THE FAIR HAVENA Work in Defence of the Miraculous Element in our Lord's Ministryupon Earth, both as against Rationalistic Impugners and certainOrthodox Defenders, by the late John Pickard Owen, with a Memoir ofthe Author by William Bickersteth Owen. 

INTRODUCTION BY R. A. STREATFEILD

The demand for a new edition of The Fair Haven gives me anopportunity of saying a few words about the genesis of what, thoughnot one of the most popular of Samuel Butler's books, is certainlyone of the most characteristic. Few of his works, indeed, show morestrikingly his brilliant powers as a controversialist and hisimplacable determination to get at the truth of whatever engaged hisattention. 

To find the germ of The Fair Haven we should probably have to go backto the year 1858, when Butler, after taking his degree at Cambridge, was preparing himself for holy orders by acting as a kind of laycurate in a London parish. Butler never took things for granted, andhe felt it to be his duty to examine independently a good many pointsof Christian dogma which most candidates for ordination accept asmatters of course. The result of his investigations was that heeventually declined to take orders at all. One of the stones uponwhich he then stumbled was the efficacy of infant baptism, and I haveno doubt that another was the miraculous element of Christianity, which, it will be remembered, was the cause of grievous searchings ofheart to Ernest Pontifex in Butler's semi-autobiographical novel, TheWay of All Flesh. While Butler was in New Zealand (1859-64) he hadleisure for prosecuting his Biblical studies, the result of which hepublished in 1865, after his return to England, in an anonymouspamphlet entitled "The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christas given by the Four Evangelists critically examined. " This pamphletpassed unnoticed; probably only a few copies were printed and it isnow extremely rare. After the publication of Erewhon in 1872, Butlerreturned once more to theology, and made his anonymous pamphlet thebasis of the far more elaborate Fair Haven, which was originallypublished as the posthumous work of a certain John Pickard Owen, preceded by a memoir of the deceased author by his supposed brother, William Bickersteth Owen. It is possible that the memoir was thefruit of a suggestion made by Miss Savage, an able and witty womanwith whom Butler corresponded at the time. Miss Savage was so muchimpressed by the narrative power displayed in Erewhon that she urgedButler to write a novel, and we shall probably not be far wrong inregarding the biography of John Pickard Owen as Butler's trial tripin the art of fiction--a prelude to The Way of All Flesh, which hebegan in 1873. 

It has often been supposed that the elaborate paraphernalia ofmystification which Butler used in The Fair Haven was deliberatelydesigned in order to hoax the public. I do not believe that this wasthe case. Butler, I feel convinced, provided an ironical frameworkfor his arguments merely that he might render them more effectivethan they had been when plainly stated in the pamphlet of 1865. Hefully expected his readers to comprehend his irony, and heanticipated that some at any rate of them would keenly resent it. Writing to Miss Savage in March, 1873 (shortly before the publicationof the book), he said: "I should hope that attacks on The Fair Havenwill give me an opportunity of excusing myself, and if so I shallendeavour that the excuse may be worse than the fault it is intendedto excuse. " A few days later he referred to the difficulties that hehad encountered in getting the book accepted by a publisher: " ---were frightened and even considered the scheme of the bookunjustifiable. --- urged me, as politely as he could, not to do it, and evidently thinks I shall get myself into disgrace even amongfreethinkers. It's all nonsense. I dare say I shall get into a row--at least I hope I shall. " Evidently there is here no anticipationof The Fair Haven being misunderstood. Misunderstood, however, itwas, not only by reviewers, some of whom greeted it solemnly as adefence of orthodoxy, but by divines of high standing, such as thelate Canon Ainger, who sent it to a friend whom he wished to convert. This was more than Butler could resist, and he hastened to issue asecond edition bearing his name and accompanied by a preface in whichthe deceived elect were held up to ridicule. 

Butler used to maintain that The Fair Haven did his reputation noharm. Writing in 1901, he said:

"The Fair Haven got me into no social disgrace that I have ever beenable to discover. I might attack Christianity as much as I chose andnobody cared one straw; but when I attacked Darwin it was a differentmatter. For many years Evolution, Old and New, and UnconsciousMemory made a shipwreck of my literary prospects. I am only nowbeginning to emerge from the literary and social injury which thosetwo perfectly righteous books inflicted on me. I dare say theyabound with small faults of taste, but I rejoice in having writtenboth of them. "

Very likely Butler was right as to the social side of the question, but I am convinced that The Fair Haven did him grave harm in theliterary world. Reviewers fought shy of him for the rest of hislife. They had been taken in once, and they took very good care thatthey should not be taken in again. The word went forth that Butlerwas not to be taken seriously, whatever he wrote, and the results ofthe decree were apparent in the conspiracy of silence that greetednot only his books on evolution, but his Homeric works, his writingson art, and his edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. Now that he haspassed beyond controversies and mystifications, and now that hisother works are appreciated at their true value, it is not too muchto hope that tardy justice will be accorded also to The Fair Haven. It is true that the subject is no longer the burning question that itwas forty years ago. In the early seventies theological polemicswere fashionable. Books like Seeley's Ecce Homo and Matthew Arnold'sLiterature and Dogma were eagerly devoured by readers of all classes. Nowadays we take but a languid interest in the problems thatdisturbed our grandfathers, and most of us have settled down intowhat Disraeli described as the religion of all sensible men, which nosensible man ever talks about. There is, however, in The Fair Havena good deal more than theological controversy, and our Laodicean agewill appreciate Butler's humour and irony if it cares little for hispolemics. The Fair Haven scandalised a good many people when itfirst appeared, but I am not afraid of its scandalising anybody now. I should be sorry, nevertheless, if it gave any reader a falseimpression of Butler's Christianity, and I think I cannot do betterthan conclude with a passage from one of his essays which representshis attitude to religion perhaps more faithfully than anything in TheFair Haven: "What, after all, is the essence of Christianity? Whatis the kernel of the nut? Surely common sense and cheerfulness, withunflinching opposition to the charlatanisms and Pharisaisms of aman's own times. The essence of Christianity lies neither in dogma, nor yet in abnormally holy life, but in faith in an unseen world, indoing one's duty, in speaking the truth, in finding the true liferather in others than in oneself, and in the certain hope that he wholoses his life on these behalfs finds more than he has lost. Whatcan Agnosticism do against such Christianity as this? I should beshocked if anything I had ever written or shall ever write shouldseem to make light of these things. "

R. A. STREATFEILD. August, 1913. 

BUTLER'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The occasion of a Second Edition of The Fair Haven enables me tothank the public and my critics for the favourable reception whichhas been accorded to the First Edition. I had feared that thefreedom with which I had exposed certain untenable positions taken byDefenders of Christianity might have given offence to some reviewers, but no complaint has reached me from any quarter on the score of mynot having put the best possible case for the evidence in favour ofthe miraculous element in Christ's teaching--nor can I believe that Ishould have failed to hear of it, if my book had been open toexception on this ground. 

An apology is perhaps due for the adoption of a pseudonym, and evenmore so for the creation of two such characters as JOHN PICKARD OWENand his brother. Why could I not, it may be asked, have said allthat I had to say in my own proper person?

Are there not real ills of life enough already? Is there not a "lohere!" from this school with its gushing "earnestness, " itdistinctions without differences, its gnat strainings and camelswallowings, its pretence of grappling with a question whileresolutely bent upon shirking it, its dust throwing andmystification, its concealment of its own ineffable insincerity underan air of ineffable candour? Is there not a "lo there!" from thatother school with its bituminous atmosphere of exclusiveness andself-laudatory dilettanteism? Is there not enough actual expositionof boredom come over us from many quarters without drawing for newbores upon the imagination? It is true I gave a single drop ofcomfort. JOHN PICKARD OWEN was dead. But his having ceased to exist(to use the impious phraseology of the present day) did not cancelthe fact of his having once existed. That he should have ever beenborn gave proof of potentialities in Nature which could not beregarded lightly. What hybrids might not be in store for us next?Moreover, though JOHN PICKARD was dead, WILLIAM BICKERSTETH was stillliving, and might at any moment rekindle his burning and shining lampof persistent self-satisfaction. Even though the OWENS had actuallyexisted, should not their existence have been ignored as a disgraceto Nature? Who then could be justified in creating them when theydid not exist?

I am afraid I must offer an apology rather than an excuse. The factis that I was in a very awkward position. My previous work, Erewhon, had failed to give satisfaction to certain ultra-orthodox Christians, who imagined that they could detect an analogy between the EnglishChurch and the Erewhonian Musical Banks. It is inconceivable howthey can have got hold of this idea; but I was given to understandthat I should find it far from easy to dispossess them of the notionthat something in the way of satire had been intended. There wereother parts of the book which had also been excepted to, andaltogether I had reason to believe that if I defended Christianity inmy own name I should not find Erewhon any addition to the weightwhich my remarks might otherwise carry. If I had been suspected ofsatire once, I might be suspected again with no greater reason. Instead of calmly reviewing the arguments which I adduced, The Rockmight have raised a cry of non tali auxilio. It must always beremembered that besides the legitimate investors in Christian stocks, if so homely a metaphor may be pardoned, there are unscrupulouspersons whose profession it is to be bulls, bears, stags, and I knownot what other creatures of the various Christian markets. It is allnonsense about hawks not picking out each other's eyes--there isnothing they like better. I feared The Guardian, The Record, TheJohn Bull, etc. , lest they should suggest that from a bear I nowturned bull with a view to an eventual bishopric. Such insinuationswould have impaired the value of The Fair Haven as an anchorage forwell-meaning people. I therefore resolved to obey the injunction ofthe Gentile Apostle and avoid all appearance of evil, by dissociatingmyself from the author of Erewhon as completely as possible. At themoment of my resolution JOHN PICKARD OWEN came to my assistance; Ifelt that he was the sort of man I wanted, but that he was hardlysufficient in himself. I therefore summoned his brother. The pairhave served their purpose; a year nowadays produces great changes inmen's thoughts concerning Christianity, and the little matter ofErewhon having quite blown over I feel that I may safely appear in mytrue colours as the champion of orthodoxy, discard the OWENS as otherthan mouthpieces, and relieve the public from uneasiness as to anyfurther writings from the pen of the surviving brother. 

Nevertheless I am bound to own that, in spite of a generallyfavourable opinion, my critics have not been unanimous in theirinterpretation of The Fair Haven. Thus, The Rock (April 25, 1873, and May 9, 1873), says that the work is "an extraordinary one, whether regarded as a biographical record or a theological treatise. Indeed the importance of the volume compels us to depart from ourcustom of reviewing with brevity works entrusted to us, and we shallin two consecutive numbers of The Rock lay before its readers whatappear to us to be the merits and demerits of this posthumousproduction. "

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"His exhibition of the certain proofs furnished of the Resurrectionof our Lord is certainly masterly and convincing. "

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"To the sincerely inquiring doubter, the striking way in which thetruth of the Resurrection is exhibited must be most beneficial, butsuch a character we are compelled to believe is rare among those ofthe schools of neology. "

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"Mr. OWEN'S exposition and refutation of the hallucination andmythical theories of Strauss and his followers is most admirable, andall should read it who desire to know exactly what excuses men makefor their incredulity. The work also contains many beautifulpassages on the discomfort of unbelief, and the holy pleasure of asettled faith, which cannot fail to benefit the reader. "

On the other hand, in spite of all my precautions, the samemisfortune which overtook Erewhon has also come upon The Fair Haven. It has been suspected of a satirical purpose. The author of apamphlet entitled Jesus versus Christianity says:-

"The Fair Haven is an ironical defence of orthodoxy at the expense ofthe whole mass of Church tenet and dogma, the character of Christonly excepted. Such at least is our reading of it, though critics ofthe Rock and Record order have accepted the book as a serious defenceof Christianity, and proclaimed it as a most valuable contribution inaid of the faith. Affecting an orthodox standpoint it most bitterlyreproaches all previous apologists for the lack of candour with whichthey have ignored or explained away insuperable difficulties andattached undue value to coincidences real or imagined. One and allthey have, the author declares, been at best, but zealous 'liars forGod, ' or what to them was more than God, their own religious system. This must go on no longer. We, as Christians having a sound cause, need not fear to let the truth be known. He proceeds accordingly toset forth the truth as he finds it in the New Testament; and in amasterly analysis of the account of the Resurrection, which heselects as the principal crucial miracle, involving all othermiracles, he shows how slender is the foundation on which the wholefabric of supernatural theology has been reared. "

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"As told by our author the whole affords an exquisite example of thenatural growth of a legend. "

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"If the reader can once fully grasp the intention of the style, andits affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy, and perceive alsohow utterly destructive are its 'candid admissions' to the wholefabric of supernaturalism, he will enjoy a rare treat. It is nothowever for the purpose of recommending what we at least regard as apiece of exquisite humour, that we call attention to The Fair Haven, but &c. &c. "

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This is very dreadful; but what can one do?

Again, The Scotsman speaks of the writer as being "throughout indownright almost pathetic earnestness. " While The National Reformerseems to be in doubt whether the book is a covert attack uponChristianity or a serious defence of it, but declares that bothorthodox and unorthodox will find matter requiring thought andanswer. 

I am not responsible for the interpretations of my readers. It isonly natural that the same work should present a very differentaspect according as it is approached from one side or the other. There is only one way out of it--that the reader should kindlyinterpret according to his own fancies. If he will do this the bookis sure to please him. I have done the best I can for all parties, and feel justified in appealing to the existence of the widelyconflicting opinions which I have quoted, as a proof that the balancehas been evenly held, and that I was justified in calling the book adefence--both as against impugners and defenders. 

S. BUTLER. Oct. 8, 1873. 

MEMOIR OF THE LATE JOHN PICKARD OWEN

CHAPTER I

The subject of this Memoir, and Author of the work which follows it, was born in Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road, London, on the 5thof February, 1832. He was my elder brother by about eighteen months. Our father and mother had once been rich, but through a succession ofunavoidable misfortunes they were left with but a very moderateincome when my brother and myself were about three and four yearsold. My father died some five or six years afterwards, and we onlyrecollected him as a singularly gentle and humorous playmate whodoted upon us both and never spoke unkindly. The charm of such arecollection can never be dispelled; both my brother and myselfreturned his love with interest, and cherished his memory with themost affectionate regret, from the day on which he left us till thetime came that the one of us was again to see him face to face. Sosweet and winning was his nature that his slightest wish was our law--and whenever we pleased him, no matter how little, he never failedto thank us as though we had done him a service which we should havehad a perfect right to withhold. How proud were we upon any of theseoccasions, and how we courted the opportunity of being thanked! Hedid indeed well know the art of becoming idolised by his children, and dearly did he prize the results of his own proficiency; yet trulythere was no art about it; all arose spontaneously from thewellspring of a sympathetic nature which knew how to feel as othersfelt, whether old or young, rich or poor, wise or foolish. On onepoint alone did he neglect us--I refer to our religious education. On all other matters he was the kindest and most careful teacher inthe world. Love and gratitude be to his memory!

My mother loved us no less ardently than my father, but she was of aquicker temper, and less adept at conciliating affection. She musthave been exceedingly handsome when she was young, and was stillcomely when we first remembered her; she was also highlyaccomplished, but she felt my father's loss of fortune more keenlythan my father himself, and it preyed upon her mind, though ratherfor our sake than for her own. Had we not known my father we shouldhave loved her better than any one in the world, but affection goesby comparison, and my father spoiled us for any one but himself;indeed, in after life, I remember my mother's telling me, with manytears, how jealous she had often been of the love we bore him, andhow mean she had thought it of him to entrust all scolding orrepression to her, so that he might have more than his due share ofour affection. Not that I believe my father did this consciously;still, he so greatly hated scolding that I dare say we might oftenhave got off scot free when we really deserved reproof had not mymother undertaken the onus of scolding us herself. We thereforenaturally feared her more than my father, and fearing more we lovedless. For as love casteth out fear, so fear love. 

This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew the wayto bear it. She tried to upbraid us, in little ways, into loving heras much as my father; the more she tried this, the less we couldsucceed in doing it; and so on and so on in a fashion which need notbe detailed. Not but what we really loved her deeply, while heraffection for us was unsurpassable still, we loved her less than weloved my father, and this was the grievance. 

My father entrusted our religious education entirely to my mother. He was himself, I am assured, of a deeply religious turn of mind, anda thoroughly consistent member of the Church of England; but heconceived, and perhaps rightly, that it is the mother who shouldfirst teach her children to lift their hands in prayer, and impart tothem a knowledge of the One in whom we live and move and have ourbeing. My mother accepted the task gladly, for in spite of a certainnarrowness of view--the natural but deplorable result of her earliersurroundings--she was one of the most truly pious women whom I haveever known; unfortunately for herself and us she had been trained inthe lowest school of Evangelical literalism--a school which in afterlife both my brother and myself came to regard as the main obstacleto the complete overthrow of unbelief; we therefore looked upon itwith something stronger than aversion, and for my own part I stilldeem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the cause of Christhas ever encountered. But of this more hereafter. 

My mother, as I said, threw her whole soul into the work of ourreligious education. Whatever she believed she believed literally, and, if I may say so, with a harshness of realisation which left verylittle scope for imagination or mystery. Her plans of Heaven andsolutions of life's enigmas were direct and forcible, but they couldonly be reconciled with certain obvious facts--such as theomnipotence and all-goodness of God--by leaving many thingsabsolutely out of sight. And this my mother succeeded effectually indoing. She never doubted that her opinions comprised the truth, thewhole truth, and nothing but the truth; she therefore made haste tosow the good seed in our tender minds, and so far succeeded that whenmy brother was four years old he could repeat the Apostles' Creed, the General Confession, and the Lord's Prayer without a blunder. Mymother made herself believe that he delighted in them; but, alas! itwas far otherwise; for, strange as it may appear concerning one whoselater life was a continual prayer, in childhood he detested nothingso much as being made to pray and to learn his Catechism. In this Iam sorry to say we were both heartily of a mind. As for Sunday, theless said the better. 

I have already hinted (but as a warning to other parents I hadbetter, perhaps, express myself more plainly), that this aversion wasprobably the result of my mother's undue eagerness to reap anartificial fruit of lip service, which could have little meaning tothe heart of one so young. I believe that the severe check which thenatural growth of faith experienced in my brother's case was duealmost entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism inwhich he had been trained; but, however this may be, we both of ushated being made to say our prayers--morning and evening it was ourone bugbear, and we would avoid it, as indeed children generallywill, by every artifice which we could employ. Thus we were in thehabit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer time, and wouldgratefully hear my father tell my mother that it was a shame to wakeus; whereon he would carry us up to bed in a state apparently of theprofoundest slumber when we were really wide awake and in great fearof detection. For we knew how to pretend to be asleep, but we didnot know how we ought to wake again; there was nothing for ittherefore when we were once committed, but to go on sleeping till wewere fairly undressed and put to bed, and could wake up safely in thedark. But deceit is never long successful, and we were at lastignominiously exposed. 

It happened one evening that my mother suspected my brother John, andtried to open his little hands which were lying clasped in front ofhim. Now my brother was as yet very crude and inconsistent in histheories concerning sleep, and had no conception of what a realsleeper would do under these circumstances. Fear deprived him of hispowers of reflection, and he thus unfortunately concluded thatbecause sleepers, so far as he had observed them, were alwaysmotionless, therefore, they must be quite rigid and incapable ofmotion, and indeed that any movement, under any circumstances (forfrom his earliest childhood he liked to carry his theories to theirlegitimate conclusion), would be physically impossible for one whowas really sleeping; forgetful, oh! unhappy one, of the flexibilityof his own body on being carried upstairs, and, more unhappy still, ignorant of the art of waking. He, therefore, clenched his fingersharder and harder as he felt my mother trying to unfold them whilehis head hung listless, and his eyes were closed I as though he weresleeping sweetly. It is needless to detail the agony of shame thatfollowed. My mother begged my father to box his ears, which myfather flatly refused to do. Then she boxed them herself, and therefollowed a scene and a day or two of disgrace for both of us. 

Shortly after this there happened another misadventure. A lady cameto stay with my mother, and was to sleep in a bed that had beenbrought into our nursery, for my father's fortunes had alreadyfailed, and we were living in a humble way. We were still but fourand five years old, so the arrangement was not unnatural, and it wasassumed that we should be asleep before the lady went to bed, and bedownstairs before she would get up in the morning. But the arrivalof this lady and her being put to sleep in the nursery were greatevents to us in those days, and being particularly wanted to go tosleep, we of course sat up in bed talking and keeping ourselves awaketill she should come upstairs. Perhaps we had fancied that she wouldgive us something, but if so we were disappointed. However, whetherthis was the case or not, we were wide awake when our visitor came tobed, and having no particular object to gain, we made no pretence ofsleeping. The lady kissed us both, told us to lie still and go tosleep like good children, and then began doing her hair. 

I remember that this was the occasion on which my brother discovereda good many things in connection with the fair sex which had hithertobeen beyond his ken; more especially that the mass of petticoats andclothes which envelop the female form were not, as he expressed it tome, "all solid woman, " but that women were not in reality moresubstantially built than men, and had legs as much as he had, a factwhich he had never yet realised. On this he for a long timeconsidered them as impostors, who had wronged him by leading him tosuppose that they had far more "body in them" (so he said), than henow found they had. This was a sort of thing which he regarded withstern moral reprobation. If he had been old enough to have asolicitor I believe he would have put the matter into his hands, aswell as certain other things which had lately troubled him. For butrecently my mother had bought a fowl, and he had seen it plucked, andthe inside taken out; his irritation had been extreme on discoveringthat fowls were not all solid flesh, but that their insides--andthese formed, as it appeared to him, an enormous percentage of thebird--were perfectly useless. He was now beginning to understandthat sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good meat wasconcerned; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in comparison withwhat they ought to have considering their apparent bulk--insignificant, mere skin and bone covering a cavern. What right hadthey, or anything else, to assert themselves as so big, and prove soempty? And now this discovery of woman's falsehood was quite toomuch for him. The world itself was hollow, made up of shams anddelusions, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. 

Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough. Everything with him was tobe exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it, andeverything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doinghitherto. If a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid; ifhollow, very hollow; nothing was to be half and half, and nothing wasto change unless he had himself already become accustomed to itstimes and manners of changing; there were to be no exceptions and nocontradictions; all things were to be perfectly consistent, and allpremises to be carried with extremest rigour to their legitimateconclusions. Heaven was to be very neat (for he was always tidyhimself), and free from sudden shocks to the nervous system, such asthose caused by dogs barking at him, or cows driven in the streets. God was to resemble my father, and the Holy Spirit to bear some sortof indistinct analogy to my mother. 

Such were the ideal theories of his childhood--unconsciously formed, but very firmly believed in. As he grew up he made suchmodifications as were forced upon him by enlarged perceptions, butevery modification was an effort to him, in spite of a continual andsuccessful resistance to what he recognised as his initial mentaldefect. 

