In one of Tindale's younger contemporaries in the northern kingdom, there occurs a similar desert stretch, where the silence is even more profound; and which the most diligent research has failed to break. John Knox was born in 1505; and of his inner life for the first forty years we know absolutely nothing. Then suddenly, against a background darker in Scotland than that in England, he emerges holding George Wishart's two-edged sword in his hand. Of the crisis which lay behind, which changed him from a priest before the altar to the beloved disciple of this early martyr, we hear not a word. "In the solemn days of early faith", wrote the late Taylor Innes, "not a few men like him were in the desert until the time of their showing unto Israel. Not the polished shaft only, but the rough spear-head too was in the shadow of a mighty hand until the day when it was launched." If ever Papini's paradoxical dictum be credible, it is in a life like this: "The most highly educational biographies are those of men of whom little or nothing is known. Those are the books that set forth the human ideal, that tell us what a man ought to be." The paradox is elsewhere resolved by him when he says: "I care less for the whole course of a man's life than for his own distilling of its essence." The distilled essence of Tindale's life comes to view again and again during these brief years; which were crowded with events, dramatic and of age-long significance, and which passed from drama to tragedy in the martyr fires he had long foreseen. Centenaries are apt to miscarry. If such occasions serve only for the display of erudition and platform vanity, and fail to lead us to seek the essential message and the continuing inspiration of the great men they celebrate, what riches of the past remain sealed to us! There have been celebrations loudly acclaimed by men who would have bayed at the heels of the brave revolutionary whom they now eloquently praise. They simulate seeing he is no longer alive and dangerous, but a hero dead: and they join the chorus of universal praise. The effect is to emphasize the deadness of the past, not to rekindle glorious life—this is rekindled only where there is eagerness to be in or near the succession of the great, where there is sympathy with admiration, where there is in fine some kinship of spirit.