was in the early Christian Church a very formidable and large body of bitter antagonists of Paul’s, who would have been only too glad to have convicted him, if they could, of any misrepresentation of the usual notions, or divergence from the usual type of teaching.  So we may take it as undeniable that the representation of this chapter is historically true; and that within five-and-twenty years of the death of Jesus Christ every Christian community and every Christian teacher believed in and proclaimed the fact of the Resurrection.

But if that be so, we necessarily are carried a great deal nearer the Cross than five-and-twenty years; and, in fact, there is not, between the moment when Paul penned these words and the day of Pentecost, a single chink in the history where you can insert such a tremendous innovation as the full-fledged belief in a resurrection coming in as something new.

I do not need to dwell at all upon this other thought, that, unless the belief that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead originated at the time of His death, there would never have been a Church at all.  Why was it that they did not tumble to pieces?  Take the nave out of the wheel and what becomes of the spokes?  A dead Christ could never have been the basis of a living Church.  If He had not risen from the dead, the story of His disciples would have been the same as that which Gamaliel told the Sanhedrim was the story of all former pseudo-Messiahs such as that man Theudas.  ’He was slain, and as many as followed him were dispersed and came to naught.’  Of course!  The existence of the Church demands, as a pre-requisite, the initial belief in the Resurrection.  I think, then, that the contemporaneousness of the evidence is sufficiently established.

What about its good faith?  I suppose that nobody, nowadays, doubts the veracity of these witnesses.  Anybody that knows an honest man when he sees him, anybody that has the least ear for the tone of sincerity and the accent of conviction, must say that they may have been fanatics, they may have been mistaken, but one thing is clear as sunlight, they were not false witnesses for God.

What, then, about their competency?  Their simplicity, their ignorance, their slowness to believe, their stupor of surprise when the fact first dawned upon them, which they tell not with any idea of manufacturing evidence in their own favour, but simply as a piece of history, all tend to make us certain that there was no play of a morbid imagination, no hysterical turning of a wish into a fact, on the part of these men.  The sort of things which they say that they saw and experienced are such as to make any such supposition altogether absurd.  There are long conversations, appearances appealing to more than one sense, appearances followed by withdrawals, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening, sometimes at a distance, as on the mountain, sometimes close by, as in the chamber, to single souls and to multitudes.  Fancy five hundred people all at once smitten with the same mistake, imagining that they saw what they did not see!  Miracles may be difficult to believe, they are not half so difficult to believe as absurdities.  And this modern explanation of the faith in the Resurrection I venture respectfully to designate as absurd.