gloom of despondency over the silence of the first Easter

eve.

rection

Clearly it was the Resurrection, and it alone, which at once dispelled all this darkness and lighted up the whole life and nature of Jesus Christ with a new brightness The power of of meaning. From that time it is evident that the Resurthere passed over the whole spiritual character of the disciples a change, from cowardice to boldness, from hesitation and doubt to faith, from narrow earthly hopes to a sure and certain grasp of heavenly realities-perfectly intelligible if the Resurrection be true, entirely inexplicable on any one of the theories of delusion, imposture, mythical imagination, which explain it away as false. We have seen already that the fact of the Resurrection was everywhere the very centre of all the first Christian preaching, till even a clear-sighted heathen like Festus discerned plainly enough that the one question was whether Jesus was dead, or whether He was alive for evermore. Certainly an apostle, who of all others grasped most firmly the essential spirituality of the Gospel, knew well and declared emphatically that, if Christ was not risen, all Christian faith was a vain delusion, and all Christian preaching a lie told in the name of God. The religion which is sometimes offered to us in the name of Christianity, surrendering all belief in the reality of the Resurrection, and yet proposing to retain a faith in Christ as the Son of God, is in no sense the actual Christianity which once conquered the world.

the confes

Now the effect of the belief in the Resurrection as a sure and certain fact, forced on the mind in spite of many difficulties of conception and earnest doubts of the shown in strength of testimony, is most powerfully repre- sion of sented in the great confession of St. Thomas. St. Thomas. With marvellous truth to nature we are told that it was the doubting apostle, who at last pronounced the most striking and absolute profession of faith: 'My Lord and my God.' The words themselves have naturally startled every thoughtful reader. For they are words which, as in a sudden flash of anticipation, give us a glimpse of a great truth, at the clear knowledge of which Christian thought only arrived by degrees hereafter. They are words of which it might be

easy to show that they far outrun in their bold inference all hard logical conclusions from the facts on which they were based; they are words on the exact scope and meaning of which men may dispute. But, after all, they simply describe what the first intelligent heathen testimony as to Christian worship describes as a thing of course at the close of the apostolic age. They are an outpouring of worship to the risen Christ as God.'

How were they drawn forth? There is again but one answer: By the sudden realisation at once of the fact and of the infinite spiritual meaning of the Resurrecpower: tion (implying, of course, the Ascension) as a manifestation of Jesus Christ.

Its manifold

as a seal of His truth;

It was not merely that He had always staked His truth upon it, as the only worthy conclusion of His earthly life, and the explanation of the true meaning of His death-that it proved Him to have power to lay down His life, because it visibly manifested His power to take it again- that without it His life would but have been the noblest of human lives, and His death the greatest of all human martyrdoms.

as the

It was not merely that it was the completion of the manifestation of Him by power the great miracle of miracles, at once crowning all others, and manifesting a power in Him to which the working of them was but a little thing, and in which He rose infinitely above all servants of God who had worked miracles in days gone by.

miracle of miracles;

as crowning His teaching;

Nor, again, was it only the completion of His manifestation in teaching, opening, both in itself and in the doctrine grounded upon it, a glimpse for all mankind of the future life, not in the vague glorious haze of speculation, but the calm clear light of fact—so that the hopes which were the deepest mysteries of the schools, became a commonplace of every day for the whole race of man.

But it was, above all else, the final manifestation of what He was. It told out at last unmistakably the true

"See Pliny's letter to Trajan: Carmen Christo, quasi Deo, dicere.'

6

as a mani

His nature.

nature of Jesus Christ Himself. It showed visibly the existence in Him of that inherent life, superior to all material laws, untouched by the corruption of sin and death, which is the special attribute of God and of God festation of alone. It pointed naturally to a further inference that, as He rose from earth to heaven, so He had come from heaven to earth, and that His true home was in the bosom of the Godhead. These truths were hereafter to be pondered in their profounder theological expression and meaning, and finally expressed in the great doctrine of the Word of God." But their simplest and most vivid expression was certainly in the words of St. Thomas. My Lord' they had long called Him, as the long-expected Messiah, and as a King actually ruling over their souls, moving among them on a higher level of being, speaking what they knew but in part, and yet felt to be the very truth of heaven. But now that phrase was found insufficient without the addition, so startling in itself, so infinitely strange from Jewish lips, 'My Lord and my God.' That addition, like so many exclamations from the fulness of the heart, outstripping the slower pace of the understanding, simply meant that God was not only with Him, but in Him-that in reality, and not in metaphor or paradox, He was the Emmanuel, God with us.' How that truth was related to the nature of the Godhead in itself-how its two parts were represented in the name of the Son and the name of the Word-all this no sign, however marvellous, could possibly show. If it was to be known at all, it must be known through faith in our Lord's own explicit teaching, of which I shall speak hereafter. But the truth itself in its broad simple outline was forced on the soul by the sight of the risen Lord on earth, or the vision, such as St. Paul saw afterwards, of Him in heaven. It was none other than that which is so plainly stated in the Epistle to the Romans (Rom. i. 3): 'Jesus Christ was of the seed of David according to the flesh, but was declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.'

