“Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb--bid arise A grey mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to the skies, Let it mark where the great First King slumbers: whose fame would ye know? Up above see the rock’s naked face, where the record shall go In great characters cut by the scribe,--Such was Saul, so he did; With the sages directing the work, by the populace chid,-- For not half, they’ll affirm, is comprised there! Which fault to amend, In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend (See, in tablets ‘tis level before them) their praise, and record With the gold of the graver, Saul’s story,--the statesman’s great word Side by side with the poet’s sweet comment. The river’s a-wave With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet-winds rave: So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part In thy being! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that thou art!” What is said in this passage is applicable to the record we have of Christ’s life upon earth. Christianity has only to a very limited extent been perpetuated through the letter of the New Testament. It has been perpetuated chiefly through transmissions of personalities, through apostolic succession, in a general sense, and through embodiments of his spirit in art and literature--“the stateman’s great word”, “the poet’s sweet comment”. Were it not for this transmission of the quickening power of personality, the New Testament would be to a great extent a dead letter. It owes its significance to the quickened spirit which is brought to the reading of it. The personality of Christ could not be, through a plastic sympathy, moulded out of the New Testament records, without the aid of intermediate personalities. The Messianic idea was not peculiar to the Jewish race-- the idea of a Person gathering up within himself, in an effective fulness and harmony, the restorative elements of humanity, which have lost their power through dispersion and consequent obscuration. There have been Messiahs of various orders and ranks in every age,-- great personalities that have realized to a greater or less extent (though there has been but one, the God-Man, who fully realized), the spiritual potentialities in man, that have stood upon the sharpest heights as beacons to their fellows. In the individual the species has, as it were, been gathered up, epitomized, and intensified, and he has thus been a prophecy, and to some extent a fulfilment of human destiny.