The measure that continues is the permanent vertical criterion that remains effective after every external support has dissolved. The residual man applies it without waiting for the age to confirm its authority. The measure itself is unchanged. Only the collective structures that once made its application public have vanished.
Young men who still feel the pressure of a higher standard often look for residual institutions or residual groups that will keep the measure alive for them. Most of those institutions have already been emptied by the horizontal forces of the age. The residual path does not depend on their survival. It continues as the application of the permanent criterion from the interior center that still recognizes its force.
This solitary application is the residual form of the older traditional obedience to a higher law. The man who continues to measure himself by that law already performs the residual act. That act does not require public recognition to remain real.
Apply the measure. Do not wait for the age to restore conditions in which the higher criterion is collectively enforced. The residual act is to keep the permanent measure decisive in every concrete choice. That decisiveness is the continuity of the higher type under residual conditions.