of them saw Him going up into heaven!  The hallucination is on the other side, I think.  They have got the saddle on the wrong horse when they talk about the Apostolic witnesses being the victims of hallucination.  It is the people who believe it possible that they should be who are so.  The old argument against miracles used to say that it is more consonant with experience that testimony should be false, than that a miracle should be true.  I venture to say it is a much greater strain on a man’s credulity, to believe that such evidence is false than that such a miracle, so attested, is true.  And I, for my part, venture to think that the reasonable men are the men who listen to these eye-witnesses when they say, ’We saw Him rise’; and echo back in answer the triumphant certitude, ’Christ is risen indeed!’

There is another consideration that I might put briefly.  A very valuable way of establishing facts is to point to the existence of other facts, which indispensably require the previous ones for their explanation.  Let me give you an illustration of what I mean.  I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, amongst other reasons, because I do not understand how it was possible for the Church to exist for a week after the Crucifixion, unless Jesus Christ rose again.  Why was it that they did not all scatter?  Why was it that the spirit of despondency and the tendency to separation, which were beginning to creep over them when they were saying:  ’Ah! it is all up!  We trusted that this had been He,’ did not go on to their natural issue?  How came it that these people, with their Master taken away from the midst of them, and the bond of union between them removed, and all their hopes crushed did not say:  ’We have made a mistake, let us go back to Gennesareth and take to our fishing again, and try and forget our bright illusions’?  That is what John the Baptist’s followers did when he died.  Why did not Christ’s do the same?  Because Christ rose again and re-knit them together.  When the Shepherd was smitten, the flock would have been scattered, and never drawn together any more, unless there had been just such a thing as the Resurrection asserts there was, to reunite the dispersed and to encourage the depressed.  And so I say, Christianity with a dead Christ, and a Church gathered round a grave from which the stone has not been rolled away, is more unbelievable than the miracle, for it is an absurdity.

Then there is another thing that I would say in a word.  Let me put an illustration to explain what I mean.  Suppose, after the execution of King Charles I., in some corner of the country a Pretender had sprung up and said, ‘I am the King!’ the way to end that would have been for the Puritan leaders to have taken people to St. George’s Chapel, and said, ’Look! there is the coffin, there is the body, is that the king, or is it not?’ Jesus Christ was said to have risen again, within a week of the time of His death.  The rulers of