I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark in thepreceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used to noticeit as an almost invariable rule that children's earliest ideas of Godare modelled upon the character of their father--if they have one. Should the father be kind, considerate, full of the warmest love, fond of showing it, and reserved only about his displeasure, thechild having learned to look upon God as His Heavenly Father throughthe Lord's Prayer and our Church Services, will feel towards God ashe does towards his own father; this conception will stick to a manfor years and years after he has attained manhood--probably it willnever leave him. For all children love their fathers and mothers, ifthese last will only let them; it is not a little unkindness thatwill kill so hardy a plant as the love of a child for its parents. Nature has allowed ample margin for many blunders, provided there bea genuine desire on the parent's part to make the child feel that heis loved, and that his natural feelings are respected. This is allthe religious education which a child should have. As he grows olderhe will then turn naturally to the waters of life, and thirst afterthem of his own accord by reason of the spiritual refreshment whichthey, and they only, can afford. Otherwise he will shrink from them, on account of his recollection of the way in which he was led down todrink against his will, and perhaps with harshness, when all theanalogies with which he was acquainted pointed in the direction oftheir being unpleasant and unwholesome. So soul-satisfying is familyaffection to a child, that he who has once enjoyed it cannot bear tobe deprived of the hope that he is possessed in Heaven of a parentwho is like his earthly father--of a friend and counsellor who willnever, never fail him. There is no such religious nor moraleducation as kindly genial treatment and a good example; all else maythen be let alone till the child is old enough to feel the want ofit. It is true that the seed will thus be sown late, but in what asoil! On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly father harshand uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will bepainful. He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness ofhis father. He will therefore shrink from Him. The rottenness ofstillborn love in the heart of a child poisons the blood of the soul, and hence, later, crime. 

To return, however, to the lady. When she had put on her night-gown, she knelt down by her bedside and, to our consternation, began to sayher prayers. This was a cruel blow to both of us; we had always beenunder the impression that grownup people were not made to say theirprayers, and the idea of any one saying them of his or her own accordhad never occurred to us as possible. Of course the lady would notsay her prayers if she were not obliged; and yet she did say them;therefore she must be obliged to say them; therefore we should beobliged to say them, and this was a very great disappointment. Awe-struck and open-mouthed we listened while the lady prayed in sonorousaccents, for many things which I do not now remember, and finally formy father and mother and for both of us--shortly afterwards she rose, blew out the light and got into bed. Every word that she said hadconfirmed our worst apprehensions; it was just what we had beentaught to say ourselves. 

Next morning we compared notes and drew the most painful inferences;but in the course of the day our spirits rallied. We agreed thatthere were many mysteries in connection with life and things which itwas high time to unravel, and that an opportunity was now afforded uswhich might not readily occur again. All we had to do was to be trueto ourselves and equal to the occasion. We laid our plans with greatastuteness. We would be fast asleep when the lady came up to bed, but our heads should be turned in the direction of her bed, andcovered with clothes, all but a single peep-hole. My brother, as theeldest, had clearly a right to be nearest the lady, but I could seevery well, and could depend on his reporting faithfully whatevershould escape me. 

There was no chance of her giving us anything--if she had meant to doso she would have done it sooner; she might, indeed, consider themoment of her departure as the most auspicious for this purpose, butthen she was not going yet, and the interval was at our own disposal. We spent the afternoon in trying to learn to snore, but we were notcertain about it, and in the end regretfully concluded that assnoring was not de rigueur we had better dispense with it. 

We were put to bed; the light was taken away; we were told to go tosleep, and promised faithfully that we would do so; the tongue indeedswore, but the mind was unsworn. It was agreed that we should keeppinching one another to prevent our going to sleep. We did so atfrequent intervals; at last our patience was rewarded with the heavycreak, as of a stout elderly lady labouring up the stairs, andpresently our victim entered. 

To cut a long story short, the lady on satisfying herself that wewere asleep, never said her prayers at all; during the remainder ofher visit whenever she found us awake she always said them, but whenshe thought we were asleep, she never prayed. It is needless to addthat we had the matter out with her before she left, and that theconsequences were unpleasant for all parties; they added to thetroubles in which we were already involved as to our prayers, andwere indirectly among the earliest causes which led my brother tolook with scepticism upon religion. 

For a while, however, all went on as though nothing had happened. Aneffect of distrust, indeed, remained after the cause had beenforgotten, but my brother was still too young to oppose anything thatmy mother told him, and to all outward appearance he grew in grace noless rapidly than in stature. 

For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by the onegreat sorrow of our father's death. Shortly after this we were sentto a day school in Bloomsbury. We were neither of us very happythere, but my brother, who always took kindly to his books, picked upa fair knowledge of Latin and Greek; he also learned to draw, and toexercise himself a little in English composition. When I was aboutfourteen my mother capitalised a part of her income and started meoff to America, where she had friends who could give me a helpinghand; by their kindness I was enabled, after an absence of twentyyears, to return with a handsome income, but not, alas, before thedeath of my mother. 

Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Biblewith us and explain it. She had become deeply impressed with themillenarian fervour which laid hold of so many some twenty-five orthirty years ago. The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book inthe Bible, and she was imbued with the fullest conviction that allthe threatened horrors with which it teems were upon the eve of theiraccomplishment. The year eighteen hundred and forty-eight was to be(as indeed it was) a time of general bloodshed and confusion, whilein eighteen hundred and sixty-six, should it please God to spare her, her eyes would be gladdened by the visible descent of the Son of Manwith a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, with the trump of God;and the dead in Christ should rise first; then she, as one of themthat were alive, would be caught up with other saints into the air, and would possibly receive while rising some distinguishing token ofconfidence and approbation which should fall with due impressivenessupon the surrounding multitude; then would come the consummation ofall things, and she would be ever with the Lord. She died peaceablyin her bed before she could know that a commercial panic was thenearest approach to the fulfilment of prophecy which the yeareighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth. 

These opinions of my mother's were positively disastrous--injuringher naturally healthy and vigorous mind by leading her to indulge inall manner of dreamy and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, whichany but the most narrow literalist would feel at once to beuntenable. Thus several times she expressed to us her convictionthat my brother and myself were to be the two witnesses mentioned inthe eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation, and dilated upon thegratification she should experience upon finding that we had indeedbeen reserved for a position of such distinction. We were as yetmere children, and naturally took all for granted that our mothertold us; we therefore made a careful examination of the passage whichthrew light upon our future; but on finding that the prospect wasgloomy and full of bloodshed we protested against the honours whichwere intended for us, more especially when we reflected that themother of the two witnesses was not menaced in Scripture with anyparticular discomfort. If we were to be martyrs, my mother ought towish to be a martyr too, whereas nothing was farther from herintention. Her notion clearly was that we were to be massacredsomewhere in the streets of London, in consequence of the anti-Christian machinations of the Pope; that after lying about unburiedfor three days and a half we were to come to life again; and, finally, that we should conspicuously ascend to heaven, in front, perhaps, of the Foundling Hospital. 

She was not herself indeed to share either our martyrdom or ourglorification, but was to survive us many years on earth, living inan odour of great sanctity and reflected splendour, as the centraland most august figure in a select society. She would perhaps beable indirectly, through her sons' influence with the Almighty, tohave a voice in most of the arrangements both of this world and ofthe next. If all this were to come true (and things seemed very likeit), those friends who had neglected us in our adversity would notfind it too easy to be restored to favour, however greatly they mightdesire it--that is to say, they would not have found it too easy inthe case of one less magnanimous and spiritually-minded than herself. My mother said but little of the above directly, but the fragmentswhich occasionally escaped her were pregnant, and on looking back itis easy to perceive that she must have been building one of the moststupendous aerial fabrics that have ever been reared. 

I have given the above in its more amusing aspect, and am half afraidthat I may appear to be making a jest of weakness on the part of oneof the most devotedly unselfish mothers who have ever existed. Butone can love while smiling, and the very wildness of my mother'sdream serves to show how entirely her whole soul was occupied withthe things which are above. To her, religion was all in all; theearth was but a place of pilgrimage--only so far important as it wasa possible road to heaven. She impressed this upon both of us byevery word and action--instant in season and out of season, so thatshe might fill us more deeply with a sense of God. But theinevitable consequences happened; my mother had aimed too high andhad overshot her mark. The influence indeed of her guileless andunworldly nature remained impressed upon my brother even during thetime of his extremest unbelief (perhaps his ultimate safety is in themain referable to this cause, and to the happy memories of my father, which had predisposed him to love God), but my mother had insisted onthe most minute verbal accuracy of every part of the Bible; she hadalso dwelt upon the duty of independent research, and on thenecessity of giving up everything rather than assent to things whichour conscience did not assent to. No one could have more effectuallytaught us to try TO THINK the truth, and we had taken her at her wordbecause our hearts told us that she was right. But she requiredthree incompatible things. When my brother grew older he came tofeel that independent and unflinching examination, with adetermination to abide by the results, would lead him to reject thepoint which to my mother was more important than any other--I meanthe absolute accuracy of the Gospel records. My mother wasinexpressibly shocked at hearing my brother doubt the authenticity ofthe Epistle to the Hebrews; and then, as it appeared to him, shetried to make him violate the duties of examination and candour whichhe had learnt too thoroughly to unlearn. Thereon came pain and anestrangement which was none the less profound for being mutuallyconcealed. 

This estrangement was the gradual work of some five or six years, during which my brother was between eleven and seventeen years old. At seventeen, I am told that he was remarkably well informed andclever. His manners were, like my father's, singularly genial, andhis appearance very prepossessing. He had as yet no doubt concerningthe soundness of any fundamental Christian doctrine, but his mind wastoo active to allow of his being contented with my mother's child-like faith. There were points on which he did not indeed doubt, butwhich it would none the less be interesting to consider; such forexample as the perfectibility of the regenerate Christian, and themeaning of the mysterious central chapters of the Epistle to theRomans. He was engaged in these researches though still only a boy, when an event occurred which gave the first real shock to his faith. 

He was accustomed to teach in a school for the poorest children everySunday afternoon, a task for which his patience and good temper wellfitted him. On one occasion, however, while he was explaining theeffect of baptism to one of his favourite pupils, he discovered tohis great surprise that the boy had never been baptised. He pushedhis inquiries further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in hisclass only five had been baptised, and, not only so, but that nodifference in disposition or conduct could be discovered between theregenerate boys and the unregenerate. The good and bad boys weredistributed in proportions equal to the respective numbers of thebaptised and unbaptised. In spite of a certain impetuosity ofnatural character, he was also of a matter-of-fact and experimentalturn of mind; he therefore went through the whole school, whichnumbered about a hundred boys, and found out who had been baptisedand who had not. The same results appeared. The majority had notbeen baptised; yet the good and bad dispositions were so distributedas to preclude all possibility of maintaining that the baptised boyswere better than the unbaptised. 

The reader may smile at the idea of any one's faith being troubled bya fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but in truth mybrother was seriously and painfully shocked. The teacher to whom heapplied for a solution of the difficulty was not a man of any realpower, and reported my brother to the rector for having disturbed theschool by his inquiries. The rector was old and self-opinionated;the difficulty, indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been tomy brother, but instead of saying so at once, and referring to anyrecognised theological authority, he tried to put him off with wordswhich seemed intended to silence him rather than to satisfy him;finally he lost his temper, and my brother fell under suspicion ofunorthodoxy. 

This kind of treatment might answer with some people, but not with mybrother. He alludes to it resentfully in the introductory chapter ofhis book. He became suspicious that a preconceived opinion was beingdefended at the expense of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven uponhis own unaided investigation. The result may be guessed: he beganto go astray, and strayed further and further. The children of God, he reasoned, the members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom ofHeaven, were no more spiritually minded than the children of theworld and the devil. Was then the grace of God a gift which left notrace whatever upon those who were possessed of it--a thing thepresence or absence of which might be ascertained by consulting theparish registry, but was not discernible in conduct? The grace ofman was more clearly perceptible than this. Assuredly there must bea screw loose somewhere, which, for aught he knew, might bejeopardising the salvation of all Christendom. Where then was thisloose screw to be found?

He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief wascaused by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism. Hetherefore, to my mother's inexpressible grief, joined the Baptistsand was immersed in a pond near Dorking. With the Baptists heremained quiet about three months, and then began to quarrel with hisinstructors as to their doctrine of predestination. Shortlyafterwards he came accidentally upon a fascinating stranger who wasno less struck with my brother than my brother with him, and thisgentleman, who turned out to be a Roman Catholic missionary, landedhim in the Church of Rome, where he felt sure that he had now foundrest for his soul. But here, too, he was mistaken; after about twoyears he rebelled against the stifling of all free inquiry; on thisrebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and he was soonbattling with unbelief. He then fell in with one who was a pureDeist, and was shorn of every shred of dogma which he had ever held, except a belief in the personality and providence of the Creator. 

On reviewing his letters written to me about this time, I ampainfully struck with the manner in which they show that all thesepitiable vagaries were to be traced to a single cause--a cause whichstill exists to the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, Ifear, seems likely to continue in full force for many a year to come--I mean, to a false system of training which teaches people to regardChristianity as a thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirelyin the strictest reading of the letter, or to be rejected asabsolutely untrue. The fact is, that all permanent truth is as oneof those coal measures, a seam of which lies near the surface, andeven crops up above the ground, but which is generally of an inferiorquality and soon worked out; beneath it there comes a layer of sandand clay, and then at last the true seam of precious quality and invirtually inexhaustible supply. The truth which is on the surface israrely the whole truth. It is seldom until this has been worked outand done with--as in the case of the apparent flatness of the earth--that unchangeable truth is discovered. It is the glory of the Lordto conceal a matter: it is the glory of the king to find it out. Ifmy brother, from whom I have taken the above illustration, had hadsome judicious and wide-minded friend to correct and supplement themainly admirable principles which had been instilled into him by mymother, he would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but, as it was, he fell in with one after another, each in his own way asliteral and unspiritual as the other--each impressed with one aspectof religious truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhapsthe widest-minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met; butno one from his early manhood could have augured this result; on thecontrary, he shewed every sign of being likely to develop into one ofthose who can never see more than one side of a question at a time, in spite of their seeing that side with singular clearness of mentalvision. In after life, he often met with mere lads who seemed to himto be years and years in advance of what he had been at their age, and would say, smiling, "With a great sum obtained I this freedom;but thou wast free-born. "

Yet when one comes to think of it, a late development and laboriousgrowth are generally more fruitful than those which are over-earlyluxuriant. Drawing an illustration from the art of painting, withwhich he was well acquainted, my brother used to say that all thegreatest painters had begun with a hard and precise manner from whichthey had only broken after several years of effort; and that in likemanner all the early schools were founded upon definiteness ofoutline to the exclusion of truth of effect. This may be true; butin my brother's case there was something even more unpromising thanthis; there was a commonness, so to speak, of mental execution, fromwhich no one could have foreseen his after-emancipation. Yet in thecourse of time he was indeed emancipated to the very uttermost, whilehis bonds will, I firmly trust, be found to have been of inestimableservice to the whole human race. 

For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see theChristian scheme AS A WHOLE, or even to conceive the idea that therewas any whole at all, other than each one of the stages of opinionthrough which he was at the time passing; yet when the idea was atlength presented to him by one whom I must not name, the discardedfragments of his faith assumed shape, and formed themselves into aconsistently organised scheme. Then became apparent the value of hisknowledge of the details of so many different sides of Christianverity. Buried in the details, he had hitherto ignored the fact thatthey were only the unessential developments of certain componentparts. Awakening to the perception of the whole after an intimateacquaintance with the details, he was able to realise the positionand meaning of all that he had hitherto experienced in a way whichhas been vouchsafed to few, if any others. 

Thus he became truly a broad Churchman. Not broad in the ordinaryand ill-considered use of the term (for the broad Churchman is aslittle able to sympathise with Romanists, extreme High Churchmen andDissenters, as these are with himself--he is only one of a sect whichis called by the name broad, though it is no broader than its ownbase), but in the true sense of being able to believe in thenaturalness, legitimacy, and truth qua Christianity even of thosedoctrines which seem to stand most widely and irreconcilably asunder. 

CHAPTER II

But it was impossible that a mind of such activity should have goneover so much ground, and yet in the end returned to the same positionas that from which it started. 

So far was this from being the case that the Christianity of hismaturer life would be considered dangerously heterodox by those whobelong to any of the more definite or precise schools of theologicalthought. He was as one who has made the circuit of a mountain, andyet been ascending during the whole time of his doing so: such aperson finds himself upon the same side as at first, but upon agreatly higher level. The peaks which had seemed the most importantwhen he was in the valley were now dwarfed to their true proportionsby colossal cloud-capped masses whose very existence could not havebeen suspected from beneath: and again, other points which hadseemed among the lowest turned out to be the very highest of all--asthe Finster-Aarhorn, which hides itself away in the centre of theBernese Alps, is never seen to be the greatest till one is high andfar off. 

Thus he felt no sort of fear or repugnance in admitting that the NewTestament writings, as we now have them, are not by any meansaccurate records of the events which they profess to chronicle. This, which few English Churchmen would be prepared to admit, was tohim so much of an axiom that he despaired of seeing any soundtheological structure raised until it was universally recognised. 

And here he would probably meet with sympathy from the more advancedthinkers within the body of the Church, but so far as I know, hestood alone as recognising the wisdom of the Divine counsels inhaving ordained the wide and apparently irreconcilable divergenciesof doctrine and character which we find assigned to Christ in theGospels, and as finding his faith confirmed, not by the suppositionthat both the portraits drawn of Christ are objectively true, butTHAT BOTH ARE OBJECTIVELY INACCURATE, AND THAT THE ALMIGHTY INTENDEDTHEY SHOULD BE INACCURATE, inasmuch as the true spiritual conceptionin the mind of man could be indirectly more certainly engendered by astrife, a warring, a clashing, so to speak, of versions, all of themdistorting slightly some one or other of the features of theoriginal, than directly by the most absolutely correct impressionwhich human language could convey. Even the most perfect humanspeech, as has been often pointed out, is a very gross and imperfectvehicle of thought. I remember once hearing him say that it was nottill he was nearly thirty that he discovered "what thick and stickyfluids were air and water, " how crass and dull in comparison withother more subtle fluids; he added that speech had no less deceivedhim, seeming, as it did, to be such a perfect messenger of thought, and being after all nothing but a shuffler and a loiterer. 

With most men the Gospels are true in spite of their discrepanciesand inconsistencies; with him Christianity, as distinguished from abare belief in the objectively historical character of each part ofthe Gospels, was true because of these very discrepancies; as hisconceptions of the Divine manner of working became wider, the veryforces which had at one time shaken his faith to its foundationsestablished it anew upon a firmer and broader base. He was graduallyled to feel that the ideal presented by the life and death of ourSaviour could never have been accepted by Jews at all, if its wholepurport had been made intelligible during the Redeemer's life-time;that in order to insure its acceptance by a nucleus of followers itmust have been endowed with a more local aspect than it was intendedafterwards to wear; yet that, for the sake of its subsequentuniversal value, the destruction of that local complexion wasindispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from viva vocecommunication and imperfect education were the means adopted by theCreator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadthwhich could not be otherwise obtainable--and that thus the value ofthe ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alikeby the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gainby a certain amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder to fillin the details according to his own spiritual needs, and that noideal can be truly universal and permanents unless it have anelasticity which will allow of this process in the minds of those whocontemplate it; that it cannot become thus elastic unless by the lossof no inconsiderable amount of detail, and that thus the half, as Dr. Arnold used to say, "becomes greater than the whole, " the sketch morepreciously suggestive than the photograph. Hence far from deploringthe fragmentary, confused, and contradictory condition of the Gospelrecords, he saw in this condition the means whereby alone the humanmind could have been enabled to conceive--not the precise nature ofChrist--but THE HIGHEST IDEAL OF WHICH EACH INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN SOULWAS CAPABLE. As soon as he had grasped these conceptions, which willbe found more fully developed in one of the later chapters of hisbook, the spell of unbelief was broken. 

But, once broken, it was dissolved utterly and entirely; he couldallow himself to contemplate fearlessly all sorts of issues fromwhich one whose experiences had been less varied would have shrunk. He was free of the enemy's camp, and could go hither and thitherwhithersoever he would. The very points which to others wereinsuperable difficulties were to him foundation-stones of faith. Forexample, to the objection that if in the present state of the recordsno clear conception of the nature of Christ's life and teaching couldbe formed, we should be compelled to take one for our model of whomwe knew little or nothing certain, I have heard him answer, "And somuch the better for us all. The truth, if read by the light of man'simperfect understanding, would have been falser to him than anyfalsehood. It would have been truth no longer. BETTER BE LED ARIGHTBY AN ERROR WHICH IS SO ADJUSTED AS TO COMPENSATE FOR THE ERRORS INMAN'S POWERS OF UNDERSTANDING, THAN BE MISLED BY A TRUTH WHICH CANNEVER BE TRANSLATED FROM OBJECTIVITY TO SUBJECTIVITY. In such acase, it is the error which is the truth and the truth the error. 

Fearless himself, he could not understand the fears felt by others;and this was perhaps his greatest sympathetic weakness. He wasimpatient of the subterfuges with which untenable interpretations ofScripture were defended, and of the disingenuousness of certainharmonists; indeed, the mention of the word harmony was enough tokindle an outbreak of righteous anger, which would sometimes go tothe utmost limit of righteousness. "Harmonies!" he would exclaim, "the sweetest harmonies are those which are most full of discords, and the discords of one generation of musicians become heavenly musicin the hands of their successors. Which of the great musicians hasnot enriched his art not only by the discovery of new harmonies, butby proving that sounds which are actually inharmonious arenevertheless essentially and eternally delightful? What an outcryhas there not always been against the 'unwarrantable licence' withthe rules of harmony whenever a Beethoven or a Mozart has brokenthrough any of the trammels which have been regarded as thesafeguards of the art, instead of in their true light of fetters, andhow gratefully have succeeding musicians acquiesced in and adoptedthe innovation. " Then would follow a tirade with illustration uponillustration, comparison of this passage with that, and an exhaustivedemonstration that one or other, or both, could have had no sort ofpossible foundation in fact; he could only see that the persons fromwhom he differed were defending something which was untrue and whichthey ought to have known to be untrue, but he could not see thatpeople ought to know many things which they do not know. 

Had he himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see fromhis own standpoints? Can any of us do so? The force of early biasand education, the force of intellectual surroundings, the force ofnatural timidity, the force of dulness, were things which he couldappreciate and make allowance for in any other age, and among anyother people than his own; but as belonging to England and theNineteenth Century they had no place in his theory of Nature; theywere inconceivable, unnatural, unpardonable, whenever they came intocontact with the subject of Christian evidences. Deplorable, indeed, they are, but this was just the sort of word to which he could notconfine himself. The criticisms upon the late Dean Alford's notes, which will be given in the sequel, display this sort of temper; theyare not entirely his own, but he adopted them and endorsed them witha warmth which we cannot but feel to be unnecessary, not to say more. Yet I am free to confess that whatever editorial licence I couldventure to take has been taken in the direction of lenity. 

