The ideal expressed here of a great and wise national ruler who would bring about the realization of liberty, justice and peace to the Hebrew nation, and not only to them but to all mankind, becomes in the prophetic vision of Daniel a mystic being. "I saw in the visions of night, and behold, with the clouds of heaven came down as a likeness of the son of man. He stepped forward to the ancient of days. To him was given dominion, magnificence and rule. And all the peoples, nations and tongues did homage to him. His empire is an eternal empire and his realm shall never cease." In "Saul" Browning makes David the type of the prophetic faculty in its complete development. His vision is of an ideal which was not fully unfolded until the advent of Jesus himself--the ideal not merely of the mythical political liberator but of the spiritual saviour, who through infinite love would bring redemption and immortality to mankind. David in the poem essays to cheer Saul with the thought of the greatness that will live after him in the memory of others, but his own passionate desire to give something better than this to Saul awakens in him the assurance that God must be as full of love and compassion as he is. Thus Browning explains the sudden awakening of David, not as a divine revelation from without, but as a natural growth of the human spirit Godward. This new perception of values produces the ecstasy during which David sees his visions, the "witnesses, cohorts" about him, "angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware." This whole conception was developed by Browning from the single phrase in I Samuel: "And David came to Saul, and stood before him: and he loved him greatly." In thus making David prophesy of an ideal which had not been evolved at his time, Browning indulges in what the biblical critic would call prophecy after the fact, and so throws himself in on the side of the mythical interpreters of the Bible. He has taken a historical narrative, embellished it poetically as in the imaginary accounts of the songs sung by David to Saul, and given it a philosophical content belonging on its objective side to the dawn of Christianity in the coming of Jesus himself and on its subjective side to his (the poet's) own time--that is, the idea of internal instead of external revelation--one of the ideas about which has been waged the so-called conflict of Science and Religion as it was understood by some of the most prominent thinkers of the latter half of the century. In this, again, it will be seen that Browning was in the van of the thought of the century, and still more was he in the van in the psychological tinge which he gives to David's experience. Professor William James himself could not better have portrayed a case of religious ecstasy growing out of genuine exaltation of thought than the poet has in David's experience.