V. Such is the general outline of the actual progress in the mastery, which the sight of the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ gained over the disciples

who were to be the actual preachers of the Gospel to the world. I have confined myself strictly to the accounts of this given in the actual Gospel narrative. It would be easy to extend the view by dwelling (as

The method of progress in faith.

indeed I have dwelt already) on a similar evolution of the faith in Christ, starting with the Resurrection, passing on to the Mediation, ending in the clear conception of Godhead, which showed itself in the subsequent teaching of Christianity. There is, indeed, in the comparison of the two forms of development, similar yet not identical, a strong evidence of the substantial accuracy and independence of the record of the Fourth Gospel, not wholly unlike that which Paley worked out so ably in the comparison of the Acts and the Epistles in his 'Hora Paulinæ.' But the examination of the development of Christian doctrine in the Epistles belongs more properly to the consideration of the results of definite faith in the word of the Lord Jesus, of which I do not yet speak. It is in the Gospels that we can most clearly understand that preparatory stage of faith with which we are now concerned. It is best to see the life of Christ through the eyes of the disciples themselves.

What is the impression which these considerations should make on us?

The signifi

faith of the

disciples in

itself.

We have first to consider the significance of the great fact of this gradual conversion of the disciples to an absolute allegiance, of the extraordinary change which cance of the that conversion wrought on them, and the still more extraordinary power which, thus converted and changed in their whole character, they were able to exercise over the world at large, laying firm hold on the three great elements of the ancient civilisation-the Hebrew, the Greek, and the Roman-and subjecting them all to the name of Christ. The fact is unquestionable in its reality, and in its importance it transcends all that the world has yet seen. How is it to be accounted for? As has been urged again and again, the account which the New Testament gives of it is a simple and adequate account. If Jesus Christ be what Christianity supposes Him to be, if the

7 See Part I. cc. vii. viii. ix.

manifestation of Him in life was crowned by the facts of the Resurrection and Ascension, we can well explain the faith which He actually inspired, and the power of such a faith, at once to lift His apostles above themselves into a new spiritual and heavenly life, and to make their witness go forth. from one end of the world to the other, with a sound which has continued unbroken, and has spread wider and wider through eighteen centuries. But, without this supposition, how can the facts be probably or even possibly accounted for? The supposition of delusion and imposture, or the mixture of delusion and imposture which is more common and more powerful than either separately, will surely not bear examination in the face of the actual facts of the case. How could their long discipleship of close familiar intercourse, gradually overcoming all prejudice, all hesitation, all doubt, and inducing them to stake life and death on the service of Christ, be compatible with mere delusion? When they so simply pleaded that what they told they had seen with their eyes, and their hands had handled,' so that it could not be a 'cunningly devised fable,' or the fancy of a blind fanaticism, the common-sense of the world rightly accepted the plea. How, on the other hand, could a deliberate imposture be morally compatible with the extraordinary loftiness and spirituality of their teaching, with the enthusiasm which raised them above all earthly things, and nerved them to face laborious life and ignominious death without a moment's hesitation, and with the marvellous power exercised through their witness over Jew and Gentile, in the teeth of every possible influence of opposition? What sign is there anywhere, either in their life or their teaching, of the mingling of the incongruous elements of honest enthusiasm and self-deceiving imposture, with the inevitable inconsistencies and discomfitures which it must bring with it? Yet it must be remembered that their own faith, and their claim of allegiance from the world, were not for an idea or a principle, but for a Person; that their preaching was not brilliant argument or eloquent exhortation, but simple witness of the great facts of His manifestation; and in such a work, if there be delusion or imposture, it is infinitely difficult for it to escape the detec