On the whole, however, he valued Dean Alford's work very highly, giving him great praise for the candour with which he notunfrequently set the harmonists aside. For example, in his notesupon the discrepancies between St. Luke's and St. Matthew's accountsof the early life of our Lord, the Dean openly avows that it is quitebeyond his purpose to attempt to reconcile the two. "This part ofthe Gospel history, " he writes, "is one where the harmonists, bytheir arbitrary reconcilement of the two accounts, have given greatadvantage to the enemies of the faith. AS THE TWO ACCOUNTS NOWSTAND, it is wholly impossible to suggest any satisfactory method ofUNITING THEM, every one who has attempted it has in some part orother of his hypothesis violated probability and common sense, " butin spite of this, the Dean had no hesitation in accepting both theaccounts. With reference to this the author of The Jesus of History(Williams and Norgate, 1866)--a work to which my brother admittedhimself to be under very great obligations, and which he greatlyadmired, in spite of his utter dissent from the main conclusionarrived at, has the following note:-

"Dean Alford, N. T. For English readers, admits that the narratives asthey stand are contradictory, but he believes both. He is evensevere upon the harmonists who attempt to frame schemes ofreconciliation between the two, on account of the triumph they thusfurnish to the 'enemies of the faith, ' a phrase which seems to implyall who believe less than he does. The Dean, however, forgets thatthe faith which can believe two (apparently) contradictorypropositions in matters of fact is a very rare gift, and that for onewho is so endowed there are thousands who can be satisfied with aplausible though demonstrably false explanation. To the latter classthe despised harmonists render a real service. "

Upon this note my brother was very severe. In a letter, dated Dec. 18, 1866, addressed to a friend who had alluded to it, and expressedhis concurrence with it as in the main just, my brother wrote: "Youare wrong about the note in The Jesus of History, there is more ofthe Christianity of the future in Dean Alford's indifference to theharmony between the discordant accounts of Luke and Matthew thanthere would have been EVEN IN THE MOST CONVINCING AND SATISFACTORYexplanation of the way in which they came to differ. No suchexplanation is possible; both the Dean and the author of The Jesus ofHistory were very well aware of this, but the latter is unjust inassuming that his opponent was not alive to the absurdity ofappearing to believe two contradictory propositions at one and thesame time. The Dean takes very good care that he shall not appear todo this, for it is perfectly plain to any careful reader that he mustreally believe that one or both narratives are inaccurate, inasmuchas the differences between them are too great to allow ofreconciliation by a supposed suppression of detail. 

"This, though not said so clearly as it should have been, is yetvirtually implied in the admission that no sort of fact which couldby any possibility be admitted as reconciling them had ever occurredto human ingenuity; what, then, Dean Alford must have really felt wasthat the spiritual value of each account was no less precious for notbeing in strict accordance with the other; that the objective truthlies somewhere between them, and is of very little importance, beinglong dead and buried, and living in its results only, in comparisonwith the subjective truth conveyed by both the narratives, whichlives in our hearts independently of precise knowledge concerning theactual facts. Moreover, that though both accounts may perhaps beinaccurate, yet that A VERY LITTLE natural inaccuracy on the part ofeach writer would throw them apparently very wide asunder, that suchinaccuracies are easily to be accounted for, and would, in fact, beinevitable in the sixty years of oral communication which elapsedbetween the birth of our Lord and the writing of the first Gospel, and again in the eighty or ninety years prior to the third, so thatthe details of the facts connected with the conception, birth, genealogy, and earliest history of our Saviour are irrecoverable--ageneral impression being alone possible, or indeed desirable. 

"It might perhaps have been more satisfactory if Dean Alford hadexpressed the above more plainly; but if he had done this, who wouldhave read his book? Where would have been that influence in thedirection of truly liberal Christianity which has been so potentduring the last twenty years? As it was, the freedom with which theDean wrote was the cause of no inconsiderable scandal. Or, again, hemay not have been fully conscious of his own position: few men are;he had taken the right one, but more perhaps by spiritual instinctthan by conscious and deliberate exercise of his intellectualfaculties. Finally, compromise is not a matter of good policy only, it is a solemn duty in the interests of Christian peace, and this notin minor matters only--we can all do this much--but in thoseconcerning which we feel most strongly, for here the sacrifice isgreatest and most acceptable to God. There are, of course, limits tothis, and Dean Alford may have carried compromise too far in thepresent instance, but it is very transparent. The narrowness whichleads the author of The Jesus of History to strain at such a gnat isthe secret of his inability to accept the divinity and miracles ofour Lord, and has marred the most exhaustively critical exegesis ofthe life and death of our Saviour with an impotent conclusion. "

It is strange that one who could write thus should occasionally haveshown himself so little able to apply his own principles. He seemsto have been alternately under the influence of two conflictingspirits--at one time writing as though there were nothing preciousunder the sun except logic, consistency, and precision, and breathingfire and smoke against even very trifling deviations from the path ofexact criticism--at another, leading the reader almost to believethat he disregarded the value of any objective truth, and speaking ofendeavour after accuracy in terms that are positively contemptuous. Whenever he was in the one mood he seemed to forget the possibilityof any other; so much so that I have sometimes thought that he didthis deliberately and for the same reasons as those which led AdamSmith to exclude one set of premises in his Theory of MoralSentiments and another in his Wealth of Nations. I believe, however, that the explanation lies in the fact that my brother was inclined tounderrate the importance of belief in the objective truth of anyother individual features in the life of our Lord than hisResurrection and Ascension. All else seemed dwarfed by the side ofthese events. His whole soul was so concentrated upon the centre ofthe circle that he forgot the circumference, or left it out of sight. Nothing less than the strictest objective truth as to the main factsof the Resurrection and Ascension would content him; the othermiracles and the life and teaching of our Lord might then be leftopen; whatever view was taken of them by each individual Christianwas probably the one most desirable for the spiritual wellbeing ofeach. 

Even as regards the Resurrection and Ascension, he did not greatlyvalue the detail. Provided these facts were so established that theycould never henceforth be controverted, he thought that the lessdetail the broader and more universally acceptable would be theeffect. Hence, when Dean Alford's notes seemed to jeopardise theevidences for these things, he could brook no trifling; for unlessChrist actually died and actually came to life again, he saw noescape from an utter denial of any but natural religion. Christwould have been no more to him than Socrates or Shakespeare, exceptin so far as his teaching was more spiritual. The triune nature ofthe Deity--the Resurrection from the dead--the hope of Heaven andsalutary fear of Hell--all would go but for the Resurrection andAscension of Jesus Christ; nothing would remain except a sense of theDivine as a substitute for God, and the current feeling of one'speers as the chief moral check upon misconduct. Indeed, we have seenthis view openly advocated by a recent writer, and set forth in thevery plainest terms. My brother did not live to see it, but if hehad, he would have recognised the fulfilment of his own prophecies asto what must be the inevitable sequel of a denial of our Lord'sResurrection. 

It will be seen therefore that he was in no danger of being carriedaway by a "pet theory. " Where light and definition were essential, he would sacrifice nothing of either; but he was jealous for hishighest light, and felt "that the whole effect of the Christianscheme was indefinitely heightened by keeping all other lightssubordinate"--this at least was the illustration which he often usedconcerning it. But as there were limits to the value of light and"finding"--limits which had been far exceeded, with the result of anunnatural forcing of the lights, and an effect of garishness andunreality--so there were limits to the as yet unrecognisedpreciousness of "losing" and obscurity; these limits he placed at theobjectivity of our Lord's Resurrection and Ascension. Let there belight enough to show these things, and the rest would gain by beingin half-tone and shadow. 

His facility of illustration was simply marvellous. From hisconversation any one would have thought that he was acquainted withall manner of arts and sciences of which he knew little or nothing. It is true, as has been said already, that he had had some practicein the art of painting, and was an enthusiastic admirer of themasterpieces of Raphael, Titian, Guido, Domenichino, and others; buthe could never have been called a painter; for music he hadconsiderable feeling; I think he must have known thorough-bass, butit was hard to say what he did or did not know. Of science he wasalmost entirely ignorant, yet he had assimilated a quantity of strayfacts, and whatever he assimilated seemed to agree with him andnourish his mental being. But though his acquaintance with any oneart or science must be allowed to have been superficial only, he hadan astonishing perception of the relative bearings of facts whichseemed at first sight to be quite beyond the range of one another, and of the relations between the sciences generally; it was thiswhich gave him his felicity and fecundity of illustration--a giftwhich he never abused. He delighted in its use for the purpose ofcarrying a clear impression of his meaning to the mind of another, but I never remember to have heard him mistake illustration forargument, nor endeavour to mislead an adversary by a fascinating butirrelevant simile. The subtlety of his mind was a more serioussource of danger to him, though I do not know that he greatly lost byit in comparison with what he gained; his sense, however, ofdistinctions was so fine that it would sometimes distract hisattention from points of infinitely greater importance in connectionwith his subject than the particular distinction which he was tryingto establish at the moment. 

The reader may be glad to know what my brother felt about retainingthe unhistoric passages of Scripture. Would he wish to see themsought for and sifted out? Or, again, what would he proposeconcerning such of the parables as are acknowledged by every liberalChurchman to be immoral, as, for instance, the story of Dives andLazarus and the Unjust Steward--parables which can never have beenspoken by our Lord, at any rate not in their present shape? And herewe have a remarkable instance of his moderation and truly Englishgood sense. "Do not touch one word of them, " was his often-repeatedexclamation. "If not directly inspired by the mouth of God they havebeen indirectly inspired by the force of events, and the force ofevents is the power and manifestation of God; they could not havebeen allowed to come into their present position if they had not beenrecognised in the counsels of the Almighty as being of indirectservice to mankind; there is a subjective truth conveyed even bythese parables to the minds of many, that enables them to lay hold ofother and objective truths which they could not else have grasped. 

"There can be no question that the communistic utterances of thethird gospel, as distinguished from St. Matthew's more spiritual anddoubtless more historic rendering of the same teaching, have been ofinestimable service to Christianity. Christ is not for the wholeonly, but also for them that are sick, for the ill-instructed andwhat we are pleased to call 'dangerous' classes, as well as for themore sober thinkers. To how many do the words, 'Blessed be ye poor:for your's is the kingdom of Heaven' (Luke vi. , 20), carry a comfortwhich could never be given by the 'Blessed are the poor in spirit' ofMatthew v. , 3. In Matthew we find, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit:for their's is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they that mourn:for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shallinherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst afterrighteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful:for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: forthey shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall becalled the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecutedfor righteousness' sake: for their's is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, andshall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven:for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. ' In Lukewe read, 'Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. . . . But woeunto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woeunto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laughnow! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto you, when all men shallspeak well of you! for so did THEIR fathers to the false prophets, 'where even the grammar of the last sentence, independently of thesubstance, is such as it is impossible to ascribe to our Lordhimself. 

"The 'upper' classes naturally turn to the version of Matthew, butthe 'lower, ' no less naturally to that of Luke, nor is it likely thatthe ideal of Christ would be one-tenth part so dear to them had notthis provision for them been made, not by the direct teaching of theSaviour, but by the indirect inspiration of such events as were seenby the Almighty to be necessary for the full development of thehighest ideal of which mankind was capable. All that we have in theNew Testament is the inspired word, directly or indirectly, of God, the unhistoric no less than the historic; it is for us to takespiritual sustenance from whatever meats we find prepared for us, notto order the removal of this or that dish; the coarser meats are forthe coarser natures; as they grow in grace they will turn from theseto the finer: let us ourselves partake of that which we find bestsuited to us, but do not let us grudge to others the provision thatGod has set before them. There are many things which though notobjectively true are nevertheless subjectively true to those who canreceive them; and subjective truth is universally felt to be evenhigher than objective, as may be shown by the acknowledged duty ofobeying our consciences (which is the right TO US) rather than anydictate of man however much more objectively true. It is that whichis true TO US that we are bound each one of us to seek and follow. "

Having heard him thus far, and being unable to understand, much lessto sympathise with teaching so utterly foreign to anything which Ihad heard elsewhere, I said to him, "Either our Lord did say thewords assigned to him by St. Luke or he did not. If he did, as theystand they are bad, and any one who heard them for the first timewould say that they were bad; if he did not, then we ought not toallow them to remain in our Bibles to the misleading of people whowill thus believe that God is telling them what he never did tellthem--to the misleading of the poor, whom even in low self-interestwe are bound to instruct as fully and truthfully as we can. "

He smiled and answered, "That is the Peter Bell view of the matter. I thought so once, as, indeed, no one can know better than yourself. "

The expression upon his face as he said this was sufficient to showthe clearness of his present perception, nevertheless I was anxiousto get to the root of the matter, and said that if our Lord neveruttered these words their being attributed to him must be due tofraud; to pious fraud, but still to fraud. 

"Not so, " he answered, "it is due to the weakness of man's powers ofmemory and communication, and perhaps in some measure to unconsciousinspiration. Moreover, even though wrong of some sort may have hadits share in the origin of certain of the sayings ascribed to ourSaviour, yet their removal now that they have been consecrated bytime would be a still greater wrong. Would you defend the spoliationof the monasteries, or the confiscation of the abbey lands? I takeit no--still less would you restore the monasteries or take back thelands; a consecrated change becomes a new departure; accept it andturn it to the best advantage. These are things to which the theoryof the Church concerning lay baptism is strictly applicable. Fierinon debet, factum valet. If in our narrow and unsympatheticstrivings after precision we should remove the hallowed imperfectionswhereby time has set the glory of his seal upon the gospels as wellas upon all other aged things, not for twenty generations will theyresume that ineffable and inviolable aspect which our fussymeddlesomeness will have disturbed. Let them alone. It is as theystand that they have saved the world. 

"No change is good unless it is imperatively called for. Not eventhe Reformation was good; it is good now; I acquiesce in it, as I doin anything which in itself not vital has received the sanction ofmany generations of my countrymen. It is sanction which sanctifiethin matters of this kind. I would no more undo the Reformation nowthan I would have helped it forward in the sixteenth century. Leavethe historic, the unhistoric, and the doubtful to grow together untilthe harvest: that which is not vital will perish and rot unnoticedwhen it has ceased to have vitality; it is living till it has donethis. Note how the very passages which you would condemn have diedout of the regard of any but the poor. Who quotes them? Who appealsto them? Who believes in them? Who indeed except the poorest of thepoor attaches the smallest weight to them whatever? To us they aredead, and other passages will die to us in like manner, noiselesslyand almost imperceptibly, as the services for the fifth of Novemberdied out of the Prayer Book. One day the fruit will be hanging uponthe tree, as it has hung for months, the next it will be lying uponthe ground. It is not ripe until it has fallen of itself, or withthe gentlest shaking; use no violence towards it, confident that youcannot hurry the ripening, and that if shaken down unripe the fruitwill be worthless. Christianity must have contained the seeds ofgrowth within itself, even to the shedding of many of its presentdogmas. If the dogmas fall quietly in their maturity, the preciousseed of truth (which will be found in the heart of every dogma thathas been able to take living hold upon the world's imagination) willquicken and spring up in its own time: strike at the fruit too soonand the seed will die. "

I should be sorry to convey an impression that I am responsible for, or that I entirely agree with, the defence of the unhistoric which Ihave here recorded. I have given it in my capacity of editor and insome sort biographer, but am far from being prepared to maintain thatit is likely, or indeed ought, to meet with the approval of anyconsiderable number of Christians. But, surely, in these days ofself-mystification it is refreshing to see the boldness with which mybrother thought, and the freedom with which he contemplated all sortsof issues which are too generally avoided. What temptation wouldhave been felt by many to soften down the inconsistencies andcontradictions of the Gospels. How few are those who will venture tofollow the lead of scientific criticism, and admit what every scholarmust well know to be indisputable. Yet if a man will not do this, heshows that he has greater faith in falsehood than in truth. 

CHAPTER III

On my brother's death I came into possession of several of his earlycommonplace books filled with sketches for articles; some of theseare more developed than others, but they are all of them fragmentary. I do not think that the reader will fail to be interested with theinsight into my brother's spiritual and intellectual progress which afew extracts from these writings will afford, and have therefore, after some hesitation, decided in favour of making them public, though well aware that my brother would never have done so. They aretoo exaggerated to be dangerous, being so obviously unfair as tocarry their own antidote. The reader will not fail to notice thegrowth not only in thought but also in literary style which isdisplayed by my brother's later writings. 

In reference to the very subject of the parables above alluded to, hehad written during his time of unbelief:- "Why are we to interpret soliterally all passages about the guilt of unbelief, and insist uponthe historical character of every miraculous account, while we areindignant if any one demands an equally literal rendering of theprecepts concerning human conduct? He that hath two coats is not togive to him that hath none: this would be 'visionary, ' 'utopian, ''wholly unpractical, ' and so forth. Or, again, he that is smitten onthe one cheek is not to turn the other to the smiter, but to hand theoffender over to the law; nor are the commands relative toindifference as to the morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence tobe taken as they stand; nor yet the warnings against praying inpublic; nor can the parables, any one of them, be interpretedstrictly with advantage to human welfare, except perhaps that of theGood Samaritan; nor the Sermon on the Mount, save in such passages aswere already the common property of mankind before the coming ofChrist. The parables which every one praises are in reality verybad: the Unjust Steward, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the ProdigalSon, Dives and Lazarus, the Sower and the Seed, the Wise and FoolishVirgins, the Marriage Garment, the Man who planted a Vineyard, areall either grossly immoral, or tend to engender a very low estimateof the character of God--an estimate far below the standard of thebest earthly kings; where they are not immoral, or do not tend todegrade the character of God, they are the merest commonplacesimaginable, such as one is astonished to see people accept as havingbeen first taught by Christ. Such maxims as those which inculcateconciliation and a forgiveness of injuries (wherever practicable) arecertainly good, but the world does not owe their discovery to Christ, and they have had little place in the practice of his followers. 

"It is impossible to say that as a matter of fact the English peopleforgive their enemies more freely now than the Romans did, we willsay in the time of Augustus. The value of generosity and magnanimitywas perfectly well known among the ancients, nor do these qualitiesassume any nobler guise in the teaching of Christ than they did inthat of the ancient heathen philosophers. On the contrary, they haveno direct equivalent in Christian thought or phraseology. They areheathen words drawn from a heathen language, and instinct with thesame heathen ideas of high spirit and good birth as belonged to themin the Latin language; they are no part or parcel of Christianity, and are not only independent of it, but savour distinctly of theflesh as opposed to the spirit, and are hence more or lessantagonistic to it, until they have undergone a certain modificationand transformation--until, that is to say, they have been mulcted oftheir more frank and genial elements. The nearest approach to themin Christian phrase is 'self-denial, ' but the sound of this wordkindles no smile of pleasure like that kindled by the ideas ofgenerosity and nobility of conduct. At the thought of self-denial wefeel good, but uncomfortable, and as though on the point ofperforming some disagreeable duty which we think we ought to pretendto like, but which we do not like. At the thought of generosity, wefeel as one who is going to share in a delightfully exhilarating butarduous pastime--full of the most pleasurable excitement. On themention of the word generosity we feel as if we were going outhunting; at the word 'self-denial, ' as if we were getting ready to goto church. Generosity turns well-doing into a pleasure, self-denialinto a duty, as of a servant under compulsion. 

"There are people who will deny this, but there are people who willdeny anything. There are some who will say that St. Paul would nothave condemned the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, AMidsummer Night's Dream, and almost everything that Shakspeare everwrote; but there is no arguing against this. 'Every man, ' said Dr. Johnson, 'has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has aright to knock him down for it. ' But even granting that generosityand high spirit have made some progress since the days of Christ, allowance must be made for the lapse of two thousand years, duringwhich time it is only reasonable to suppose that an advance wouldhave been made in civilisation--and hence in the direction ofclemency and forbearance--whether Christianity had been preached ornot, but no one can show that the modern English, if superior to theancients in these respects, show any greater superiority than may beascribed justly to centuries of established order and goodgovernment. "

* * * * *

"Again, as to the ideal presented by the character of Christ, aboutwhich so much has been written; is it one which would meet with allthis admiration if it were presented to us now for the first time?Surely it offers but a peevish view of life and things in comparisonwith that offered by other highest ideals--the old Roman and Greekideals, the Italian ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal. "

* * * * *

"As with the parables so with the Sermon on the Mount--where it isnot commonplace it is immoral, and vice versa; the admiration whichis so freely lavished upon the teachings of Jesus Christ turns out tobe but of the same kind as that bestowed upon certain modern writers, who have made great reputations by telling people what they perfectlywell knew; and were in no particular danger of forgetting. There is, however, this excuse for those who have been carried away with suchmusical but untruthful sentences as 'Blessed are they that mourn:for they shall be comforted, ' namely, that they have not come to thesubject with unbiassed minds. It is one thing to see no merit in apicture, and another to see no merit in a picture when one is toldthat it is by Raphael; we are few of us able to stand against thePRESTIGE of a great name; our self-love is alarmed lest we should bedeficient in taste, or, worse still, lest we should be considered tobe so; as if it could matter to any right-minded person whether theworld considered him to be of good taste or not, in comparison withthe keeping of his own soul truthful to itself. 

"But if this holds good about things which are purely matters oftaste, how much more does it do so concerning those who make adistinct claim upon us for moral approbation or the reverse? Such aclaim is most imperatively made by the teaching of Jesus Christ: arewe then content to answer in the words of others--words to which wehave no title of our own--or shall we strip ourselves of preconceivedopinion, and come to the question with minds that are truly candid?Whoever shrinks from this is a liar to his own self, and as such, theworst and most dangerous of liars. He is as one who sits in animpregnable citadel and trembles in a time of peace--so great acoward as not even to feel safe when he is in his own keeping. Howloose of soul if he knows that his own keeping is worthless, howaspen-hearted if he fears lest others should find him out and hurthim for communing truthfully with himself!

* * * * *

"That a man should lie to others if he hopes to gain somethingconsiderable--this is reckoned cheating, robbing, fraudulent dealing, or whatever it may be; but it is an intelligible offence incomparison with the allowing oneself to be deceived. So in likemanner with being bored. The man who lets himself be bored is evenmore contemptible than the bore. He who puts up with shoddypictures, shoddy music, shoddy morality, shoddy society, is moredespicable than he who is the prime agent in any of these things. Hehas less to gain, and probably deceives himself more; so that hecommits the greater crime for the less reward. And I sayemphatically that the morality which most men profess to hold as aDivine revelation was a shoddy morality, which would neither wash norwear, but was woven together from a tissue of dreams and blunders, and steeped in blood more virulent than the blood of Nessus. 

"Oh! if men would but leave off lying to themselves! If they wouldbut learn the sacredness of their own likes and dislikes, andexercise their moral discrimination, making it clear to themselveswhat it is that they really love and venerate. There is no suchenemy to mankind as moral cowardice. A downright vulgar self-interested and unblushing liar is a higher being than the moral curwhose likes and dislikes are at the beck and call of bullies thatstand between him and his own soul; such a creature gives up the mostsacred of all his rights for something more unsubstantial than a messof pottage--a mental serf too abject even to know that he is beingwronged. Wretched emasculator of his own reason, whose jejunetimidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the most secretchambers of his heart!

"We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided we feel thathe was under strong temptation and well knew that he was deceiving. He has done wrong--still we can understand it, and he may yet havesome useful stuff about him--but what can we feel towards one who fora small motive tells lies even to himself, and does not know that heis lying? What useless rotten fig-wood lumber must not such a thingbe made of, and what lies will there not come out of it, falling inevery direction upon all who come within its reach. The common self-deceiver of modern society is a more dangerous and contemptibleobject than almost any ordinary felon, a matter upon which those whodo not deceive themselves need no enlightenment. "

* * * * *

"But why insist so strongly on the literal interpretation of one partof the sayings of Christ, and be so elastic about that of thepassages which inculcate more than those ordinary precepts which allhad agreed upon as early as the days of Solomon and probably earlier?We have cut down Christianity so as to make it appear to sanction ourown conventions; but we have not altered our conventions so as tobring them into harmony with Christianity. We do not give to himthat asketh; we take good care to avoid him; yet if the precept meantonly that we should be liberal in assisting others--it wanted noenforcing: the probability is that it had been enforced too muchrather than too little already; the more literally it has beenfollowed the more terrible has the mischief been; the saying onlybecomes harmless when regarded as a mere convention. So with mostparts of Christ's teaching. It is only conventional Christianitywhich will stand a man in good stead to live by; true Christianitywill never do so. Men have tried it and found it fail; or, rather, its inevitable failure was so obvious that no age or country has everbeen mad enough to carry it out in such a manner as would havesatisfied its founders. So said Dean Swift in his Argument againstabolishing Christianity. 'I hope, ' he writes, 'no reader imagines meso weak as to stand up in defence of real Christianity, such as usedin primitive times' (if we may believe the authors of those ages) 'tohave an influence upon men's beliefs and actions. To offer at therestoring of that would be, indeed, a wild project; it would be todig up foundations, to destroy at one blow all the wit and half thelearning of the kingdom, to break the entire frame and constitutionof things, to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with theprofessors of them; in short, to turn our courts of exchange andshops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal ofHorace where he advises the Romans all in a body to leave their city, and to seek a new seat in some remote part of the world by way ofcure for the corruption of their manners. 

