"Whether via relic or relative, we seem to await that fairy tale moment..."

"Of course the biography of a figure from the past escapes time in a more overt sense, too, by seeming to resurrect the subject of the biography. Inside the small eternity of the book the subject is once again brought to life, and in a kind of flipbook illusion he again disports himself through the trompe-l'oeil decades- and then, of course, dies once more. But his death at the end of the book comes to us afresh, as if we had just read about it in that morning's newspaper. We mourn his passing, and wish that we might see him once more alive, might have him with us for a few more pages, our new friends. And so it is that we sometimes find ourselves stumbling through such things as are called epilogues, looking again for the one just lost."

"Who among us doesn't at some time long to re-enter the past, to touch and hear again what is lost? No human impulse is more fundamental than our desire to transcend time, and none argues better that time is not the medium for which we are finally meant. And in the case of such as Wilberforce, we strain for some link, some palpable connection, whether to stand where he stood or touch what he touched, or perhaps even to speak to a living descendant, and stare at their faces. Whether via relic or relative, we seem to await that fairy tale moment when the dead, grey façade of years between us at last cracks and crumbles and falls away, revealing the real thing hiding beneath: eternity, fresh and green."

Eric Metaxas, in the epilogue of his book Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End the Slavery