But there is one other point to which I would like to turn for a moment; and that is that little clause in my text that ’He was buried.’  Why does Paul introduce that amongst his facts?  Possibly in order to affirm the reality of Christ’s death; but I think for another reason.  If it be true that Jesus Christ was laid in that sepulchre, a stone’s throw outside the city gate, do you not see what a difficulty that fact puts in the way of disbelief or denial of His Resurrection?  If the grave—­and it was not a grave, remember, like ours, but a cave, with a stone at the door of it, that anybody could roll away for entrance—­if the grave was there, why, in the name of common-sense, did not the rulers put an end to the pestilent heresy by saying, ‘Let us go and see if the body is there’?

Modern deniers of the Resurrection may fairly be asked to front this thought—­If Jesus Christ’s body was in the sepulchre, how was it possible for belief in the Resurrection to have been originated, or maintained?  If His body was not in the grave, what had become of it?  If His friends stole it away then they were deceivers of the worst type in preaching a resurrection; and we have already seen that that hypothesis is ridiculous.  If His enemies took it away, for which they had no motive, why did they not produce it and say, ’There is an answer to your nonsense.  There is the dead man.  Let us hear no more of this absurdity of His having risen from the dead’?

‘He died ... according to the Scriptures, and He was buried.’  And the angels’ word carries the only explanation of the fact which it proclaims, ‘He is not here—­He is risen.’

I take leave to say that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is established by evidence which nobody would ever have thought of doubting unless for the theory that miracles were impossible.  The reason for disbelief is not the deficiency of the evidence, but the bias of the judge.

III.  And now I have no time to do more than touch the last thought.  I have tried to show what establishes the facts.  Let me remind you, in a sentence or two, what the facts establish.

I by no means desire to suspend the whole of the evidence for Christianity on the testimony of the eyewitnesses to the Resurrection.  There are a great many other ways of establishing the truth of the Gospel besides that, upon which I do not need to dwell now.  But, taking this one specific ground which my text suggests, what do the facts thus established prove?

Well, the first point to which I would refer, and on which I should like to enlarge, if I had time, is the bearing of Christ’s Resurrection on the acceptance of the miraculous.  We hear a great deal about the impossibility of miracle and the like.  It upsets the certainty and fixedness of the order of things, and so forth, and so forth.  Jesus Christ has risen from the dead; and that opens a door wide enough to admit all the rest of the Gospel miracles.