"'Therefore, I think this caution was in itself altogetherunnecessary (which I have inserted only to prevent all possibility ofcavilling), since every candid reader will easily understand mydiscourse to be intended only in defence of nominal Christianity, theother having been for some time wholly laid aside by general consentas utterly inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth andpower. '

"Yet but for these schemes of wealth and power the world wouldrelapse into barbarianism; it is they and not Christianity which havecreated and preserved civilisation. And what if some unhappy wretch, with a serious turn of mind and no sense of the ridiculous, takes allthis talk about Christianity in sober earnest, and tries to act uponit? Into what misery may he not easily fall, and with what life-longerrors may he not embitter the lives of his children!

* * * * *

"Again, we do not cut off our right hand nor pluck out our eyes ifthey offend us; we conventionalise our interpretations of thesesayings at our will and pleasure; we do take heed for the morrow, andshould be inconceivably wicked and foolish were we not to do so; wedo gather up riches, and indeed we do most things which theexperience of mankind has taught us to be to our advantage, quiteirrespectively of any precept of Christianity for or against. Butwhy say that it is Christianity which is our chief guide, when thewords of Christ point in such a very different direction from thatwhich we have seen fit to take? Perhaps it is in order to compensatefor our laxity of interpretation upon these points that we are sorigid in stickling for accuracy upon those which make no demand uponour comfort or convenience? Thus, though we conventionalisepractice, we never conventionalise dogma. Here, indeed, we sticklefor the letter most inflexibly; yet one would have thought that wemight have had greater licence to modify the latter than the former. If we say that the teaching of Christ is not to be taken according toits import--why give it so much importance? Teaching by exaggerationis not a satisfactory method, nor one worthy of a being higher thanman; it might have been well once, and in the East, but it is notwell now. It induces more and more of that jarring and straining ofour moral faculties, of which much is unavoidable in the existingcomplex condition of affairs, but of which the less the better. Atpresent the tug of professed principles in one direction, and ofnecessary practice in the other, causes the same sort of wear andtear in our moral gear as is caused to a steam-engine by continuallyreversing it when it is going it at full speed. No mechanism canstand it. "

The above extracts (written when he was about twenty-three years old)may serve to show how utter was the subversion of his faith. Hismind was indeed in darkness! Who could have hoped that so brillianta day should have succeeded to the gloom of such mistrust? Yet asupon a winter's morning in November when the sun rises red throughthe smoke, and presently the fog spreads its curtain of thickdarkness over the city, and then there comes a single breath of windfrom some more generous quarter, whereupon the blessed sun shinesagain, and the gloom is gone; or, again, as when the warm south-westwind comes up breathing kindness from the sea, unheralded, suspected, when the earth is in her saddest frost, and on the instant all thelands are thawed and opened to the genial influences of a sweetspringful whisper--so thawed his heart, and the seed which had laindormant in its fertile soil sprang up, grew, ripened, and broughtforth an abundant harvest. 

Indeed now that the result has been made plain we can perhaps feelthat his scepticism was precisely of that nature which should havegiven the greatest ground for hope. He was a genuine lover of truthin so far as he could see it. 

His lights were dim, but such as they were he walked according tothem, and hence they burnt ever more and more clearly, till in laterlife they served to show him what is vouchsafed to such men and tosuch only--the enormity of his own mistakes. Better that a manshould feel the divergence between Christian theory and Christianpractice, that he should be shocked at it--even to the breaking awayutterly from the theory until he has arrived at a wider comprehensionof its scope--than that he should be indifferent to the divergenceand make no effort to bring his principles and practice into harmonywith one another. A true lover of consistency, it was intolerable tohim to say one thing with his lips and another with his actions. Aslong as this is true concerning any man, his friends may feel surethat the hand of the Lord is with him, though the signs thereof behidden from mortal eyesight. 

CHAPTER IV

During the dark and unhappy time when he had, as it seems to me, bullied himself, or been bullied into infidelity, he had been utterlyunable to realise the importance even of such a self-evident fact asthat our Lord addressing an Eastern people would speak in such a wayas Eastern people would best understand; it took him years toappreciate this. He could not see that modes of thought are as muchpart of a language as the grammar and words which compose it, andthat before a passage can be said to be translated from one languageinto another it is often not the words only which must be rendered, but the thought itself which must be transformed; to a peoplehabituated to exaggeration a saying which was not exaggerated wouldhave been pointless--so weak as to arrest the attention of no one; inorder to translate it into such words as should carry precisely thesame meaning to colder and more temperate minds, the words wouldoften have to be left out of sight altogether, and a new sentence orperhaps even simile or metaphor substituted; this is plainly out ofthe question, and therefore the best course is that which has beentaken, i. E. , to render the words as accurately as possible, and leavethe reader to modify the meaning. But it was years before my brothercould be got to feel this, nor did he ever do so fully, simple andobvious though it must appear to most people, until he had learned torecognise the value of a certain amount of inaccuracy andinconsistency in everything which is not comprehended in mechanics orthe exact sciences. "It is this, " he used to say, "which givesartistic or spiritual value as contrasted with mechanical precision. "

In inaccuracy and inconsistency, therefore (within certain limits), my brother saw the means whereby our minds are kept from regardingthings as rigidly and immutably fixed which are not yet fullyunderstood, and perhaps may never be so while we are in our presentstate of probation. Life is not one of the exact sciences, living isessentially an art and not a science. Every thing addressed to humanminds at all must be more or less of a compromise; thus, to take avery old illustration, even the definitions of a point and a line--the fundamental things in the most exact of the sciences--are merecompromises. A point is supposed to have neither length, breadth, nor thickness--this in theory, but in practice unless a point have alittle of all these things there is nothing there. So with a line; aline is supposed to have length, but no breadth, yet in practice wenever saw a line which had not breadth. What inconsistency is therehere, in requiring us to conceive something which we cannot conceive, and which can have no existence, before we go on to the investigationof the laws whereby the earth can alone be measured and the orbits ofthe planets determined. I do not think that this illustration waspresented to my brother's mind while he was young, but I am sure thatif it had been it would have made him miserable. He would have hadno confidence in mathematics, and would very likely have made afurious attack upon Newton and Galileo, and been firmly convincedthat he was discomfiting them. Indeed I cannot forget a certain lookof bewilderment which came over his face when the idea was put beforehim, I imagine, for the first time. Fortunately he had so grown thatthe right inference was now in no danger of being missed. He did notconclude that because the evidences for mathematics were founded uponcompromises and definitions which are inaccurate--therefore thatmathematics were false, or that there were no mathematics, but helearnt to feel that there might be other things which were no lessindisputable than mathematics, and which might also be founded onfacts for which the evidences were not wholly free frominconsistencies and inaccuracies. 

To some he might appear to be approaching too nearly to the "Sed tuvera puta" argument of Juvenal. I greatly fear that an attempt maybe made to misrepresent him as taking this line; that is to say, asaccepting Christianity on the ground of the excellence of its moralteaching, and looking upon it as, indeed, a superstition, butsalutary for women and young people. Hardly anything would haveshocked him more profoundly. This doctrine with its plausible showof morality appeared to him to be, perhaps, the most gross of allimmoralities, inasmuch as it cuts the ground from under the feet oftruth, luring the world farther and farther from the only truesalvation--the careful study of facts and of the safest inferencesthat may be drawn from them. Every fact was to him a part of nature, a thing sacred, pregnant with Divine teaching of some sort, as beingthe expression of Divine will. It was through facts that he saw God;to tamper with facts was, in his view, to deface the countenance ofthe Almighty. To say that such and such was so and so, when thespeaker did not believe it, was to lead people to worship a false Godinstead of a true one; an e?d????; setting them, to quote the wordsof the Psalmist, "a-whoring after their own imaginations. " He sawthe Divine presence in everything--the evil as well as the good; theevil being the expression of the Divine will that such and suchcourses should not go unpunished, but bring pain and misery whichshould deter others from following them, and the good being his signof approbation. There was nothing good for man to know which couldnot be deduced from facts. This was the only sound basis ofknowledge, and to found things upon fiction which could be made tostand upon facts was to try and build upon a quicksand. 

He, therefore, loathed the reasoning of Juvenal with all theintensity of his nature. It was because he believed that theResurrection and Ascension of our Lord were just as much matters ofactual history as the assassination of Julius Caesar, and that theyhappened precisely in the same way as every daily event happens atpresent--that he accepted the Christian scheme in its essentials. Then came the details. Were these also objectively true? Heanswered, "Certainly not in every case. " He would not for the worldhave had any one believe that he so considered them; but having madeit perfectly clear that he was not going to deceive himself, he sethimself to derive whatever spiritual comfort he could from them, justas he would from any noble fiction or work of art, which, while notprofessing to be historical, was instinct with the soul of genius. That there were unhistorical passages in the New Testament was to hima fact; therefore it was to be studied as an expression of the Divinewill. What could be the meaning of it? That we should consider themas true? Assuredly not this. Then what else? This--that we shouldaccept as subjectively true whatever we found spiritually precious, and be at liberty to leave all the rest alone--the unhistoric elementhaving been introduced purposely for the sake of giving greater scopeand latitude to the value of the ideal. 

Of course one who was so firmly persuaded of the objective truth ofthe Resurrection and Ascension could be in no sort of danger ofrelapsing into infidelity as long as his reason remained. During theyears of his illness his mind was clearly impaired, and no longerunder his own control; but while his senses were his own it wasabsolutely impossible that he could be shaken by discrepancies andinconsistencies in the gospels. What small and trifling things aresuch discrepancies by the side of the great central miracle of theResurrection! Nevertheless their existence was indisputable, and wasno less indisputably a cause of stumbling to many, as it had been tohimself. His experience of his own sufferings as an unbeliever gavehim a keener sympathy with those who were in that distressingcondition than could be felt by any one who had not so suffered, andfitted him, perhaps, more than any one who has yet lived to be theinterpreter of Christianity to the Rationalist, and of Rationalism tothe Christian. This, accordingly, was the task to which he sethimself, having been singularly adapted for it by Nature, and assingularly disciplined by events. 

It seemed to him that the first thing was to make the two partiesunderstand one another--a thing which had never yet been done, butwhich was not at all impossible. For Protestantism is raisedessentially upon a Rationalistic base. When we come to a definitionof Rationalism nothing can be plainer than that it demands noscepticism from any one which an English Protestant would not approveof. It is another matter with the Church of Rome. That Churchopenly declares it as an axiom that religion and reason have nothingto do with one another, and that religion, though in flatcontradiction to reason, should yet be accepted from the hands of acertain order as an act of unquestioning faith. The line ofseparation therefore between the Romanist and the Rationalist isclear, and definitely bars any possibility of arrangement between thetwo. Not so with the Protestant, who as heartily as the Rationalistadmits that nothing is required to be believed by man except suchthings as can be reasonably proved--i. E. , proved to the satisfactionof the reason. No Protestant would say that the Christian schemeought to be accepted in spite of its being contrary to reason; we saythat Christianity is to be believed because it can be shewn to followas the necessary consequence of using our reason rightly. We shouldbe shocked at being supposed to maintain otherwise. Yet this is pureRationalism. The Rationalist would require nothing more; he demursto Christianity because he maintains that if we bring our reason tobear upon the evidences which are brought forward in support of it, we are compelled to reject it; but he would accept it withouthesitation if he believed that it could be sustained by argumentswhich ought to carry conviction to the reason. Thus both are agreedin principle that if the evidences of Christianity satisfy humanreason, then Christianity should be received, but that on any othersupposition it should be rejected. 

Here then, he said, we have a common starting-point and the mainprinciple of Rationalism turns out to be nothing but what we allreadily admit, and with which we and our fathers have been asfamiliar for centuries as with the air we breathe. Every Protestantis a Rationalist, or else he ought to be ashamed of himself. Does hewant to be called an "Irrationalist"? Hardly--yet if he is not aRationalist what else can he be? No: the difference between us isone of detail, not of principle. This is a great step gained. 

The next thing therefore was to make each party understand the viewwhich the other took concerning the position which they had agreed tohold in common. There was no work, so far as he knew, which would beaccepted both by Christians and unbelievers as containing a fairstatement of the arguments of the two contending parties: every bookwhich he had yet seen upon either side seemed written with the viewof maintaining that its own side could hold no wrong, and the otherno right: neither party seemed to think that they had anything tolearn from the other, and neither that any considerable addition totheir knowledge of the truth was either possible or desirable. Eachwas in possession of truth already, and all who did not see and feelthis must be either wilfully blinded, or intensely stupid, orhypocrites. 

So long as people carried on a discussion thus, what agreement waspossible between them? Yet where, upon the Christian side, was theattempt to grapple with the real difficulties now felt byunbelievers? Simply nowhere. All that had been done hitherto wasantiquated. Modern Christianity seemed to shrink from grappling withmodern Rationalism, and displayed a timidity which could not beaccounted for except by the supposition of secret misgiving thatcertain things were being defended which could not be defendedfairly. This was quite intolerable; a misgiving was a warning voicefrom God, which should be attended to as a man valued his soul. Onthe other hand, the conviction reasonably entertained by unbelieversthat they were right on many not inconsiderable details of thedispute, and that so-called orthodox Christians in their hearts knewit but would not own it--or that if they did not know it, they wereonly in ignorance because it suited their purpose to be so--thisconviction gave an overweening self-confidence to infidels, as thoughthey must be right in the whole because they were so in part; theytherefore blinded themselves to all the more fundamental arguments insupport of Christianity, because certain shallow ones had been putforward in the front rank, and been far too obstinately defended. They thus regarded the question too superficially, and had erred evenmore through pride of intellect and conceit than their opponentsthrough timidity. 

What then was to be done? Surely this; to explain the two contendingparties to one another; to show to Rationalists that Christians areright upon Rationalistic principles in all the more important oftheir allegations; that is to say, to establish the Resurrection andAscension of the Redeemer upon a basis which should satisfy the mostimperious demands of modern criticism. This would form the first andmost important part of the task. Then should follow a no lessconvincing proof that Rationalists are right in demurring to thehistorical accuracy of much which has been too obstinately defendedby so-called orthodox writers. This would be the second part. Wasthere not reason to hope that when this was done the two partiesmight understand one another, and meet in a common Christianity? Hebelieved that there was, and that the ground had been already clearedfor such mutual compromise as might be accepted by both sides, notfrom policy but conviction. Therefore he began writing the bookwhich it has devolved upon myself to edit, and which must now speakfor itself. For him it was to suffer and to labour; almost on thevery instant of his having done enough to express his meaning he wasremoved from all further power of usefulness. 

The happy change from unbelief to faith had already taken place somethree or four years before my return from America. With it had alsocome that sudden development of intellectual and spiritual powerwhich so greatly astonished even those who had known him best. Thewhole man seemed changed--to have become possessed of an unusuallycapacious mind, instead of one which was acute, but acute only. Onlooking over the earlier letters which I received from him when I wasin America, I can hardly believe that they should have been writtenby the same person as the one to whom, in spite of not a few greatmental defects, I afterwards owed more spiritual enrichment than Ihave owed to any other person. Yet so it was. It came upon meimperceptibly that I had been very stupid in not discovering that mybrother was a genius; but hardly had I made the discovery, and hardlyhad the fragment which follows this memoir received its presentshape, when his overworked brain gave way and he fell into a statelittle better than idiocy. His originally cheerful spirits left him, and were succeeded by a religious melancholy which nothing coulddisturb. He became incapable either of mental or physical exertion, and was pronounced by the best physicians to be suffering from someobscure disease of the brain brought on by excitement and unduemental tension: in this state he continued for about four years, anddied peacefully, but still as one in the profoundest melancholy, onthe 15th of March, 1872, aged 40. 

Always hopeful that his health would one day be restored, I neverventured to propose that I should edit his book during his own life-time. On his death I found his papers in the most deplorableconfusion. The following chapters had alone received anything like apresentable shape--and these providentially are the most essential. 

A dream is a dream only, yet sometimes there follows a fulfilmentwhich bears a strange resemblance to the thing dreamt of. No one nowbelieves that the Book of Revelation is to be taken as foretellingevents which will happen in the same way as the massacre, forinstance, of St. Bartholomew, indeed it is doubtful how far the wholeis not to be interpreted as an allegory, descriptive of spiritualrevolutions; yet surely my mother's dream as to the future of one, atleast, of her sons has been strangely verified, and it is believedthat the reader when he lays down this volume will feel that therehave been few more potent witnesses to the truth of Christ than JohnPickard Owen. 

THE FAIR HAVEN

CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION

It is to be feared that there is no work upon the evidences of ourfaith, which is as satisfactory in its completeness and convincingpower as we have a right to expect when we consider the paramountimportance of the subject and the activity of our enemies. Otherwisewhy should there be no sign of yielding on the part of so manysincere and eminent men who have heard all that has been said uponthe Christian side and are yet not convinced by it? We cannot thinkthat the many philosophers who make no secret of their opposition tothe Christian religion are unacquainted with the works of Butler andPaley--of Mansel and Liddon. This cannot be: they must beacquainted with them, and find them fail. 

Now, granting readily that in some minds there is a certain wilfuland prejudiced self-blindness which no reasoning can overcome, andgranting also that men very much preoccupied with any one pursuit(more especially a scientific one) will be apt to give but scant anddivided attention to arguments upon other subjects such as religionor politics, nevertheless we have so many opponents who profess tohave made a serious study of Christian evidences, and against whoseopinion no exception can be fairly taken, that it seems as though wewere bound either to admit that our demonstrations requirerearrangement and reconsideration, or to take the Roman position, andmaintain that revelation is no fit subject for evidence but is to beaccepted upon authority. This last position will be rejected at onceby nine-tenths of Englishmen. But upon rejecting it we look in vainfor a work which shall appear to have any such success in arrestinginfidelity as attended the works of Butler and Paley in the lastcentury. In their own day these two great men stemmed the current ofinfidelity: but no modern writers have succeeded in doing so, and itwill scarcely be said that either Butler or Paley set at rest themany serious and inevitable questions in connection with Christianitywhich have arisen during the last fifty years. We could hardlyexpect one of the more intelligent students at Oxford or Cambridge tofind his mind set once and for ever free from all rising doubt eitherby the Analogy or the Evidences. Suppose, for example, that he hasbeen misled by the German writers of the Tubingen school, how willeither of the above-named writers help him? On the contrary, theywill do him harm, for they will not meet the requirements of thecase, and the inference is too readily drawn that nothing else can doso. It need hardly be insisted upon that this inference is a mostunfair one, but surely the blame of its being drawn rests in somemeasure at the door of those whose want of thoroughness has leftpeople under the impression that no more can be said than what hasbeen said already. 

It is the object, therefore, of this book to contribute towardsestablishing Christian evidences upon a more secure and self-evidentbase than any upon which they are made to rest at present, so far, that is to say, as a work which deliberately excludes whole fields ofChristian evidence can tend towards so great a consummation. Inspite of the narrow limits within which I have resolved to keep mytreatment of the subject, I trust that I may be able to produce suchan effect upon the minds of those who are in doubt concerning theevidences for the hope that is in them, that henceforward they shallnever doubt again. I am not sanguine enough to suppose that I shallbe able to induce certain eminent naturalists and philosophers toreopen a question which they have probably long laid aside assettled; unfortunately it is not in any but the very noblestChristian natures to do this, nevertheless, could they be persuadedto read these pages I believe that they would find so much whichwould be new to them, that their prejudices would be greatly shaken. To the younger band of scientific investigators I appeal morehopefully. 

It may be asked why not have undertaken the whole subject and devoteda life-time to writing an exhaustive work? The answer suggestsitself that the believer is in no want of such a book, while theunbeliever would be repelled by its size. Assuredly there can be nodoubt as to the value of a great work which should meet objectionsderived from certain recent scientific theories, and confuteopponents who have arisen since the death of our two greatapologists, but as a preliminary to this a smaller and moreelementary book seems called for, which shall give the main outlinesof our position with such boldness and effectiveness as to arrest theattention of any unbeliever into whose hands it may fall, and inducehim to look further into what else may be urged upon the Christianside. We are bound to adapt our means to our ends, and shall have abetter chance of gaining the ear of our adversaries if we can offerthem a short and pregnant book than if we come to them with a longone from which whole chapters might be pruned. We have to bring theChristian religion to men who will look at no book which cannot beread in a railway train or in an arm-chair; it is most deplorablethat this should be the case, nevertheless it is indisputably a fact, and as such must be attended to by all who hope to be of use inbringing about a better state of things. And let me add that neveryet was there a time when it so much behoved all who are impressedwith the vital power of religion to bestir themselves; for thesymptoms of a general indifference, not to say hostility, must beadmitted to be widely diffused, in spite of an imposing array offacts which can be brought forward to the contrary; and not onlythis, but the stream of infidelity seems making more havoc yearly, asit might naturally be expected to do, when met by no new works of anyreal strength or permanence. 

Bearing in mind, therefore, the necessity for prompt action, itseemed best to take the most overwhelming of all miracles--theResurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and show that it can be sosubstantiated that no reasonable man should doubt it. This I havetherefore attempted, and I humbly trust that the reader will feelthat I have not only attempted it, but done it, once and for all soclearly and satisfactorily and with such an unflinching examinationof the most advanced arguments of unbelievers, that the question cannever be raised hereafter by any candid mind, or at any rate notuntil science has been made to rest on different grounds from thoseon which she rests at present. 

But the truth of our Lord's resurrection having been onceestablished, what need to encumber this book with further evidencesof the miraculous element in his ministry? The other miracles can beno insuperable difficulty to one who accepts the Resurrection. It istrue that as Christians we cannot dwell too minutely upon every actand incident in the life of the Redeemer, but unhappily we have todeal with those who are not Christians, and must consider rather whatwe can get them to take than what we should like to give them: "Beye wise as serpents and harmless as doves, " saith the Saviour. Asingle miracle is as good as twenty, provided that it be wellestablished, and can be shewn to be so: it is here that even theablest of our apologists have too often failed; they have professedto substantiate the historical accuracy of all the recorded miraclesand sayings of our Lord, with a result which is in some instancesfeeble and conventional, and occasionally even unfair (oh! whatsuicidal folly is there in even the remotest semblance ofunfairness), instead of devoting themselves to throwing a flood ofbrilliancy upon the most important features and leaving the others toshine out in the light reflected from these. Even granting that someof the miracles recorded of our Lord are apocryphal, what of that?We do not rest upon them: we have enough and more than enoughwithout them, and can afford to take the line of saying to theunbeliever, "Disbelieve this miracle or that if you find that youcannot accept it, but believe in the Resurrection, of which we willput forward such ample proofs that no healthy reason can withstandthem, and, having accepted the Resurrection, admit it as themanifestation of supernatural power, the existence of which can thusno longer be denied. "

Does not the reader feel that there is a ring of truth and candourabout this which must carry more weight with an opponent than anystrained defence of such a doubtful miracle as the healing of theimpotent man at the pool of Bethesda? We weight ourselves as againstour opponents by trying to defend too much; no matter how sound andable the defence of one part of the Christian scheme may have been, its effect is often marred by contiguity with argument which thewriter himself must have suspected, or even known, to be ingeniousrather than sound: the moment that this is felt in any book itsvalue with an opponent is at an end, for he must be continually indoubt whether the spirit which he has detected here or there may notbe existing and at work in a hundred other places where he has notdetected it. What carries weight with an antagonist is the feelingthat his position has been mastered and his difficulties grasped withthoroughness and candour. 

