Yet from age to age the warning has been given again, the vain farewell has been spoken, "it is expedient for you that I go away." Perhaps he went, in one form; but he quickly re-appeared in another; and each new presentation had its own special kind of evil effect. The Christ of Peter, James and John retired to make room for Paul's "Lord from heaven." He withdrew in favor of the incarnate Word. The incarnate Word loses itself in the Second Person of the Trinity. The imagination of man, unable to invent further transformations rested here: Christendom for fifteen hundred years has knelt in awe before the divine image it projected on the clouds of heaven. But the work of disenchantment began early. The sublimated ideal slowly came down from the skies. The glorified Christ assumed the lineaments of a human being, from Deity became archangel, chief of all the celestial hierarchy; from archangel slipped down through the ranks of spirits, till he occupied the place of Son of God, preëxistent, and in attributes, super-human; thence he declined a step to the position of premiership over the human family, the inaugurator of a new type of man, virgin-born as indicating that he was not the natural product of the generations but was introduced into nature by an original law; a further lapse from the supreme dignity brought him to the plane of humanity, but reported him as miraculously endowed with gifts from the Holy Spirit, supernaturally graced with attributes of power and wisdom, sent on a special mission to found a church and declare a law, raised from the dead to demonstrate immortality, and lifted to the skies to establish the presence of a living Deity. To this eminent station he bids farewell to stand as the perfect man, teacher, reformer, saint, before the enthusiastic gaze of humanitarians, who made amends for the spoliation of his celestial wardrobe by the splendor with which they endowed his human soul. Here the idealists place him, still claiming for him no exceptional birth, no super-human origin, no preëxistence, no miraculous powers over nature, no superiority of wit or wisdom, no immunity from errors of opinion or mistakes of judgment, no fated sanctity of will, no moral impeccability, but ascribing to him an unerringness of spiritual insight, an even loftiness of soul, an incorruptibility of conscience, a depth and comprehensiveness of humanity which raise him far above the plane of history, and tempt them to look longingly backward, instead of directing a steady gaze forward. But this figure is now seen to be an ideal, like the rest unjustified by chronicle or by fact. The comforter, which is the spirit of truth, requires that he should go away, following his predecessors into the realm of majestic and beneficent illusion. The Christ in every guise disappears and there remain only the uneven and incomplete footprints of a son of man from which we can conclude only that a regal person at one time passed that way.