The cross is the outcome of his deepest mind, of his prayer life.  It is more like him than anything else he ever did.  It has in it more of him.  Whoever he was, whoever he is, whatever our Christology, one fact stands out.  It was his love of men and women and his faith in God that took him there.

Was he justified? was he right? or was it a delusion?

First of all, let us go back to a historic event.  The resurrection is, to a historian, not very clear in its details.  But is it the detail or the central fact that matters?  Take away the resurrection, however it happened, whatever it was, and the history of the Church is unintelligible.  We live in a rational world—­a world, that is, where, however much remains as yet unexplained, everything has a promise of being lucid, everything has reason in it.  Great results have great causes.  We have to find, somewhere or other, between the crucifixion and the first preaching of the disciples in Jerusalem, something that entirely changed the character of that group of men.

Something happened, so tremendous and so vital, that it changed not only the character of the movement and the men—­but with them the whole history of the world.  The evidence for the resurrection is not so much what we read in the Gospels as what we find in the rest of the New Testament—­the new life of the disciples.  They are a new group.  When it came to the cross, his cross, they ran away.  A few weeks later we find them rejoicing to be beaten, imprisoned and put to death (Acts 5:41).  What had happened?  What we have to explain is a new life—­a new life of prayer and joy and power, a new indifference to physical death, in a new relation to God.  That is one outcome of the cross and of what followed; and as historians we have to explain it.  We have also to explain how the disciples came to conceive of another Galilean—­a carpenter whom they might have seen sawing and sweating in his shop, with whom they tramped the roads of Palestine, whom they saw done to death in ignominy and derision—­sitting at the right hand of God.  Taken by itself, we might call such a belief mere folly; but too much goes with it for so easy an explanation.  The cross was not the end.  As Mr. Neville Talbot has recently pointed out in his book, “The Mind of the Disciples”, if the story stopped with the cross, God remains unexplained, and the story ends in unrelieved tragedy.  But it does not end in tragedy; it ends—­if we can use the word as yet—­in joy and faith and victory; and these—­how should we have seen them but for the cross?  They are bound up with his choice of the cross and his triumph over it all.  Death is not what it was—­“the last line of all,” as Horace says.  Life and immortality have been brought to light (2 Tim. 1:10).  “The Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world.”  So we read at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, and the historical critic may tell us that he does not think that John the Baptist