On this point I am qualified to speak from long and bitterexperience. I say that want of candour and the failure to grasp theposition occupied, however untenably, by unbelievers is the chiefcause of the continuance of unbelief. When this cause has beenremoved unbelief will die a natural death. For years I was myself abeliever in nothing beyond the personality and providence of God:yet I feel (not without a certain sense of bitterness, which I knowthat I should not feel but cannot utterly subdue) that if my firstdoubts had been met with patient endeavour to understand their natureand if I had felt that the one in whom I confided had been ready togo to the root of the matter, and even to yield up the convictions ofa life-time could it be shewn that they were unsafely founded, mydoubts would have been resolved in an hour or two's quietconversation, and would at once have had the effect, which they haveonly had after long suffering and unrest, of confirming me in myallegiance to Christ. But I was met with anger and impatience. There was an instinct which told me that my opponent had never hearda syllable against his own convictions, and was determined not tohear one: on this I assumed rashly that he must have good reason forhis resolution; and doubt ripened into unbelief. Oh! what years ofheart-burning and utter drifting followed. Yet when I was at lastbrought within the influence of one who not only believed all that myfirst opponent did, but who also knew that the more light was thrownupon it the more clearly would its truth be made apparent--a man whotalked with me as though he was anxious that I should convince him ifhe were in error, not as though bent on making me believe whateverhabit and circumstances had imposed as a formula upon himself--myheart softened at once, and the dry places of my soul were watered. 

The above may seem too purely personal to warrant its introductionhere, yet the experience is one which should not be without its valueto others. Its effect upon myself has been to give me an unutterablelonging to save others from sufferings like my own; I know so wellwhere it is that, to use a homely metaphor, the shoe pinches. And itis chiefly here--in the fact that the unbeliever does not feel asthough we really wanted to understand him. This feeling is in manycases lamentably well founded. No one likes hearing doubt thrownupon anything which he regards as settled beyond dispute, and this, happily, is what most men feel concerning Christianity. Again, indolence or impotence of mind indisposes many to intellectualeffort; others are pained by coming into contact with anything whichderogates from the glory due to the great sacrifice of Christ, or tohis Divine nature, and lastly not a few are withheld by moralcowardice from daring to bestow the pains upon the unbeliever whichhis condition requires. But from whichever of these sources thedisinclination to understand him comes, its effect is equallydisastrous to the unbeliever. People do not mind a difference ofopinion, if they feel that the one who differs from them has got afirm grasp of their position; or again, if they feel that he istrying to understand them but fails from some defect either ofintellect or education, even in this case they are not pained byopposition. What injures their moral nature and hardens their heartsis the conviction that another could understand them if he chose, butdoes not choose, and yet none the less condemns them. On this theybecome imbued with that bitterness against Christianity which isnoticeable in so many free-thinkers. 

Can we greatly wonder? For, sad though the admission be, it is onlyjustice to admit that we Christians have been too often contented toaccept our faith without knowing its grounds, in which case it ismore by luck than by cunning that we are Christians at all, and ourfaith will be in continual danger. The greater number even of thosewho have undertaken to defend the Christian faith have been sadlyinclined to avoid a difficulty rather than to face it, unless it isso easy as to be no real difficulty at all. I do not say that thisis unnatural, for the Christian writer must be deeply impressed withthe sinfulness of unbelief, and will therefore be anxious to avoidraising doubts which will probably never yet have occurred to hisreader, and might possibly never do so; nor does there at first sightappear to be much advantage in raising difficulties for the solepurpose of removing them; nevertheless I cannot think that if eitherButler or Paley could have foreseen the continuance of unbelief, andthe ruin of so many souls whom Christ died to save, they would havebeen contented to act so almost entirely upon the defensive. 

Yet it is impossible not to feel that we in their place should havedone as they did. Infidelity was still in its infancy: the natureof the disease was hardly yet understood; and there seemed reason tofear lest it might be aggravated by the very means taken to cure it;it seemed safer therefore in the first instance to confine attentionto the matter actually in debate, and leave it to time to suggest amore active treatment should the course first tried proveunsatisfactory. Who can be surprised that the earlier apologistsshould have felt thus in the presence of an enemy whose novelty madehim appear more portentous than he can ever seem to ourselves? Theywere bound to venture nothing rashly; what they did they did, fortheir own age, thoroughly; we owe it to their cautious pioneeringthat we so know the weakness of our opponents and our own strength asto be able to do fearlessly what may well have seemed perilous to ourforefathers: nevertheless it is easy to be wise after the event, andto regret that a bolder course was not taken at the outset. IfButler and Paley had fought as men eager for the fray, as men whosmelt the battle from afar, it is impossible to believe thatinfidelity could have lasted as long as it has. What can be done nowcould have been done just as effectively then, and though we cannotbe surprised at the caution shewn at first, we are bound to deploreit as short-sighted. 

The question, however, for ourselves is not what dead men might havedone better long ago, but what living men and women can do mostwisely now; and in answer to it I would say that there is no policyso unwise as fear in a good cause: the bold course is also the wiseone; it consists in being on the lookout for objections, in findingthe very best that can be found and stating them in their mostintelligible form, in shewing what are the logical consequences ofunbelief, and thus carrying the war into the enemy's country; infighting with the most chivalrous generosity and a determination totake no advantage which is not according to the rules of war moststrictly interpreted against ourselves, but within such aninterpretation showing no quarter. This is the bold course and thetrue course: it will beget a confidence which can never be felt inthe wariness, however well-intentioned, of the old defenders. 

Let me, therefore, beg the reader to follow me patiently while I domy best to put before him the main difficulties felt by unbelievers. When he is once acquainted with these he will run in no danger ofconfirming doubt through his fear in turning away from it in thefirst instance. How many die hardened unbelievers through thetreatment which they have received from those to whom theirChristianity has been a matter of circumstances and habit only? Hellis no fiction. Who, without bitter sorrow, can reflect upon theagonies even of a single soul as being due to the selfishness orcowardice of others? Awful thought! Yet it is one which is dailyrealised in the case of thousands. 

In the commonest justice to brethren, however sinful, each one of uswho tries to lead them to the Saviour is bound not only to shew themthe whole strength of our own arguments, but to make them see that weunderstand the whole strength of theirs; for men will not seriouslylisten to those whom they believe to know one side of a questiononly. It is this which makes the educated infidel so hard to dealwith; he knows very well that an intelligent apprehension of theposition held by an opponent is indispensable for profitablediscussion; but he very rarely meets with this in the case of thoseChristians who try to argue with him; he therefore soon acquires ahabit of avoiding the subject of religion, and can seldom be inducedto enter upon an argument which he is convinced can lead to nothing. 

He who would cure a disease must first know what it is, and he whowould convert an infidel must know what it is that he is to beconverted from, as well as what he is to be led to; nothing can belaid hold of unless its whereabouts is known. It is deplorable thatsuch commonplaces should be wanted; but, alas! it is impossible to dowithout them. People have taken a panic on the subject of infidelityas though it were so infectious that the very nurses and doctorsshould run away from those afflicted with it; but such conduct is noless absurd than cruel and disgraceful. INFIDELITY IS ONLYINFECTIOUS WHEN IT IS NOT UNDERSTOOD. The smallest reflection shouldsuffice to remind us that a faith which has satisfied the mostbrilliant and profound of human intellects for nearly two thousandyears must have had very sure foundations, and that any digging aboutthem for the purpose of demonstrating their depth and solidity, willresult, not in their disturbance, but in its being made clear toevery eye that they are laid upon a rock which nothing can shake--that they do indeed satisfy every demand of human reason, whichsuffers violence not from those who accept the scheme of theChristian redemption, but from those who reject it. 

This being the case, and that it is so will, I believe, appear withgreat clearness in the following pages, what need to shrink from thejust and charitable course of understanding the nature of what isurged by those who differ from us? How can we hope to bring them tobe of one mind in Christ Jesus with ourselves, unless we can resolvetheir difficulties and explain them? And how can we resolve theirdifficulties until we know what they are? Infidelity is as a reekingfever den, which none can enter safely without due precautions, butthe taking these precautions is within our own power; we can all relyupon the blessed promises of the Saviour that he will not desert usin our hour of need if we will only truly seek him; there is moreinfidelity in this shrinking and fear of investigation than in almostany open denial of Christ; the one who refuses to examine the doubtsfelt by another, and is prevented from making any effort to removethem through fear lest he should come to share them, shews eitherthat he has no faith in the power of Christianity to standexamination, or that he has no faith in the promises of God to guidehim into all truth. In either case he is hardly less an unbelieverthan those whom he condemns. 

Let the reader therefore understand that he will here find no attemptto conceal the full strength of the arguments relied on byunbelievers. This manner of substantiating the truth of Christianityhas unhappily been tried already; it has been tried and has failed asit was bound to fail. Infidelity lives upon concealment. Shew it inbroad daylight, hold it up before the world and make its hideousnessmanifest to all--then, and not till then, will the hours of unbeliefbe numbered. WE have been the mainstay of unbelief through ourtimidity. Far be it from me, therefore, that I should help anyunbeliever by concealing his case for him. This were the most cruelkindness. On the contrary, I shall insist upon all his arguments andstate them, if I may say so without presumption, more clearly thanthey have ever been stated within the same limits. No one knows whatthey are better than I do. No one was at one time more firmlypersuaded that they were sound. May it be found that no one has sowell known how also to refute them. 

The reader must not therefore expect to find fictitious difficultiesin the way of accepting Christianity set up with one hand in order tobe knocked down again with the other: he will find the most powerfularguments against all that he holds most sacred insisted on with thesame clearness as those on his own side; it is only by placing thetwo contending opinions side by side in their utmost development thatthe strength of our own can be made apparent. Those who wish to crypeace, peace, when there is no peace, those who would take theirfaith by fashion as the take their clothes, those who doubt thestrength of their own cause and do not in their heart of heartbelieve that Christianity will stand investigation, those, again, whocare not who may go to Hell provided they are comfortably sure ofgoing to Heaven themselves, such persons may complain of the linewhich I am about to take. They on the other hand whose faith is suchthat it knows no fear of criticism, and they whose love for Christleads them to regard the bringing of lost souls into his flock as thehighest earthly happiness--such will admit gladly that I have beenright in tearing aside the veil from infidelity and displaying ituncloaked by the side of faith itself. 

At the same time I am bound to confess that I never should have beenable to see the expediency, not to say the absolute necessity forsuch a course, unless I had been myself for many years an unbeliever. It is this experience, so bitterly painful, that has made me feel sostrongly as to the only manner in which others can be brought fromdarkness into light. The wisdom of the Almighty recognised that ifman was to be saved it must be done by the assumption of man's natureon the part of the Deity. God must make himself man, or man couldnever learn the nature and attributes of God. Let us then follow thesublime example of the incarnation, and make ourselves as unbelieversthat we may teach unbelievers to believe. If Paley and Butler hadonly been REAL INFIDELS for a single year, instead of taking thethoughts and reasonings of their opponents at second-hand, what adifference should we not have seen in the nature of their work. Alas! their clear and powerful intellects had been trained early inthe severest exercises; they could not be misled by any of thesophistries of their opponents; but, on the other hand, never havingbeen misled they knew not the thread of the labyrinth as one who hasbeen shut up therein. 

I should also warn the reader of another matter. He must not expectto find that I can maintain everything which he could perhaps desireto see maintained. I can prove, to such a high degree of presumptionas shall amount virtually to demonstration, that our Lord died uponthe cross, rose again from the dead upon the third day, and ascendedinto Heaven: but I cannot prove that none of the accounts of theseevents which have come down to us have suffered from the hand oftime: on the contrary, I must own that the reasons which led me toconclude that there must be confusion in some of the accounts of theResurrection continue in full force with me even now. I see no wayof escaping from this conclusion: but it seems equally strange thatthe Christian should have such an indomitable repugnance to acceptit, and that the unbeliever should conceive that it inflicts anydamage whatever upon the Christian evidences. Perhaps the error ofeach confirms that of the other, as will appear hereafter. 

I have spoken hitherto as though I were writing only for men, but thehelp of good women can never be so precious as in the salvation ofhuman souls; if there is one work for which women are better fittedthan another, it is that of arresting the progress of unbelief. Canthere be a nobler one? Their superior tact and quickness give them agreat advantage over men; men will listen to them when they wouldturn away from one of their own sex; and though I am well aware thatcourtesy is no argument, yet the natural politeness shewn by a man toa woman will compel attention to what falls from her lips, and willthus perhaps be the means of bringing him into contact with Divinetruths which would never otherwise have reached him. Yet this is awork from which too many women recoil in horror--they know that theycan do nothing unless they are intimately acquainted with theopinions of those from whom they differ, and from such an intimacythey believe that they are right in shrinking. 

Oh, my sisters, my sisters, ye who go into the foulest dens ofdisease and vice, fearless of the pestilence and of man's brutality, ye whose whole lives bear witness to the cross of Christ and theefficacy of the Divine love, did one of you ever fear being corruptedby the vice with which you came in contact? Is there one of you whofears to examine why it is that even the most specious form of viceis vicious? You fear not infection here, for you know that you areon sure ground, and that there is no form of vice of which theviciousness is not clearly provable; but can you doubt that thefoundation of your faith is sure also, and can you not see that yourcowardice in not daring to examine the foul and soul-destroying denof infidelity is a stumbling-block to those who have not yet knowntheir Saviour? Your fear is as the fear of children who dare not goin the dark; but alas! the unbeliever does not understand it thus. He says that your fear is not of the darkness but of the light, andthat you dare not search lest you should find that which would makeagainst you. Hideous blasphemy against the Lord! But is not the sinto be laid partly at the door of those whose cowardice has givenoccasion for it?

Is there none of you who knows that as to the pure all things arepure, so to the true and loyal heart all things will confirm itsfaith? You shrink from this last trial of your allegiance, partlyfrom the pain of even seeing the wounds of your Redeemer laid open--of even hearing the words of those enemies who have traduced him andcrucified him afresh--but you lose the last and highest of theprizes, for great as is your faith now, be very sure that from thiscrowning proof of your devotion you would emerge with greater still. 

Has none of you seen a savage dog barking and tearing at the end ofhis chain as though he were longing to devour you, and yet if youhave gone bravely up to him and bade him be still, he is cowed andnever barks again? Such is the genius of infidelity; it loves tothreaten those who retreat, yet it shrinks daunted back from thosewho meet it boldly; it is the lack of boldness on the part of theChristian which gives it all its power; when Christians are strong inthe strength of their own cause infidels will know their impotence, but as long as there are cowards there will be those who prey uponcowardice, and as long as those who should defend the cross of Christhide themselves behind battlements, so long will the enemy come up tothe very walls of the defence and trouble them that are within. Theabove words must have sounded harsh and will I fear have given painto many a tender heart which is conscious of the depth of its ownlove for the Redeemer, and would be shocked at the thought thatanything had been neglected in his service, but has not the voice ofsuch a heart returned answer to itself that what I have written isjust?

Again, I have been told by some that they have been aware of thenecessity of doing their best towards putting a stop to infidelity, and that they have been unceasing in their prayers for friends orhusbands or relations who know not Christ, but that with prayerstheir efforts have ended. Now, there can be no one in the wholeworld who has had more signal proofs of the efficacy of prayer thanthe writer of these pages, but he would lie if he were to say thatprayer was ever answered when it was only another name for idleness, a cloak for the avoidance of obvious duty. God is no helper of theindolent and the coward; if this were so, what need to work at all?Why not sit still, and trust in prayer for everything? No; to thewomen who have prayed, and prayed only, the answer is ready at hand, that work without prayer is bad, but prayer without work worse. Letthem do their own utmost in the way of sowing, planting, andwatering, and then let them pray to God that he will vouchsafe themthe increase; but they can no more expect the increase to be of God'sfree gift without the toil of sowing than did the blessed Apostle St. Paul. If God did not convert the heathen for Paul and Apollos inanswer to their prayers alone, how can we expect that he will convertthe infidel for ourselves, unless we have first followed in thefootsteps of the Apostles? The sin of infidelity will rest upon usand our children until we have done our best to shake it off; andthis not timidly and disingenuously as those who fear for the result, but with the certainty that it is the infidel and not the Christianwho need fear investigation, if the investigation only goes deepenough. Herein has lain our error, we have feared to allow theunbeliever to put forth all his strength lest it should provestronger than we thought it was, when in truth the world would onlyhave known the sooner of its weakness; and this shall now at last beabundantly shewn, for, as I said above, I will help no infidel byconcealing his case; it shall appear in full, and as nearly in hisown words as the limits at my disposal will allow. Out of his ownmouth shall he be condemned, and yet, I trust, not condemned alone;but converted as I myself, and by the same irresistible chain ofpurest reason; one thing only is wanted on the part of the reader, itis this, the desire to attain truth regardless of past prejudices. 

If an unbeliever has made up his mind that we must be wrong, withouthaving heard our side, and if he presumes to neglect the mostordinary precaution against error--that of understanding the positionof an opponent--I can do nothing with him or for him. No man canmake another see, if the other persists in shutting his eyes andbandaging them: if it is a victory to be able to say that theycannot see the truth under these circumstances, the victory is withour opponents; but for those who can lay their hands upon their heartand say truly before God and man that they care nothing for themaintenance of their own opinions, but only that they may come toknow the truth, for such I can do much. I can put the matter beforethem in so clear a light that they shall never doubt hereafter. 

Never was there a time when such an exposition was wanted so much asnow. The specious plausibilities of a pseudo-science have ledhundreds of thousands into error; the misapplication of geology hasensnared a host of victims, and a still greater misapplication ofnatural history seems likely to devour those whom the perversion ofgeology has spared. Not that I have a word to say against TRUEscience: true science can never be an enemy of the Bible, which isthe text-book of the science of the salvation of human souls aswritten by the great Creator and Redeemer of the soul itself, but theEnemy of Mankind is never idle, and no sooner does God vouchsafe tous any clearer illumination of his purposes and manner of working, than the Evil One sets himself to consider how he can turn theblessing into a curse; and by the all-wise dispensation of Providencehe is allowed so much triumph as that he shall sift the wise from thefoolish, the faithful from the traitors. God knoweth his own. Stillthere is no surer mark that one is among the number of those whom hehath chosen than the desire to bring all to share in the graciouspromises which he has vouchsafed to those that will take advantage ofthem; and there are few more certain signs of reprobation thanindifference as to the existence of unbelief, and faint-heartednessin trying to remove it. It is the duty of all those who love Christto lead their brethren to love him also; but how can they hope tosucceed in this until they understand the grounds on which he isrejected?

For there ARE grounds, insufficient ones, untenable ones, groundswhich a little loving patience and, if I may be allowed the word, ingenuity, will shew to be utterly rotten; but as long as theirrottenness is only to be asserted and not proved, so long willdeluded people build upon them in fancied security. As yet the proofhas never been made sufficiently clear. If displayed sufficientlyfor one age it has been necessary to do the work again for the next. As soon as the errors of one set of people have been made apparent, another set has arisen with fresh objections, or the old fallacieshave reappeared in another shape. It is not too much to say that ithas never yet been so clearly proved that Christ rose again from thedead, that a jury of educated Englishmen should be compelled toassent to it, even though they had never before heard ofChristianity. This therefore it is my object to do once and for evernow. 

It is not for me to pry into the motives of the Almighty, nor toinquire why it is that for nearly two thousand years the perfectionof proof should never have been duly produced, but if I dare hazardan opinion I should say that such proof was never necessary untilnow, but that it has lain ready to be produced at a moment's noticeon the arrival of the fitting time. In the early stages of theChurch the viva voce testimony of the Apostles was still so near thatits force was in no way spent; from those times until recently theuniversality of belief was such that proof was hardly needed; it isonly for a hundred years or so (which in the sight of God are but asyesterday) that infidelity has made real progress. Then God raisedhis hand in wrath; revolution taught men to see the nature ofunbelief and the world shrank back in horror; the time of fear passedby; unbelief has again raised itself; whereon we can see that otherand even more fearful revolutions {1} are daily threatening. Whatcountry is safe? In what part of the world do not men feel an uneasyforeboding of the wrath which will surely come if they do not repentand turn unto the Lord their God? Go where we will we are consciousof that heaviness and oppression which is the precursor of thehurricane and the earthquake; none escape it: an all-pervading senseof rottenness and fearful waiting upon judgment is upon the hearts ofall men. May it not be that this awe and silence have been ordainedin order that the still small voice of the Lord may be the moreclearly heard and welcomed as salvation? Is it not possible that theinfinite mercy of God is determined to give mankind one last chance, before the day of that coming which no creature may abide? I darenot answer: yet I know well that the fire burneth within me, andthat night and day I take no rest but am consumed until the workcommitted to me is done, that I may be clear from the blood of allmen. 

CHAPTER II--STRAUSS AND THE HALLUCINATION THEORY

It has been well established by Paley, and indeed has seldom beendenied, that within a very few years of Christ's crucifixion a largenumber of people believed that he had risen from the dead. Theybelieved that after having suffered actual death he rose to actuallife, as a man who could eat and drink and talk, who could be seenand handled. Some who held this were near relations of Christ, somehad known him intimately for a considerable time before hiscrucifixion, many must have known him well by sight, but all wereunanimous in their assertion that they had seen him alive after hehad been dead, and in consequence of this belief they adopted a newmode of life, abandoning in many cases every other earthlyconsideration save that of bearing witness to what they had known andseen. I have not thought it worth while to waste time and space byintroducing actual proof of the above. This will be found in Paley'sopening chapters, to which the reader is referred. 

How then did this intensity of conviction come about? Differ as theymight and did upon many of the questions arising out of the main factwhich they taught, as to the fact itself they differed not in theleast degree. In their own life-time and in that of those who couldconfute them their story gained the adherence of a very large andever increasing number. If it could be shewn that the belief inChrist's reappearance did not arise until after the death of thosewho were said to have seen him, when actions and teachings might havebeen imputed to them which were not theirs, the case would then bedifferent; but this cannot be done; there is nothing in historybetter established than that the men who said that they had seenChrist alive after he had been dead, were themselves the first to layaside all else in order to maintain their assertion. If it could bemaintained that they taught what they did in order to sanction laxityof morals, the case would again be changed. But this too isimpossible. They taught what they did because of the intensity oftheir own conviction and from no other motive whatsoever. 

