the Christ of the gospels means to drop ’died for our sins according to the Scriptures,’ and to retain only the non-miraculous, moral and religious teachings that are recorded in the three first gospels, then I say that it is fatal for the Church, and it is false to the facts, for the Christ of the epistles is the Christ of the gospels:  the difference only being that in the one you have the facts, and in the other you have their meaning and their power.

So, lastly, let this text teach us what we ourselves have to do with this unanimous testimony.  ‘So we preach, and so ye believed.’  Brother!  Do you believe so?  That is to say, is your conception of the Gospel the mighty redemptive agency which is wrought by the Incarnate Son of God, who was crucified for our offences, and rose that we might live, and is glorified that we, too, may share His glory?  Is that your Gospel?  But do not be content with an intellectual grasp of the thing.  ‘So ye believed’ means a great deal more than ‘I believe that Christ died for our sins.’  It means ’I believe in the Christ who did die for my sins.’  You must cast yourself as a sinful man on Him; and, so casting, you will find that it is no vain story which is commended to us by all these august voices from the past, but you will have in your own experience the verification of the fact that He died for our sins, in your own consciousness of sins forgiven, and new love bestowed; and so may turn round to Paul, the leader of the chorus, and to all the apostolic band, and say to them, ’Now I believe, not because of thy saying, but because I have seen Him, and myself heard Him.’

THE CERTAINTY AND JOY OF THE RESURRECTION

   ’But now is Christ risen from the dead ... the first
   fruits of them that slept.’—­1 COR. xv. 20.

The Apostle has been contemplating the long train of dismal consequences which he sees would arise if we only had a dead Christ.  He thinks that he, the Apostle, would have nothing to preach, and we, nothing to believe.  He thinks that all hope of deliverance from sin would fade away.  He thinks that the one fact which gives assurance of immortality having vanished, the dead who had nurtured the assurance have perished.  And he thinks that if things were so, then Christian men, who had believed a false gospel, and nourished an empty faith, and died clinging to a baseless hope, were far more to be pitied than men who had had less splendid dreams and less utter illusions.

Then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he turns away from that dreary picture, and with a change of key, which the dullest ear can appreciate, from the wailing minors of the preceding verses, he breaks into this burst of triumph.  ’Now’—­things being as they are, for it is the logical ‘now,’ and not the temporal one—­things being as they are, ’Christ is risen from the dead, and that as the first fruits of them that slept.’