-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.

"A poet must be earth's ESSENTIAL king", as Sordello asserts,
and he is that by virtue of his exerting or shedding the influence of
his essential personality. "If caring not to exert the proper essence
of his royalty, he, the poet, trifle malapert with accidents instead--
good things assigned as heralds of a better thing behind"--he is
"deposed from his kingly throne, and his glory is taken from him".
Of himself, Sordello says: "The power he took most pride to test,
whereby all forms of life had been professed at pleasure,
forms already on the earth, was but a means of power beyond,
whose birth should, in its novelty, be kingship's proof. Now,
whether he came near or kept aloof the several forms he longed
to imitate, not there t