What then can that thing have been which made these men so beyond allmeasure and one-mindedly certain? Were they thus before theCrucifixion? Far otherwise. Yet the men who fled in the hour oftheir master's peril betrayed no signs of flinching when their ownwas no less imminent. How came it that the cowardice and fretfulnessof the Gospels should be transformed into the lion-heartedsteadfastness of the Acts?

The Crucifixion had intervened. Yes, but surely something more thanthe Crucifixion. Can we believe that if their experience of Christhad ended with the Cross, the Apostles would have been in that stateof mind which should compel them to leave all else for the sake ofpreaching what he had taught them? It is a hard thing for a man tochange the scheme of his life; yet this is not a case of one man butof many, who became changed as if struck with an enchanter's wand, and who, though many, were as one in the vehemence with which theyprotested that their master had reappeared to them alive. Theirconverse with Christ did not probably last above a year or two, andwas interrupted by frequent absence. If Christ had died once and forall upon the Cross, Christianity must have died with him; but it didnot die; nay, it did not begin to live with full energy until afterits founder had been crucified. We must ask again, what could thatthing have been which turned these querulous and faint-heartedfollowers into the most earnest and successful body of propagandistswhich the world has ever seen, if it was not that which they said itwas--namely, that Christ had reappeared to them alive after they hadthemselves known him to be dead? This would account for the changein them, but is there anything else that will?

They had such ample opportunities of knowing the truth that thesupposition of mistake is fraught with the greatest difficulties;they gave such guarantees of sincerity as that none have givengreater; their unanimity is perfect; there is not the faintest traceof any difference of opinion amongst them as to the main fact of theResurrection. These are things which never have been and never canbe denied, but if they do not form strong prima facie ground forbelieving in the truth and actuality of Christ's Resurrection, whatis there which will amount to a prima facie case for anythingwhatever?

Nevertheless the matter does not rest here. While there exists thefaintest possibility of mistake we may be sure that we shall dealmost wisely by examining its character and value. Let us inquiretherefore whether there are any circumstances which seem to indicatethat the early Christians might have been mistaken, and been firmlypersuaded that they had seen Christ alive, although in point of factthey had not really seen him? Men have been very positive and verysincere about things wherein we should have conceived mistakeimpossible, and yet they have been utterly mistaken. A strongpredisposition, a rare coincidence, an unwonted natural phenomenon, ahundred other causes, may turn sound judgments awry, and we dare notassume forthwith that the first disciples of Christ were superior toinfluences which have misled many who have had better chances ofwithstanding them. Visions and hallucinations are not uncommon evennow. How easily belief in a supernatural occurrence obtains amongthe peasantry of Italy, Ireland, Belgium, France, and Spain; and howmuch more easily would it do so among Jews in the days of Christ, when belief in supernatural interferences with this world's economywas, so to speak, omnipresent. Means of communication, that is tosay of verification, were few, and the tone of men's minds as regardsaccuracy of all kinds was utterly different from that of our own;science existed not even in name as the thing we now mean by it; fewcould read and fewer write, so that a story could seldom be confinedto its original limits; error, therefore, had much chance and truthlittle as compared with our own times. What more is needed to makeus feel how possible it was for the purest and most honest of men tobecome parents of all fallacy?

Strauss believes this to have been the case. He supposes that theearliest Christians were under hallucination when they thought thatthey had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion; in other words, that they never saw him at all, but only thought that they had doneso. He does not imagine that they conceived this idea at once, butthat it grew up gradually in the course of a few years, and thatthose who came under its influence antedated it unconsciouslyafterwards. He appears to believe that within a few months of theCrucifixion, and in consequence of some unexplained combination ofinternal and external causes, some one of the Apostles came to beimpressed with the notion that he had seen Christ alive; theimpression, however made, was exceedingly strong, and wascommunicated as soon as might be to some other or others of theApostles: the idea was welcome--as giving life to a hope which hadbeen fondly cherished; each inflamed the imagination of the other, until the original basis of the conception slipped unconsciously fromrecollection, while the intensity of the conviction itself becamestronger and stronger the more often the story was repeated. Strausssupposes that on seeing the firm conviction of two or three who hadhitherto been leaders among them, the other Apostles took heart, andthat thus the body grew together again perhaps within a twelve-monthof the Crucifixion. According to him, the idea of the Resurrectionhaving been once started, and having once taken root, the soil was socongenial that it grew apace; the rest of the Apostles, perhapsassembled together in a high state of mental enthusiasm andexcitement, conceived that they saw Christ enter the room in whichthey were sitting and afford some manifest proof of life andidentity; or some one else may have enlarged a less extraordinarystory to these dimensions, so that in a short time it passed currenteverywhere (there have been instances of delusions quite asextraordinary gaining a foothold among men whose sincerity is not tobe disputed), and finally they conceived that these appearances oftheir master had commenced a few months--and what is a few months?--earlier than they actually had, so that the first appearance was soonlooked upon as having been vouchsafed within three days of theCrucifixion. 

The above is not in Strauss's words, but it is a careful resume ofwhat I gather to be his conception of the origin of the belief in theResurrection of Christ. The belief, and the intensity of the belief, need explanation; the supernatural explanation, as we shouldourselves readily admit, cannot be accepted unless all others arefound wanting; he therefore, if I understand him rightly, putsforward the above as being a reasonable and natural solution of thedifficulty--the only solution which does not fail upon examination, and therefore the one which should be accepted. It is founded uponthe affection which the Apostles had borne towards their master, andtheir unwillingness to give up their hope that they had been chosen, as the favoured lieutenants of the promised Messiah. 

No man would be willing to give up such hope easily; all men wouldreadily welcome its renewal; it was easy in the then intellectualcondition of Palestine for hallucination to originate, and stilleasier for it to spread; the story touched the hearts of men toonearly to render its propagation difficult. Men and women likebelieving in the marvellous, for it brings the chance of good fortunenearer to their own doors; but how much more so when they arethemselves closely connected with the central figure of the marvel, and when it appears to give a clue to the solution of that mysterywhich all would pry into if they could--our future after death?There can be no great cause for wonder that an hallucination whicharose under such conditions as these should have gained ground andconquered all opposition, even though its origin may be traced to thebrain of but a single person. 

He would be a bold man who should say that this was impossible;nevertheless it cannot be accepted. For, in the first place, wecollect most certainly from the Gospel records that the Apostles wereNOT a compact and devoted body of adherents at the time of theCrucifixion; yet it is hard to see how Strauss's hallucination theorycan be accepted, unless this was the case. If Strauss believed theearliest followers of Christ to have been already immovably fixed intheir belief that he was the Son of God--the promised Messiah, ofwhom they were themselves the especially chosen ministers--if heconsidered that they believed in their master as the worker ofinnumerable miracles which they had themselves witnessed; as one whomthey had seen raise others from death to life, and whom, therefore, death could not be expected to control--if he held the followers ofChrist to have been in this frame of mind at the time of theCrucifixion, it might be intelligible that he should suppose thestrength of their faith to have engendered an imaginary reappearancein order to save them from the conclusion that their hopes had beenwithout foundation; that, in point of fact, they should have accepteda new delusion in order to prop up an old one; but we know very wellthat Strauss does not accept this position. He denies that theApostles had seen any miracles; independently therefore of the manyand unmistakable traces of their having been but partial and waveringadherents, which have made it a matter of common belief among thosewho have studied the New Testament that the faith of the Apostles wasunsteadfast before the Crucifixion, he must have other and strongerreasons for thinking that this was so, inasmuch as he does not lookupon them as men who had seen our Lord raise any one from the dead, nor restore the eyes of the blind. 

According to him, they may have seen Christ exercise unusual powerover the insane, and temporary alleviations of sickness, due perhapsto mental excitement, may have taken place in their presence andpassed for miracles; he would doubt how far they had even seen thismuch, for he would insist on many passages in the Gospels which wouldpoint in the direction of our Lord's never having professed to work asingle miracle; but even though he granted that they had seen certainextraordinary cases of healing, there is no amount of testimony whichwould for a moment satisfy him of their having seen more. WE see theApostles as men who before the Crucifixion had seen Lazarus raisedfrom death to life after the corruption of the grave had begun itswork, and who had seen sight given to one that had been bornsightless; as men who had seen miracle after miracle, with everyloophole for escape from a belief in the miraculous carefullyexcluded; who had seen their master walking upon the sea, and biddingthe winds be still; our difficulty therefore is to understand theincredulity of the Apostles as displayed abundantly in the Gospels;but Strauss can have none such; for he must see them as men over whomthe influence of their master had been purely personal, and due tonothing more than to a strength and beauty of character which hisfollowers very imperfectly understood. HE does not believe thatLazarus was raised at all, or that the man who had been born blindever existed; he considers the fourth gospel, which alone recordsthese events, to be the work of a later age, and not to be dependedon for facts, save here and there; certainly not where the factsrecorded are miraculous. He must therefore be even more ready thanwe are to admit that the faith of the Apostles was weak before theCrucifixion; but whether he is or not, we have it on the highestauthority that their faith was not strong enough to maintain them atthe very first approach of danger, nor to have given them any hopewhatever that our Lord should rise again; whereas for Strauss'stheory to hold good, it must already have been in a white heat ofenthusiasm. 

But even granting that this was so--in the face of all the evidencewe can reach--men so honest and sincere as the Apostles provedthemselves to be, would have taken other ground than the assertionthat their master had reappeared to them alive, unless some veryextraordinary occurrences had led them to believe that they hadindeed seen him. If their faith was glowing and intense at the timeof the Crucifixion--so intense that they believed in Christ as much, or nearly as much, after the Crucifixion as before it (and unlessthis were so the hallucinations could never have arisen at all, or atany rate could never have been so unanimously accepted)--it wouldhave been so intense as to stand in no need of a reappearance. Inthis case, if they had found that their master did not return tothem, the Apostles would probably have accepted the position that hehad, contrary to their expectation, been put to a violent death; theywould, perhaps, have come sooner or later to the conclusion that hewas immediately on death received into Heaven, and was sitting on theright hand of God; while some extraordinary dream might have beenconstrued into a revelation of the fact with the manner of itsoccurrence, and been soon generally believed; but the idea of ourLord's return to earth in a gross material body whereon the woundswere still unhealed, was perhaps the last thing that would havesuggested itself to them by way of hallucination. If their faith hadbeen great enough, and their spirits high enough to have allowedhallucination to originate at all, their imagination would havepresented them at once with a glorious throne, and the splendours ofthe highest Heaven as appearing through the opened firmament; itwould not surely have rested satisfied with a man whose hands andside were wounded, and who could eat of a piece of broiled fish andof an honeycomb. A fabric so utterly baseless as the reappearancesof our Lord (on the supposition of their being unhistoric) would havebeen built of gaudier materials. To repeat, it seems impossible thatthe Apostles should have attempted to connect their hallucinationscircumstantially and historically with the events which hadimmediately preceded them. Hallucination would have been consciousof a hiatus and not have tried to bridge it over. It would not havedeveloped the idea of our Lord's return to this grovelling andunworthy earth prior to his assumption into glory, unless those whowere under its influence had either seen other resurrections from thedead--in which case there is no difficulty attaching to theResurrection of our Lord himself--or been forced into believing it bythe evidence of their own senses; this, on the supposition that thedevotion of the first disciples was intense before the Crucifixion;but if, on the other hand, they were at that time anything butsteadfast, as both a priori and a posteriori evidence would seem toindicate, if they were few and wavering, and if what little faiththey had was shaken to its foundations and apparently at an end forever with the death of Christ, it becomes indeed difficult to see howthe idea of his return to earth alive could have ever struck even asingle one of them, much less that hallucinations which could havehad no origin but in the disordered brain of some one member of theApostolic body, should in a short time have been accepted by all asby one man without a shadow of dissension, and been strong enough toconvert them, as was said above, into the most earnest and successfulbody of propagandists that the world has ever seen. 

Truly this is not too much to say of them; and yet we are asked tobelieve that this faith, so intensely energetic, grew out of onewhich can hardly be called a faith at all, in consequence of day-dreams whose existence presupposes a faith hardly if any less intensethan that which it is supposed to have engendered. Are we notwarranted in asserting that a movement which is confined to a fewwavering followers, and which receives any very decisive check, whichscatters and demoralises the few who have already joined it, will beabsolutely sure to die a speedy natural death unless somethingutterly strange and new occurs to give it a fresh impetus? Such aresuscitating influence would have been given to the Christianreligion by the reappearance of Christ alive. This would meet therequirements of the case, for we can all feel that if we had alreadyhalf believed in some gifted friend as a messenger from God, and ifwe had seen that friend put to death before our eyes, and yet foundthat the grave had no power over him, but that he could burst itsbonds and show himself to us again unmistakably alive, we should fromthat moment yield ourselves absolutely his; but our faith would diewith him unless it had been utter before his death. 

The devotion of the Apostles is explained by their belief in theResurrection, but their belief in the Resurrection is not explainedby a supposed hallucination; for their minds were not in that statein which alone such a delusion could establish itself firmly, andunless it were established firmly by the most apparently irrefragableevidence of many persons, it would have had no living energy. How anhallucination could occur in the requisite strength to the requisitenumber of people is neither explained nor explicable, except upon thesupposition that the Apostles were in a very different frame of mindat the time of Christ's Crucifixion from that which all the evidencewe can get would seem to indicate. If Strauss had first made thispoint clear we could follow him. But he has not done so. 

Strauss says, the conception that Christ's body had been reawakenedand changed, "a double miracle, exceeding far what had occurred inthe case of Enoch and Elijah, could only be credible to one who sawin him a prophet far superior to them"--i. E. , to one whonotwithstanding his death was persuaded that he was the Messiah:"this conviction" (that a double miracle had been performed) "was thefirst to which the Apostles had to attain in the days of theirhumiliation after the Crucifixion. " Yes--but how were they to attainto it, being now utterly broken down and disillusioned? Straussadmits that before they could have come to hold what he supposes themto have held, they must have seen in Christ even after hisCrucifixion a prophet far greater than either Moses or Elias; whereasin point of fact it is very doubtful whether they ever believed thismuch of their master even before the Crucifixion, and hardlyquestionable that after it they disbelieved in him almost entirely, until he shewed himself to them alive. Is it possible that from thedead embers of so weak a faith, so vast a conflagration should havebeen kindled?

I submit, therefore, that independently of any direct evidence as tothe when and where of Christ's reappearances, the fact that theApostles before the Crucifixion were irresolute, and after itunspeakably resolute, affords strong ground for believing that theymust have seen something, or come to know something, which to theirminds was utterly overwhelming in its convincing power: when we findthe earliest and most trustworthy records unanimously asserting thatthat something was the reappearance of Christ alive, we feel thatsuch a reappearance was an adequate cause for the result actuallyproduced; and when we think over the condition of mind which bothprobability and evidence assign to the Apostles, we also feel that noother circumstance would have been adequate, nor even this unless theproof had been such as none could reasonably escape from. 

Again, Strauss's supposition that the Apostles antedated theirhallucinations suggests no less difficulty. Suppose that, after all, Strauss is right, and that there was no actual reappearance; whateverit was that led the Apostles to believe in such reappearance musthave been, judging by its effect, intense and memorable: it musthave been as a shock obliterating everything save the memory ofitself and the things connected with it: the time and manner of sucha shock could never have been forgotten, nor misplaced withoutdeliberate intention to deceive, and no one will impute any suchintention to the Apostles. 

It may be said that if they were capable of believing in the realityof their visions they would be also capable of antedating them; thisis true; but the double supposition of self-delusion, first in seeingthe visions at all, and then in unconsciously antedating them, reduces the Apostles to such an exceedingly low level of intelligenceand trustworthiness, that no good and permanent work could come fromsuch persons; the men who could be weak enough, and crazed enough, ifthe reader will pardon the expression, to do as Strauss suggests, could never have carried their work through in the way they did. Such men would have wrecked their undertaking a hundred times over inthe perils which awaited it upon every side; they would have becomevictims of their own fancies and desires, with little or no othergrounds than these for any opinions they might hold or teach: fromsuch a condition of mind they must have gone on to one still worse;and their tenets would have perished with them, if not sooner. 

Again, as regards this antedating; unless the visions happened atonce, it is inconceivable that they should have happened at all. Strauss believes that the disciples fled in their first terror totheir homes: that when there, "outside the range to which the powerof the enemies and murderers of their master extended, the spell ofterror and consternation which had been laid upon their minds gaveway, " and that under the circumstances a reaction up to the point atwhich they might have visions of Christ is capable of explanation. The answer to this is that it is indeed likely that the spell ofterror would give way when they found themselves safe at home, butthat it is not at all likely that any reaction would take place infavour of one to whom their allegiance had never been thorough, andwhom they supposed to have met with a violent and accursed end. Itmight be easy to imagine such a reaction if we did not also attemptto imagine the circumstances that must have preceded it; the momentwe try to do this, we find it to be an impossibility. If once theApostles had been dispersed, and had returned home to their formeravocations without having seen or heard anything of their master'sreturn to earth, all their expectations would have been ended; theywould have remained peaceable fishermen for the rest of their lives, and been cured once and for ever of their enthusiasm. 

Can we believe that the disciples, returning to Galilee in fear, andbereaved of that master mind which had kept them from falling outwith one another, would have remained a united and enthusiastic body?Strauss admits that their enthusiasm was for the time ended. Is itthen likely that they would have remained in any sense united, or isit not much more likely that they would have shunned each other anddisliked allusions to the past? What but Christ's actualreappearance could rekindle this dead enthusiasm, and fan it to sucha burning heat? Suppose that one or two disciples recovered faithand courage, the majority would never do so. If Christ himself withthe magic of his presence could not weld them into a devoted andharmonious company, would the rumour arising at a later time thatsome one had seen him after death, be acceptable enough to make theothers believe that they too had actually seen and handled him?Perhaps--if the rumour was believed. But WOULD it have beenbelieved? Or at any rate have been believed so utterly?

We cannot think it. For the belief and assertion are absolutelywithout trace of dissent within the Christian body, and that body wasin the first instance composed entirely of the very persons who hadknown and followed Christ before the Crucifixion. If some of theoriginal twelve had remained aloof and disputed the reappearances ofChrist, is it possible that no trace of such dissension should appearin the Epistles of St. Paul? Paul differed widely enough from thosewho were Apostles before him, and his language concerning them isoccasionally that of ill-concealed contempt and hatred rather than ofaffection; but is there a word or hint which would seem to indicatethat a single one of those who had the best means of knowing doubtedthe Resurrection? There is nothing of the kind; on the contrary, whatever we find is such as to make us feel perfectly sure that noneof them DID doubt it. Is it then possible that this unanimity shouldhave sprung from the original hallucinations of a small minority?True--it is plain from the Epistle to the Corinthians that there weresome of Paul's contemporaries who denied the Resurrection. But whowere they? We should expect that many among the more educatedGentile converts would throw doubt upon so stupendous a miracle, butis there anything which would point in the direction of these doubtshaving been held within the original body of those who said that theyhad seen Christ alive? By the eleven, or by the five hundred who sawhim at once? There is not one single syllable. Those who heard thestory second-hand would doubtless some of them attempt to explainaway its miraculous character, but if it had been founded onhallucination it is not from these alone that the doubts would havecome. 

Something is imperatively demanded in order to account for theintensity of conviction manifested by the earliest Christians shortlyafter the Crucifixion; for until that time they were far from beingfirmly convinced, and the Crucifixion was the very last thing to haveconvinced them. Given (to speak of our Lord as he must probablyappear to Strauss) an unusually gifted teacher of a noble andbeautiful character: given also, a small body of adherents who wereinclined to adopt him as their master and to regard him as the comingliberator, but who were nevertheless far from settled in theirconviction: given such a man and such followers: the teacher is putto a shameful death about two years after they had first known him, and the followers forsake him instantly: surely without hisreappearing in some way upon the scene they would have concluded thattheir doubts had been right and their hopes without foundation: butif he reappeared, their faith would, for the first time, becomeintense, all-absorbing. Surely also they might be trusted to knowwhether they had really seen their master return to them or not, andnot to sacrifice themselves in every way, and spend their whole livesin bearing testimony to pure hallucination?

There is one other point on which a few words will be necessary, before we proceed to the arguments in favour of the objectivecharacter of Christ's Resurrection as derivable from the conversionand testimony of St. Paul. It is this. Strauss and those who agreewith him will perhaps maintain that the Apostles were in truth whollydevoted to Christ before the Crucifixion, but that the Evangelistshave represented them as being only half-hearted, in order toheighten the effect of their subsequent intense devotion. But thislooks like falling into the very error which Rationalists condemnmost loudly when it comes from so-called orthodox writers. Theycomplain, and with too much justice, that our apologists have made"anything out of anything. " Yet if the Apostles were notunsteadfast, and did not desert their master in his hour of peril, and if all the accounts of Christ's reappearances are the creationsof disordered fancy, we may as well at once declare the Evangeliststo be worthless as historians, and had better give up all attempt atthe construction of history with their assistance. We cannot takewhatever we wish, and leave whatever we wish, and alter whatever wewish. If we admit that upon the whole the Gospel writings or at anyrate the first three Gospels, contain a considerable amount ofhistoric matter, we should also arrive at some general principles bywhich we will consistently abide in separating the historic from theunhistoric. We cannot deal with them arbitrarily, accepting whateverfits in with our fancies, and rejecting whatever is at variance withthem. 

Now can it be maintained that the Evangelists would be so likely tooverrate the half-heartedness of the Apostles, that we should lookwith suspicion upon the many and very plain indications of theirhaving been only half-hearted? Certainly not. If there was anylikelihood of a tendency one way or the other it would be in thedirection of overrating their faith. Would not the unbelief of theApostles in the face of all the recorded miracles be a most damagingthing in the eyes of the unconverted? Would not the Apostlesthemselves, after they were once firmly convinced, be inclined tothink that they had from the first believed more firmly than theyreally had done? This at least would be in accordance with thenatural promptings of human instinct: we are all of us apt to bewise after the event, and are far more prone to dwell upon thingswhich seem to give some colour to a pretence of prescience, than uponthose which force from us a confession of our own stupidity. Itmight seem a damaging thing that the Apostles should have doubted asmuch as long as they clearly did; would then the Evangelists go outof their way to introduce more signs of hesitation? Would any onesuggest that the signs of doubt and wavering had been overrated, unless there were some theory or other to be supported, in order toaccount for which this overrating was necessary? Would the opinionthat the want of faith had been exaggerated arise prior to theformation of a theory, or subsequently? This is the fairest test;let the reader apply it for himself. 

On the other hand, there are many reasons which should incline us tobelieve that, before the Resurrection, the Apostles were lessconvinced than is generally supposed, but it would be dangerous todepart either to the right hand or to the left of that which we findactually recorded, namely, that in the main the Apostles wereprepared to accept Christ before the Crucifixion, but that they wereby no means resolute and devoted followers. I submit that this is afair rendering of the spirit of what we find in the Gospels. It isjust because Strauss has chosen to depart from it that he has foundhimself involved in the maze of self-contradiction through which wehave been trying to follow him. There is no position so absurd thatit cannot be easily made to look plausible, if the strictlyscientific method of investigation is once departed from. 

