Il devait arriver [he proceeds] pour Jesus ce qui arrive pour tous les hommes qui ont captive l’attention de leurs semblables.  Le monde, habitue a leur attribuer des vertus surhumaines, ne peut admettre qu’ils aient subi la loi injuste, revoltante, inique, du trepas commun....  La mort est chose si absurde quand elle frappe l’homme de genie ou l’homme d’un grand coeur, que le peuple ne croit pas a la possibilite d’une telle erreur de la nature.  Les heros ne meurent pas.

The history of the world presents a large range of instances to test the singular assertion that death is so “absurd” that “the people” cannot believe that great and good men literally die.  But would it be easy to match the strangeness of a philosopher and a man of genius gravely writing this down as a reason—­not why, at the interval of centuries, a delusion should grow up—­but why, on the very morrow of a crucifixion and burial, the disciples should have believed that all the dreadful work they had seen a day or two before was in very fact and reality reversed?  We confess we do not know what human experience is if it countenances such a supposition as this.

From this antecedent probability he proceeds to the facts.  “The Sabbath day which followed the burial was occupied with these thoughts....  Never was the rest of the Sabbath so fruitful.”  They all, the women especially, thought of him all day long in his bed of spices, watched over by angels; and the assurance grew that the wicked men who had killed him would not have their triumph, that he would not be left to decay, that he would be wafted on high to that Kingdom of the Father of which he had spoken.  “Nous le verrons encore; nous entendrons sa voix charmante; c’est en vain qu’ils l’auront tue.”  And as, with the Jews, a future life implied a resurrection of the body, the shape which their hope took was settled.  “Reconnaitre que la mort pouvait etre victorieuse de Jesus, de celui qui venait de supprimer son empire, c’etait le comble de l’absurdite.”  It is, we suppose, irrelevant to remark that we find not the faintest trace of this sense of absurdity.  The disciples, he says, had no choice between hopelessness and “an heroic affirmation”; and he makes the bold surmise that “un homme penetrant aurait pu annoncer des le samedi que Jesus revivrait.”  This may be history, or philosophy, or criticism; what it is not is the inference naturally arising from the only records we have of the time spoken of.  But the force of historical imagination dispenses with the necessity of extrinsic support.  “La petite societe chretienne, ce jour-la, opera le veritable miracle:  elle ressuscita Jesus en son coeur par l’amour intense qu’elle lui porta.  Elle decida que Jesus ne mourrait pas.”  The Christian Church has done many remarkable things; but it never did anything so strange, or which so showed its power, as when it took that resolution.