the nation had the grave, the watch, the stone, the seal.  They could have put an end to the pestilent nonsense in two minutes, if it had been nonsense, by the simple process of saying, ’Go and look at the tomb, and you will see Him there.’  But this question has never been answered, and never will be—­What became of that sacred corpse if Jesus Christ did not rise again from the dead?  The clumsy lie that the rulers told, that the disciples had stolen away the body, was only their acknowledgment that the grave was empty.  If the grave were empty, either His servants were impostors, which we have seen it is incredible that they were, or the Christ was risen again.

And so, dear brethren, for many other reasons besides this handful that I have ventured to gather and put before you, and in spite of the prejudices of modern theories, I lift up here once more, with unfaltering certitude, the glad message which I beseech you to accept:  ‘Christ is risen, the first fruits of them that slept.’

II.  So much, then, for the first point in this passage.  A word or two about the second—­the triumph in the certitude of that Resurrection.

As I remarked at a previous point of this discourse, the Apostle has been speaking about the consequences which would follow from the fact that Christ was not raised.  If we take all these consequences and reverse them, we get the glad issues of His Resurrection, and understand why it was that this great burst of triumph comes from the Apostle’s lips.  And though I must necessarily treat this part of my subject very inadequately, let me try to gather together the various points on which, as I think, our Easter gladness ought to be built.

First, then, I say, the risen Christ gives us a complete Gospel.  A dead Christ annihilates the Gospel.  ‘If Christ be not risen,’ says the Apostle, ‘our preaching,’ by which he means not the act but the substance of his preaching, ‘is vain.’  Or, as the word might be more accurately rendered, ‘empty.’  There is nothing in it; no contents.  It is a blown bladder; nothing in it but wind.

What was Paul’s ‘preaching’?  It all turned upon these points—­that Jesus Christ was the Son of God; that He was Incarnate in the flesh for us men; that He died on the Cross for our offences; that He was raised again, and had ascended into Heaven, ruling the world and breathing His presence into believing hearts; and that He would come again to be our Judge.  These were the elements of what Paul called ‘his Gospel.’  He faces the supposition of a dead Christ, and he says, ’It is all gone!  It is all vanished into thin air.  I have nothing to preach if I have not a Cross to preach which is man’s deliverance from sin, because on it the Son of God hath died, and I only know that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice is accepted and sufficient, because I have it attested to me in His rising again from the dead.’