But if I had been in Strauss's place, and had wished to make out acase against Christianity without much heed of facts, I should nothave done it by a theory of hallucinations. A much prettier, morenovel and more sensational opening for such an attempt is afforded byan attack upon the Crucifixion itself. A very neat theory might bemade, that there may have been some disturbance at one of the Jewishpassovers, during which some persons were crucified as an example bythe Romans: that during this time Christ happened to be missing;that he reappeared, and finally departed, whither, no man can say:that the Apostles, after his last disappearance, remembering that hehad been absent during the tumult, little by little worked themselvesup into the belief that on his reappearance they had seen wounds uponhim, and that the details of the Crucifixion were afterwards revealedin a vision to some favoured believer, until in the course of a fewyears the narrative assumed its present shape: that then thereappearance of Christ was denied among the Jews, while theCrucifixion as attaching disgrace to him was not disputed, and thatit thus became so generally accepted as to find its way into Plinyand Josephus. This tissue of absurdity may serve as an example ofwhat the unlicensed indulgence of theory might lead to; but truly itwould be found quite as easy of belief as that the early Christianfaith in the Resurrection was due to hallucination only. 

Considering, then, that Christianity was not crushed but overran themost civilised portions of the world; that St. Paul was undoubtedlyearly told, in such a manner as for him to be thoroughly convinced ofthe fact, that on some few but sufficient occasions Christ was seenalive after he had been crucified; that the general belief in thereappearance of our Lord was so strong that those who had the bestmeans of judging gave up all else to preach it, with a unanimity andsingleness of purpose which is irreconcilable with hallucination;that all our records most definitely insist upon this belief and thatthere is no trace of its ever having been disputed among the JewishChristians, it seems hard to see how we can escape from admittingthat Jesus Christ was crucified, dead, and buried, and yet that hewas verily and indeed seen alive again by those who expected nothingless, but who, being once convinced, turned the whole world afterthem. 

It is now incumbent upon us to examine the testimony of St. Paul, towhich I would propose to devote a separate chapter. 

CHAPTER III--THE CHARACTER AND CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL

Setting aside for the present the story of St. Paul's conversion asgiven in the Acts of the Apostles--for I am bound to admit that thereare circumstances in connection with that account which throw doubtupon its historical accuracy--and looking at the broad facts only, weare struck at once with the following obvious reflection, namely, that Paul was an able man, a cultivated man, and a bitter opponent ofChristianity; but that in spite of the strength of his originalprejudices, he came to see what he thought convincing reasons forgoing over to the camp of his enemies. He went over, and with theresult we are all familiar. 

Now even supposing that the miraculous account of Paul's conversionis entirely devoid of foundation, or again, as I believe myself, thatthe story given in the Acts is not correctly placed, but refers tothe vision alluded to by Paul himself (I. Cor. Xv. ), and to eventswhich happened, not coincidently with his conversion, but some yearsafter it--does not the importance of the conversion itself rathergain than lose in consequence? A charge of unimportant inaccuracymay be thus sustained against one who wrote in a most inaccurate age;but what is this in comparison with the testimony borne to thestrength of the Christian evidences by the supposition that OF THEIROWN WEIGHT ALONE, AND WITHOUT MIRACULOUS ASSISTANCE, THEY SUCCEEDEDIN CONVINCING THE MOST BITTER, AND AT THE SAME TIME THE ABLEST, OFTHEIR OPPONENTS? This is very pregnant. No man likes to abandon theside which he has once taken. The spectacle of a man committinghimself deeply to his original party, changing without rhyme orreason, and then remaining for the rest of his life the most devotedand courageous adherent of all that he had opposed, without a singlehuman inducement to make him do so, is one which has never beenwitnessed since man was man. When men who have been committed deeplyand spontaneously to one cause, leave it for another, they do soeither because facts have come to their knowledge which are new tothem and which they cannot resist, or because their temporalinterests urge them, or from caprice: but if they change fromcaprice in important matters and after many pledges given, they willchange from caprice again: they will not remain for twenty-five orthirty years without changing a jot of their capriciously formedopinions. We are therefore warranted in assuming that St. Paul'sconversion to Christianity was not dictated by caprice: it was notdictated by self-interest: it must therefore have sprung from theweight of certain new facts which overbore all the resistance whichhe could make to them. 

What then could these facts have been?

Paul's conduct as a Jew was logical and consistent: he did what anyseriously-minded man who had been strictly brought up would have donein his situation. Instead of half believing what he had been taught, he believed it wholly. Christianity was cutting at the root of whatwas in his day accepted as fundamental: it was therefore perfectlynatural that he should set himself to attack it. There is nothingagainst him in this beyond the fact of his having done it, as far aswe can see, with much cruelty. Yet though cruel, he was cruel fromthe best of motives--the stamping out of an error which was harmfulto the service of God; and cruelty was not then what it is now: theage was not sensitive and the lot of all was harder. From the firsthe proved himself to be a man of great strength of character, andlike many such, deeply convinced of the soundness of his opinions, and deeply impressed with the belief that nothing could be good whichdid not also commend itself as good to him. He tested the truth ofhis earlier convictions not by external standards, but by theinternal standard of their own strength and purity--a fearful errorwhich but for God's mercy towards him would have made him no lesswicked than well-intentioned. 

Even after having been convinced by a weight of evidence which noprejudice could resist, and after thus attaining to a higherconception of right and truth and goodness than was possible to himas a Jew, there remained not a few traces of the old character. Opposition beyond certain limits was a thing which to the end of hislife he could not brook. It is not too much to say that he regardedthe other Apostles--and was regarded by them--with suspicion anddislike; even if an angel from Heaven had preached any other doctrinethan what Paul preached, the angel was to be accursed (Gal. I. , 8), and it is not probable that he regarded his fellow Apostles asteaching the same doctrine as himself, or that he would have allowedthem greater licence than an angel. It is plain from his undoubtedEpistles to the Corinthians and Galatians that the other Apostles, noless than his converts, exceedingly well knew that he was not a manto be trifled with. If the arm of the law had been as much on hisside after his conversion as before it, it would have gone hardlywith dissenters; they would have been treated with politic tendernessthe moment that they yielded, but woe betide them if they presumed onhaving any very decided opinions of their own. 

On the other hand, his sagacity is beyond dispute; it is certain thathis perception of what the Gentile converts could and could not bearwas the main proximate cause of the spread of Christianity. Heprevented it from becoming a mere Jewish sect, and it has been wellsaid that but for him the Jews would now be Christians, and theGentiles unbelievers. Who can doubt his tact and forbearance, wherematters not essential were concerned? His strength in not yielding afraction upon vital points was matched only by his suppleness andconciliatory bearing upon all others. To use his own words, he didindeed become "all things to all men" if by any means he could gainsome, and the probability is that he pushed this principle to itsextreme (see Acts xxi. , 20-26). 

Now when we see a man so strong and yet so yielding--the writermoreover of letters which shew an intellect at once very vigorous andvery subtle (not to say more of them), and when we know that therewas no amount of hardship, pain, and indignity, which he did not bearand count as gain in the service of Jesus Christ; when we alsoremember that he continued thus for all the known years of his lifeafter his conversion, can we think that that conversion could havebeen the result of anything even approaching to caprice? Or again, is it likely that it could have been due to contact with thehallucinations of his despised and hated enemies? Paul the Christianappears to be the same sort of man in most respects as Paul the Jew, yet can we imagine Paul the Christian as being converted fromChristianity to some other creed, by the infection of hallucinations?On the contrary, no man would more quickly have come to the bottom ofthem, and assigned them to diabolical agency. What then can thatthing have been, which wrenched the strong and able man from all thathad the greatest hold upon him, and fixed him for the rest of hislife as the most self-sacrificing champion of Christianity? Inanswer to this question we might say, that it is of no greatimportance how the change was made, inasmuch as the fact of itshaving been made at all is sufficiently pregnant. Nevertheless itwill be interesting to follow Strauss in his remarks upon the accountgiven in the Acts, and I am bound to add that I think he has made outhis case. Strange! that he should have failed to see that theevidences in support of the Resurrection are incalculablystrengthened by his having done so. How short-sighted is mereingenuity! And how weak and cowardly are they who shut their eyes tofacts because they happen to come from an opponent!

Strauss, however, writes as follows:- "That we are not bound to theindividual features of the account in the Acts is shewn by comparingit with the substance of the statement twice repeated in the languageof Paul himself: for there we find that the author's own account isnot accurate, and that he attributed no importance to a fewvariations more or less. Not only is it said on one occasion thatthe attendants stood dumb-foundered: on another that they fell withPaul to the ground; on one occasion that they heard the voice but sawno one; on another that they saw the light but did not hear the voiceof him who spoke with Paul: but also the speech of Jesus himself, inthe third repetition, gets the well known addition about "kickingagainst the pricks, " to say nothing of the fact that the appointmentto the Apostleship of the Gentiles, which according to the twoearlier accounts was made partly by Ananias, partly on the occasionof a subsequent vision in the Temple at Jerusalem, is in this lastaccount incorporated in the speech of Jesus. There is no occasion toderive the three accounts of this occurrence in the Acts fromdifferent sources, and even in this case one must suppose that theauthor of the Acts must have remarked and reconciled thediscrepancies; that he did not do so, or rather that withoutfollowing his own earlier narrative he repeated it in an arbitraryform, proves to us how careless the New Testament writers are aboutdetails of this kind, important as they are to one who strives afterstrict historical accuracy. 

"But even if the author of the Acts had gone more accurately to work, still he was not an eye witness, scarcely even a writer who took thehistory from the narrative of an eye witness. Even if we considerthe person who in different places comprehends himself and theApostle Paul under the word 'we' or 'us' to have been the composer ofthe whole work, that person was not on the occasion of the occurrencebefore Damascus as yet in the company of the Apostle. Into this hedid not enter until much later, in the Troad, on the Apostle's secondmissionary journey (Acts xvi. , 10). But that hypothesis with regardto the author of the Acts of the Apostles is, moreover, as we haveseen above, erroneous. He only worked up into different passages ofhis composition the memoranda of a temporary companion of the Apostleabout the journeys performed in his company, and we are therefore notjustified in considering the narrator to have been an eye witness inthose passages and sections in which the 'we' is wanting. Now amongthese is found the very section in which appear the two accounts ofhis conversion which Paul gives, first, to the Jewish people inJerusalem, secondly, to Agrippa and Festus in Caesarea. The lastoccasion on which the 'we' was found was xxi. , 18, that of the visitof Paul to James, and it does not appear again until xxvii. , 1, whenthe subject is the Apostle's embarkation for Italy. Nothingtherefore compels us to assume that we have in the reports of thesespeeches the account of any one who had been a party to the hearingof them, and, in them, Paul's own narrative of the occurrences thattook place on his conversion. "

The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures having beenlong given up by all who have considered the awful consequences whichit entails, the Bible records have been opened to modern criticism:-the result has been that their general accuracy is amply proved, while at the same time the writers must be admitted to have fallen inwith the feelings and customs of their own times, and mustaccordingly be allowed to have been occasionally guilty of what wouldin our own age be called inaccuracies. There is no dependence to beplaced on the verbal, or indeed the substantial, accuracy of anyancient speeches, except those which we know to have been reportedverbatim, they were (as with the Herodotean and Thucydidean speeches)in most cases the invention of the historian himself, as being whatseemed most appropriate to be said by one in the position of thespeaker. Reporting was a rare art among the ancients, and wasconfined to a few great centres of intellectual activity; accuracy, moreover, was not held to be of the same importance as at the presentday. Yet without accurate reporting a speech perishes as soon as itis uttered, except in so far as it lives in the actions of those whohear it. Even a hundred years ago the invention of speeches wasconsidered a matter of course, as in the well-known case of Dr. Johnson, than whom none could be more conscientious, and--accordingto his lights--accurate. I may perhaps be pardoned for quoting thepassage in full from Boswell, who gives it on the authority of Mr. John Nichols; the italics are mine. "He said that the Parliamentarydebates were the only part of his writings which then gave him anycompunction: BUT THAT AT THE TIME HE WROTE THEM HE HAD NO CONCEPTIONTHAT HE WAS IMPOSING UPON THE WORLD, THOUGH THEY WERE FREQUENTLYWRITTEN FROM VERY SLENDER MATERIALS, AND OFTEN FROM NONE AT ALL--THEMERE COINAGE OF HIS OWN IMAGINATION. HE never wrote any part of hisworks with equal velocity. (Boswell's Life of Johnson, chap. Lxxxii. )

This is an extreme case, yet there can be no question about itstruth. It is only one among the very many examples which could beadduced in order to shew that the appreciation of the value ofaccuracy is a thing of modern date only--a thing which we owe mainlyto the chemical and mechanical sciences, wherein the inestimabledifference between precision and inaccuracy became most speedilyapparent. If the reader will pardon an apparent digression, I wouldremark that that sort of care is wanted on behalf of Christianitywith which a cashier in a bank counts out the money that he tenders--counting it and recounting it as though he could never be sure enoughbefore he allowed it to leave his hands. This caution would havesaved the wasting of many lives, and the breaking of many hearts. 

We, on the other hand, however reckless we may be ourselves, are inthe habit of assuming that any historian whom we may have occasion toconsult, and on whose testimony we would fain rely, must have himselfweighed and re-weighed his words as the cashier his money; an errorwhich arises from want of that sympathy which should make us bearconstantly in mind what lights men had, under what influences theywrote, and what we should ourselves have done had we been so placedas they. But if any will maintain that though the general run ofancient speeches were, as those supposed to have been reported byJohnson, pure invention, yet that it is not likely that one reportingthe words of Almighty God should have failed to feel the awfulresponsibility of his position, we can only answer that the writer ofthe Acts did most indisputably so fail, as is shewn by the variousreports of those words which he has himself given: if he could inthe innocency of his heart do this, and at one time report theAlmighty as saying this, and at another that, as though, more orless, this or that were a matter of no moment, what certainty can wehave concerning such a man that inaccuracy shall not elsewhere befound in him? None. He is a warped mirror which will distort everyobject that it reflects. 

It follows, then, that from the Acts of the Apostles we have no datafor arriving at any conclusion as to the manner of Paul's change offaith, nor the circumstances connected with it. To us the accountsthere given should be simply non-existent; but this is not easy, forwe have heard them too often and from too early an age to be able toescape their influence; yet we must assuredly ignore them if we areanxious to arrive at truth. We cannot let the story told in the Actsenter into any judgement which we may form concerning Paul'scharacter. The desire to represent him as having been converted bymiracle was very natural. He himself tells us that he saw visions, and received his apostleship by revelation--not necessarily at thetime of, or immediately after, his conversion, but still at someperiod or other in his life; it would be the most natural thing inthe world for the writer of the Acts to connect some version of oneof these visions with the conversion itself: the dramatic effectwould be heightened by making the change, while the change itselfwould be utterly unimportant in the eyes of such a writer; be thishowever as it may, we are only now concerned with the fact that weknow nothing about Paul's conversion from the Acts of the Apostles, which should make us believe that that conversion was wrought in himby any other means, than by such an irresistible pressure of evidenceas no sane person could withstand. 

From the Apostle's own writings we can glean nothing about hisconversion which would point in the direction of its having beensudden or miraculous. It is true that in the Epistle to theGalatians he says, "After it had pleased God to reveal his Son inme, " but this expression does not preclude the supposition that hisconversion may have been led up to by a gradual process, theculmination of which (if that) he alone regarded as miraculous. Thuswe are forced to admit that we know nothing from any sourceconcerning the manner and circumstances of St. Paul's change fromJudaism to Christianity, and we can only conclude therefore that hechanged because he found the weight of the evidence to be greaterthan he could resist. And this, as we have seen, is an exceedinglytelling fact. The probability is, that coming much into contact withChristians through his persecution of them, and submitting them tothe severest questioning, he found that they were in all respectssober plainspoken men, that their conviction was intense, their storycoherent, and the doctrines which they had received simple andennobling; that these results of many inquisitions were so unvaryingthat he found conviction stealing gradually upon him against hiswill; common honesty compelled him to inquire further; the answerspointed invariably in one direction only; until at length he foundhimself utterly unable to resist the weight of evidence which he hadcollected, and resolved, perhaps at the last suddenly, to yieldhimself a convert to Christianity. 

Strauss says that, "in the presence of the believers in Jesus, " theconviction that he was a false teacher--an impostor--"must havebecome every day more doubtful to him. They considered it not onlypublicly honourable to be as convinced of his Resurrection as theywere of their own life--but they shewed also a state of mind, a quietpeace, a tranquil cheerfulness, even under suffering, which put toshame the restless and joyless zeal of their persecutor. Could HEhave been a false teacher who had adherents such as these? Couldthat have been a false pretence which gave such rest and security? onthe one hand, he saw the new sect, in spite of all persecutions, nay, in consequence of them, extending their influence wider and widerround them; on the other, as their persecutor, he felt that inwardtranquillity growing less and less which he could observe in so manyways in the persecuted. We cannot therefore be surprised if in hoursof inward despondency and unhappiness he put to himself the question, 'Who after all is right, thou, or the crucified Galilean about whomthese men are so enthusiastic?' And when he had got as far as this, the result, with his bodily and mental characteristics, naturallyfollowed in an ecstasy in which the very same Christ whom up to thistime he had so passionately persecuted, appeared to him in all theglory of which his adherents spoke so much, shewed him the perversityand folly of his conduct, and called him to come over to hisservice. "

The above comes simply to this, that Paul in his constant contactwith Christians found that they had more to say for themselves thanhe could answer, and should, one would have thought, have suggestedto Strauss what he supposes to have occurred to Paul, namely, that itwas not likely that these men had made a mistake in thinking thatthey had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion. There can be nodoubt about Strauss's being right as to the Christian intensity ofconviction, strenuousness of assertion, and readiness to suffer forthe sake of their faith in Christ; and these are the main points withwhich we are concerned. We arrive therefore at the conclusion thatthe first Christians were sufficiently unanimous, coherent andundaunted to convince the foremost of their enemies. They were notso BEFORE the Crucifixion; they could not certainly have been made soby the Crucifixion alone; something beyond the Crucifixion must haveoccurred to give them such a moral ascendancy as should suffice togenerate a revulsion of feeling in the mind of the persecuting Saul. Strauss asks us to believe that this missing something is to be foundin the hallucinations of two or three men whose names have not beenrecorded and who have left no mark of their own. Is there anyoccasion for answer?

It is inconceivable that he who could write the Epistle to the Romansshould not also have been as able as any man who ever lived toquestion the early believers as to their converse with Christ, and toreport faithfully the substance of what they told him. That he knewthe other Apostles, that he went up to Jerusalem to hold conferenceswith them, that he abode fifteen days with St. Peter--as he tells us, in order "to question him"--these things are certain. The Greek word?st???sa? is a very suggestive one. It is so easy to make too muchout of anything that I hardly dare to say how strongly the use of theverb ?st??e?? suggests to me "getting at the facts of the case, ""questioning as to how things happened, " yet such would be the mostobvious meaning of the word from which our own "history" and "story"are derived. Fifteen days was time enough to give Paul the means ofcoming to an understanding with Peter as to what the value of Peter'sstory was, nor can we believe that Paul should not both receive andtransmit perfectly all that he was then told. In fact, withoutsupposing these men to be so utterly visionary that nothing durablecould come out of them, there is no escape from holding that Peterwas justified in firmly believing that he had seen Christ alivewithin a very few days of the Crucifixion, that he succeeded also insatisfying Paul that this belief was well-founded, and that in theaccount of Christ's reappearances, as given I. Cor. Xv. , we have avirtually verbatim report of what Paul heard from Peter and the otherApostles. Of course the possibility remains that Paul may have beentoo easily satisfied, and not have cross-examined Peter as closely ashe might have done. But then Paul was converted BEFORE thisinterview; and this implies that he had already found a generalconsent among the Christians whom he had met with, that the storywhich he afterwards heard from Peter (or one to the same effect) wastrue. Whence then the unanimity of this belief? Strauss answers asbefore--from the hallucinations of an originally small minority. Wecan only again reply that for the reasons already given we find itquite impossible to agree with him. 

[The quotation from Strauss given in this chapter will be found pp. 414, 415, 420, of the first volume of the English translation, published by Williams and Norgate, 1865. I believe that my brotherintended to make a fresh translation from the original passages, buthe never carried out his intention, and in his MS. The page of theEnglish translation with the first and last words of each passage arealone given. I could hardly venture to undertake the responsibilityof making a fresh translation myself, and have therefore adheredalmost word for word to the published English translation--here andthere, however, a trifling alteration was really irresistible on thescores alike of euphony and clearness. --W. B. O. ]

CHAPTER IV--PAUL'S TESTIMONY CONSIDERED

Enough has perhaps been said to cause the reader to agree with theview of St. Paul's conversion taken above--that is to say, to makehim regard the conversion as mainly, if not entirely, due to theweight of evidence afforded by the courage and consistency of theearly Christians. 

But, the change in Paul's mind being thus referred to causes whichpreclude all possibility of hallucination or ecstasy on his own part, it becomes unnecessary to discuss the attempts which have been madeto explain away the miraculous character of the account given in theActs. I believe that this account is founded upon fact, and that itis derived from some description furnished by St. Paul himself of thevision mentioned, I. Cor. Xv. , which again is very possibly the sameas that of II. Cor. Xii. For the purposes of the presentinvestigation, however, the whole story must be set aside. At thesame time it should be borne in mind, that any detraction from thehistorical accuracy of the writer of the Acts, is more thancompensated for, by the additional weight given to the conversion ofSt. Paul, whom we are now able to regard as having been converted byevidence which was in itself overpowering, and which did not stand inneed of any miraculous interference in order to confirm it. 

It is important to observe that the testimony of Paul should carrymore weight with those who are bent upon close critical investigationthan that even of the Evangelists. St. Paul is one whom we know, andknow well. No syllable of suspicion has ever been breathed, even inGermany, against the first four of the Epistles which have beengenerally assigned to him; friends and foes of Christianity are alikeagreed to accept them as the genuine work of the Apostle. Fewfigures, therefore, in ancient history stand out more clearlyrevealed to us than that of St. Paul, whereas a thick veil ofdarkness hangs over that of each one of the Evangelists. Who St. Matthew was, and whether the gospel that we have is an original work, or a translation (as would appear from Papias, our highestauthority), and how far it has been modified in translation, arethings which we shall never know. The Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke are involved in even greater obscurity. The authorship, date, and origin of the fourth Gospel have been, and are being, even morehotly contested than those of the other three, and all that can beaffirmed with certainty concerning it is, that no trace of itsexistence can be found before the latter half of the second century, and that the spirit of the work itself is eminently anti-Judaistic, whereas St. John appears both from the Gospels and from St. Paul'sEpistles to have been a pillar of Judaism. 

With St. Paul all is changed: we not only know him better than weknow nine-tenths of our own most eminent countrymen of the lastcentury, but we feel a confidence in him which grows greater andgreater the more we study his character. He combines to perfectionthe qualities that make a good witness--capacity and integrity: addto this that his conclusions were forced upon him. We therefore feelthat, whereas from a scientific point of view, the Gospel narrativescan only be considered as the testimony of early and sincere writersof whom we know little or nothing, yet that in the evidence of St. Paul we find the missing link which connects us securely with actualeye-witnesses and gives us a confidence in the general accuracy ofthe Gospels which they could never of themselves alone have imparted. We could indeed ill spare either the testimony of the Evangelists orthat of St. Paul, but if we were obliged to content ourselves withone only, we should choose the Apostle. 

