the less- 

 emotional natures. No hint is given that he was 

 licentious in early life, or impassioned in any of the 

 passions. He was a busy, loud, ostentatious, self- 

 important courtier who, without any change in the 

 essentials of character, became a busy, loud, ostenta- 

 tious, self-confident ecclesiastic. The position of the 

 church in relation to spiritual life and another world 

 did not trouble him : his one sole care was for the 

 importance of the church and its primate in this 

 world. 



That leaders are as a rule organisers and combatants 

 and not originators admits of little doubt. Students 

 of religious history need not be told that Luther con- 

 tributed no single view, no single method, to Protes- 

 tantism ; Wesley not a principle or an observance 

 to Methodism. Nevertheless the fame of great reli- 

 gious leaders, as of other leaders, is as a rule built on 

 substantial foundations. It was their achievement to 

 dig out of the chaotic confusion left by purposeless 

 or, as Matthew Arnold would have said, ' ' disinterested" 

 thinkers such system and such pabulum as the epoch 

 and the multitude were groping after. 



Men of profound feeling and illimitable pondering 

 tend to suspense or even hesitation j they are never 