Turning then to the evidence of St. Paul as derivable from I. Cor. Xv. We find the following:

"Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preachedunto you, which also ye have received and wherein ye stand. By whichalso ye are saved if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first ofall that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sinsaccording to the Scriptures: and that He was buried, and that Herose again the third day according to the Scriptures; and that He wasseen of Cephas, then of the twelve: after that He was seen of abovefive hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater portion remainunto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that He wasseen of James; then of all the Apostles. And last of all He was seenof me also, as of one born out of due time. "

In the first place we must notice Paul's assertion that the Gospelwhich he was then writing was identical with that which he hadoriginally preached. We may assume that each of the appearances ofChrist here mentioned had in Paul's mind a definite time and place, derived from the account which he had received and which probably ledto his conversion; the words "that which I also received" surelyimply "that which I also received IN THE FIRST INSTANCE": now weknow from his own mouth (Gal. I. , 16, 17) that AFTER his conversionhe "conferred not with flesh and blood"--"neither, " he continues, "went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before me, but Iwent into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus: then after threeyears I went up to Jerusalem to see (?st???sa?) Peter, and abode withhim fifteen days, but others of the Apostles saw I none, save Jamesthe Lord's brother. " Since, then, he must have heard SOME storyconcerning Christ's reappearances before his conversion andsubsequent sojourn in Arabia, and since he had heard nothing fromeye-witnesses until the time of his going up to Jerusalem three yearslater, it is probable that the account quoted above is the substanceof what he found persisted in by the Christians whom he waspersecuting at Damascus, and was at length compelled to believe. Butthis is very unimportant: it is more to the point to insist upon thefact that St. Paul must have received the account given I. Cor. Xv. , 3-8 within a very few years of the Crucifixion itself, and that itwas subsequently confirmed to him by Peter, and probably by James andJohn, during his stay of fifteen days in Peter's house. 

This account can have been nothing new even then, for it is plainthat at the time of Paul's conversion the Christian Church had spreadfar: Paul speaks of RETURNING to Damascus, as though the writer ofthe Acts was right as regards the place of his conversion; but thefact of there having been a church in Damascus of sufficientimportance for Paul to go thither to persecute it, involves the lapseof considerable time since the original promulgation of our Lord'sResurrection, and throws back the origin of the belief in that eventto a time closely consequent upon the Crucifixion itself. 

Now Paul informs us that he was told (we may assume by Peter andJames) that Christ first reappeared WITHIN THREE DAYS OF THECRUCIFIXION. There is no sufficient reason for doubting this; andone fact of weekly recurrence even to this day, affords it strikingconfirmation--I refer to the institution of Sunday as the Lord's day. We know that the observance of this day in commemoration of theResurrection was a very early practice, nor is there anything whichwould seem to throw doubt upon the fact of the first "Sunday" havingbeen also the Sunday of the Resurrection. Another confirmation ofthe early date assigned to the Resurrection by St. Paul, is to befound in the fact that every instinct would warn the Apostles AGAINSTthe third day as being dangerously early, and as opening a door forthe denial of the completeness of the death. The fortieth day wouldfar more naturally have been chosen. 

Turning now from the question of the date of the first reappearanceto what is told us of the reappearances themselves, we find that theearliest was vouchsafed to St. Peter, which is at first sight opposedto the Evangelistic records; but this is a discrepancy upon which nostress should be laid; St. Paul might well be aware that MaryMagdalene was the first to look upon her risen Lord, and yet havepreferred to dwell upon the more widely known names of Peter and hisfellow Apostles. The facts are probably these, that our Lord firstshewed Himself to the women, but that Peter was the first of theApostolic body to see Him; it was natural that if our Lord did notchoose to show Himself to the Apostles without preparation, Petershould have been chosen as the one best fitted to prepare them:Peter probably collected the other Apostles, and then the Redeemershewed Himself alive to all together. This is what we should gatherfrom St. Paul's narrative; a narrative which it would seem arbitraryto set aside in the face of St. Paul's character, opportunities andantecedent prejudices against Christianity--in the face also of theunanimity of all the records we have, as well as of the fact that theChristian religion triumphed, and of the endless difficultiesattendant on the hallucination theory. 

We conclude therefore that Paul was satisfied by sufficient evidencethat our Lord had appeared to Peter on the third day after theCrucifixion, nor can any reasonable doubt be thrown upon the otherappearances of which he tells us. It is true that on the occasion ofhis visit to Peter he saw none other of the Apostles save James--butthere is nothing to lead us to suppose that there was any want ofunanimity among them: no trace of this has come down to us, andwould surely have done so if it had existed. If any dependence atall is to be placed on the writers of the New Testament it did notexist. Stronger evidence than this unanimity it would be hard tofind. 

Another most noticeable feature is the fewness of the recordedappearances of Christ. They commenced according to Paul (and this isvirtually according to Peter and James) immediately after theCrucifixion. Paul mentions only five appearances: this does notpreclude the supposition that he knew of more, nor that the women whocame to the sepulchre had also seen Him, but it does seem to implythat the reappearances were few in number, and that they continuedonly for a very short time. They were sufficient for their purpose:one of preparation to Peter--another to the Apostles--another to theoutside world, and then one or two more--but still not more thanenough to establish the fact beyond all possibility of dispute. Thewriter of the Acts tells us that Christ was seen for a space of fortydays--presumably not every day, but from time to time. Now fortydays is a mystical period, and one which may mean either more orless, within a week or two, than the precise time stated; it seemsupon the whole most reasonable to conclude that the reappearancesrecorded by Paul, and some few others not recorded, extended over aperiod of one or two months after the Crucifixion, and that they thencame to an end; for there can be no doubt that St. Paul conceivedthem as having ended with the appearance to the assembled Apostlesmentioned I. Cor. Xv. , 7, and, though he does not say so expressly, there is that in the context which suggests their having beenconfined to a short space of time. 

It is perfectly clear that St. Paul did not believe that any one hadseen Christ in the interval between the last recorded appearance tothe eleven, and the vision granted to himself. The words "and lastof all he was seen also of me AS OF ONE BORN OUT OF DUE TIME" pointstrongly in the direction of a lapse of some years between the secondappearance to the eleven and his own vision. This confirms and isconfirmed by the writer of the Acts. St. Paul never could have usedthe words quoted above, if he had held that the appearances which herecords had been spread over a space of years intervening between theCrucifixion and his own vision. Where would be the force of "bornout of due time" unless the time of the previous appearances had longpassed by? But if, at the time of St. Paul's conversion, it wasalready many years since the last occasion upon which Christ had beenseen by his disciples, we find ourselves driven back to a timeclosely consequent upon the Crucifixion as the only possible date ofthe reappearances. But this is in itself sufficient condemnation ofStrauss's theory: that theory requires considerable time for thedevelopment of a perfectly unanimous and harmonious belief in thehallucinations, while every particle of evidence which we can getpoints in the direction of the belief in the Resurrection havingfollowed very closely upon the Crucifixion. 

To repeat: had the reappearances been due to hallucination only, they would neither have been so few in number nor have come to an endso soon. When once the mind has begun to run riot in hallucination, it is prodigal of its own inventions. Favoured believers would havebeen constantly seeing Christ even up to the time of Paul's letter tothe Corinthians, and the Apostle would have written that even thenChrist was still occasionally seen of those who trusted in him, andserved him faithfully. But we meet with nothing of the sort: we aretold that Christ was seen a few times shortly after the Crucifixion, then AFTER A LAPSE OF SEVERAL YEARS (I am surely warranted in sayingthis) Paul himself saw Him--but no one in the interval, and no oneafterwards. This is not the manner of the hallucinations ofuneducated people. It is altogether too sober: the state of mindfrom which alone so baseless a delusion could spring, is one whichnever could have been contented with the results which were evidentlyall, or nearly all, that Paul knew of. St. Paul's words cannot beset aside without more cause than Strauss has shewn: instead ofbetraying a tendency towards exaggeration, they contain nothingwhatever, with the exception of his own vision, that is notimperatively demanded in order to account for the rise and spread ofChristianity. 

Concerning that vision Strauss writes as follows:

"With regard to the appearance he (Paul) witnessed--he uses the sameword (?f??) as with regard to the others: he places it in the samecategory with them only in the last place, as he names himself thelast of the Apostles, but in exactly the same rank with the others. Thus much, therefore, Paul knew--or supposed--that the appearanceswhich the elder disciples had seen soon after the Resurrection ofJesus had been of the same kind as that which had been, only later, vouchsafed to himself. Of what sort then was this?"

I confess that I am wholly unable to feel the force of the above. Strauss says that Paul's vision was ecstatic--subjective and notobjective--that Paul thought he saw Christ, although he never reallysaw him. But, says Strauss, he uses the same word for his own visionand for the appearances to the earlier Apostles: it is plaintherefore that he did not suppose the earlier Apostles to have seenChrist in the same sort of way in which they saw themselves and otherpeople, but to have seen him as Paul himself did, i. E. , bysupernatural revelation. 

But would it not be more fair to say that Paul's using the same wordfor all the appearances--his own vision included--implies that heconsidered this last to have been no less real than those vouchsafedearlier, though he may have been perfectly well aware that it wasdifferent in kind? The use of the same word for all the appearancesis quite compatible with a belief in Paul's mind that the manner inwhich he saw Christ was different from that in which the Apostles hadseen him: indeed, so long as he believed that he had seen Christ noless really than the others, one cannot see why he should have usedany other word for his own vision than that which he had applied tothe others: we should even expect that he would do so, and should besurprised at his having done otherwise. That Paul did believe in thereality of his own vision is indisputable, and his use of the word?f?? was probably dictated by a desire to assert this belief in thestrongest possible way, and to place his own vision in the samecategory with others, which were so universally known amongChristians to have been material and objective, that there was nooccasion to say so. Nevertheless there is that in Paul's words onwhich Strauss does not dwell, but which cannot be passed over withoutnotice. Paul does not simply say, "and last of all he was seen alsoof me"--but he adds the words "as of one born out of due time. "

It is impossible to say decisively that this addition implies thatPaul recognised a difference in kind between the appearances, inasmuch as the words added may only refer to time--still they wouldexplain the possible use of [?f??] in a somewhat different sense, andI cannot but think that they will suggest this possibility to thereader. They will make him feel, if he does not feel it withoutthem, how strained a proceeding it is to bind Paul down to arigorously identical meaning on every occasion on which the same wordcame from his pen, and to maintain that because he once uses it onthe occasion of an appearance which he held to be vouchsafed byrevelation, therefore, wherever else he uses it, he must haveintended to refer to something seen by revelation: the words "as ofone born out of due time" imply the utterly unlooked for andtranscendent nature of the favour, and suggest, even though they donot compel, the inference that while the other Apostles had seenChrist in the common course of nature, as a visible tangible beingbefore their waking eyes, he had himself seen Him not less truly, butstill only by special and unlooked for revelation. If such thoughtswere in his mind he would not probably have expressed them fartherthan by the touching words which he has added concerning his ownvision. So much for the objection that the evidence of Paulconcerning the earlier appearances is impaired by his having used thesame word for them, and for the appearance to himself. It onlyremains therefore to review in brief the general bearings of Paul'stestimony as given I. Cor. Xv. , 1-8. 

Firstly, there is the early commencement of the reappearances: thisis incompatible with hallucination, for the hallucination must besupposed to have occurred when most easy to refute, and when thespell of shame and fear was laid most heavily upon the Apostles. Strauss maintains that the appearances were unconsciously antedatedby Peter; we can only say that the circumstances of the case, asentered into more fully above, render this very improbable; that ifPeter told Paul that he saw Christ on the third day after theCrucifixion, he probably firmly believed that he did see Him; andthat if he believed this, he was also probably right in so believing. 

Secondly, there is the fact that the reappearances were few, andextended over a short time only. Had they been due to hallucinationthere would have been no limit either to their number or duration. Paul seems to have had no idea that there ever had been, or everwould be, successors to the five hundred brethren who saw Christ atone time. Some were fallen asleep--the rest would in time followthem. It is incredible that men should have so lost all count offact, so debauched their perception of external objects, so steepedthemselves in belief in dreams which had no foundation but in theirown disordered brains, as to have turned the whole world after themby the sheer force of their conviction of the truth of theirdelusions, and yet that suddenly, within a few weeks from thecommencement of this intoxication, they should have come to a deadstop and given no further sign of like extravagance. Thehallucinations must have been so baseless, and would argue such anutter subordination of judgement to imagination, that instead ofceasing they must infallibly have ended in riot and disorganisation;the fact that they did cease (which cannot be denied) and that theywere followed by no disorder, but by a solemn sober steadfastness ofpurpose, as of reasonable men in deadly earnest about a matter whichhad come to their knowledge, and which they held it vital for all toknow--this fact alone would be sufficient to overthrow thehallucination theory. Such intemperance could never have begottensuch temperance: from such a frame of mind as Strauss assigns to theApostles no religion could have come which should satisfy the highestspiritual needs of the most civilised nations of the earth for nearlytwo thousand years. 

When, therefore, we look at the want of faith of the Apostles beforethe Crucifixion, and to their subsequent intense devotion; at theirunanimity at their general sobriety; at the fact that they succeededin convincing the ablest of their enemies and ultimately the whole ofEurope; at the undeviating consent of all the records we have; at theearly date at which the reappearances commenced, --at their smallnumber and short duration--things so foreign to the nature ofhallucination; at the excellent opportunities which Paul had forknowing what he tells us; at the plain manner in which he tells it, and the more than proof which he gave of his own conviction of itstruth; at the impossibility of accounting for the rise ofChristianity without the reappearance of its Founder after HisCrucifixion; when we look at all these things we shall admit that itis impossible to avoid the belief that after having died, Christ DIDreappear to his disciples, and that in this fact we have the onlyintelligible explanation of the triumph of Christianity. 

CHAPTER V--A CONSIDERATION OF CERTAIN ILL-JUDGED METHODS OF DEFENCE

The reader has now heard the utmost that can be said against thehistoric character of the Resurrection by the ablest of itsimpugners. I know of nothing in any of Strauss's works which can beconsidered as doing better justice to his opinions than the passageswhich I have quoted and, I trust, refuted. I have quoted fully, andhave kept nothing in the background. If I had known of anythingstronger against the Resurrection from any other source, I shouldcertainly have produced it. I have answered in outline only, but Ido not believe that I have passed any difficulty on one side. 

What then does the reader think? Was the attack so dangerous, or thedefence so far to seek? I believe he will agree with me that thecombat was one of no great danger when it was once fairly enteredupon. But the wonder, and, let me add, the disgrace, to Englishdivines, is that the battle should have been shirked so long. Whatis it that has made the name of Strauss so terrible to the ears ofEnglish Churchmen? Surely nothing but the ominous silence which hasbeen maintained concerning him in almost all quarters of our Church. For what can he say or do against the other miracles if he bepowerless against the Resurrection? He can make sentences whichsound plausible, but that is no great feat. Can he show that thereis any a priori improbability whatever, in the fact of miracleshaving been wrought by one who died and rose from the dead? If a mandid this it is a small thing that he should also walk upon the wavesand command the winds. But if there is no a priori difficulty withregard to these miracles, there is certainly none other. 

Let this, however, for the present pass, only let me beg of thereader to have patience while I follow out the plan which I havepursued up to the present point, and proceed to examine certaindifficulties of another character. I propose to do so with the sameunflinching examination as heretofore, concealing nothing that hasbeen said, or that can be said; going out of my way to find argumentsfor opponents, if I do not think that they have put forward all thatfrom their own point of view they might have done, and careless howmany difficulties I may bring before the reader which may never yethave occurred to him, provided I feel that I can also shew him howlittle occasion there is to fear them. 

I must, however, maintain two propositions, which may perhaps beunfamiliar to some of those who have not as yet given more than aconventional and superficial attention to the Scriptural records, butwhich will meet with ready assent from all whose studies have beendeeper. Fain would I avoid paining even a single reader, but I amconvinced that the arresting of infidelity depends mainly upon thegeneral recognition of two broad facts. The first is this--that theApostles, even after they had received the gift of the Holy Spiritwere still fallible though holy men; the second--that there arecertain passages in each of the Gospels as we now have them, whichwere not originally to be found therein, and others which, thoughgenuine, are still not historic. This much of concession we must beprepared to make, and we shall find (as in the case of the conversionof St. Paul) that our position is indefinitely strengthened by doingso. 

When shall we Christians learn that the truest ground is also thestrongest? We may be sure that until we have done so we shall find ahost of enemies who will say that truth is not ours. It is we whohave created infidelity, and who are responsible for it. WE are thetrue infidels, for we have not sufficient faith in our own creed tobelieve that it will bear the removal of the incrustations of timeand superstition. When men see our cowardice, what can they thinkbut that we must know that we have cause to be afraid? We drive meninto unbelief in spite of themselves, by our tenacious adherence toopinions which every unprejudiced person must see at a glance that wecannot rightfully defend, and then we pride ourselves upon our lovefor Christ and our hatred of His enemies. If Christ accepts thiskind of love He is not such as He has declared Himself. 

We mistake our love of our own immediate ease for the love of Christ, and our hatred of every opinion which is strange to us, for zealagainst His enemies. If those to whom the unfamiliarity of anopinion or its inconvenience to themselves is a test of itshatefulness to Christ, had been born Jews, they would have crucifiedHim whom they imagine that they are now serving: if Turks, theywould have massacred both Jew and Christian; if Papists at the timeof the Reformation they would have persecuted Protestants: ifProtestants, under Elizabeth, Papists. Truth is to them an accidentof birth and training, and the Christian faith is in their eyes truebecause these accidents, as far as they are concerned, have decidedin its favour. But such persons are not Christians. It is they whocrucify Christ, who drive men from coming to Him whose every instinctwould lead them to love and worship Him, but who are warned off byobserving the crowd of sycophants and time-servers who presume tocall Him Lord. 

But to look at the matter from another point of view; when there is along sustained contest between two bodies of capable and seriouslydisposed people, (and none can deny that many of our adversaries havebeen both one and the other), and when this contest shews no sign ofhealing, but rather widens from generation to generation, and eachparty accuses the other of disingenuousness, obstinacy and other likeserious defects of mind--it may be certainly assumed that the truthlies wholly with neither side, but that each should make someconcessions to the other. A third party sees this at a glance, andis amazed because neither of the disputants can perceive that hisopponent must be possessed of some truths, in spite of his trying todefend other positions which are indefensible. Strange! that a thingwhich it seems so easy to avoid, should so seldom be avoided! Homersaid well:

"Perish strife, both from among gods and men, And wrath which maketh even him that is considerate, cruel, Which getteth up in the heart of a man like smoke, And the taste thereof is sweeter than drops of honey. "

But strife can never cease without concessions upon both sides. Weagree to this readily in the abstract, but we seldom do so when anygiven concession is in question. We are all for concession in thegeneral, but for none in the particular, as people who say that theywill retrench when they are living beyond their income, but will notconsent to any proposed retrenchment. Thus many shake their headsand say that it is impossible to live in the present age and not beaware of many difficulties in connection with the Christian religion;they have studied the question more deeply than perhaps theunbeliever imagines; and having said this much they give themselvescredit for being wide-minded, liberal and above vulgar prejudices:but when pressed as to this or that particular difficulty, and askedto own that such and such an objection of the infidel's needsexplanation, they will have none of it, and will in nine cases out often betray by their answers that they neither know nor want to knowwhat the infidel means, but on the contrary that they are resolute toremain in ignorance. I know this kind of liberality exceedinglywell, and have ever found it to harbour more selfishness, idleness, cowardice and stupidity than does open bigotry. The bigot isgenerally better than his expressed opinions, these people areinvariably worse than theirs. 

The above principle has been largely applied in the writings of so-called orthodox commentators, not unfrequently even by men who mighthave been assumed to be above condescending to such trickery. Agreat preface concerning candour, with a flourish of trumpets in thepraise of truth, seems to have exhausted every atom of truth andcandour from the work that follows it. 

It will be said that I ought not to make use of language such as thiswithout bringing forward examples. I shall therefore adduce them. 

One of the most serious difficulties to the unbeliever is theinextricable confusion in which the accounts of the Resurrection havereached us: no one can reconcile these accounts with one another, not only in minute particulars, but in matters on which it is of thehighest importance to come to a clear understanding. Thus, to omitall notice of many other discrepancies, the accounts of Mark, Luke, and John concur in stating that when the women came to the tomb ofJesus very early on the Sunday morning, they found it ALREADY EMPTY:the stone was gone when they came there, and, according to John, there was not even an angelic vision for some time afterwards. Thereis nothing in any of these three accounts to preclude the possibilityof the stone's having been removed within an hour or two of thebody's having been laid in the tomb. 

But when we turn to Matthew we find all changed: we are told thatthe stone was gone NOT when the women came, but that on their arrivalthere was a great earthquake, and that an angel came down fromHeaven, and rolled away the stone, AND SAT UPON IT, and that theguard who had been set over the tomb (of whom we hear nothing fromany of the other evangelists) became as dead men while the angeladdressed the women. 

Now this is not one of those cases in which the supposition can betolerated that all would be clear if the whole facts of the case wereknown to us. No additional facts can make it come about that thetomb should have been sealed and guarded, and yet NOT sealed andguarded; that the same women, at the same time and place, should havewitnessed an earthquake, and yet NOT witnessed one; have found astone already gone from a tomb, and yet NOT found it gone; have seenit rolled away, and NOT seen it, and so on; those who say that weshould find no difficulty if we knew ALL the facts are still carefulto abstain from any example (so far as I know) of the sort ofadditional facts which would serve their purpose. They cannot giveone; any mind which is truly candid--white--not scrawled andscribbled over till no character is decipherable--will feel at oncethat the only question to be raised is, which is the more correctaccount of the Resurrection--Matthew's or those given by the otherthree Evangelists? How far is Matthew's account true, and how far isit exaggerated? For there must be either exaggeration or inventionsomewhere. It is inconceivable that the other writers should haveknown the story told by Matthew, and yet not only made no allusion toit, but introduced matter which flatly contradicts it, and it is alsoinconceivable that the story should be true, and yet that the otherwriters should not have known it. 

This is how the difficulty stands--a difficulty which vanishes in amoment if it be rightly dealt with, but which, when treated after ourunskilful English method, becomes capable of doing inconceivablemischief to the Christian religion. Let us see then what DeanAlford--a writer whose professions of candour and talk about the dutyof unflinching examination leave nothing to be desired--has to sayupon this point. I will first quote the passage in full fromMatthew, and then give the Dean's note. I have drawn the greaterpart of the comments that will follow it from an anonymous pamphlet{2} upon the Resurrection, dated 1865, but without a publisher'sname, so that I presume it must have been printed for privatecirculation only. 

St. Matthew's account runs:-

"Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation, thechief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate, saying, 'Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, "Afterthree days I will rise again. " Command therefore that the sepulchrebe made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by nightand steal him away and say unto the people, "He is risen from thedead:" so the last error shall be worse than the first. ' Pilate saidunto them, 'Ye have a watch: go your way, make it as sure as yecan. ' So they went and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stoneand setting a watch. In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawntowards the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the otherMary to see the sepulchre. And, behold, there was a greatearthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, andcame and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. Hiscountenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: Andfor fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. Andthe angel answered and said unto the women, 'Fear not ye: for I knowthat ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he isrisen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And goquickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him:lo, I have told you. ' And they departed quickly from the sepulchrewith fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples word. And as they went to tell his disciples, Jesus met them, saying, 'Allhail. ' And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him(cf. John xx. , 16, 17). Then said Jesus unto them, 'Be not afraid:go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall theysee me. ' Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch cameinto the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things thatwere done. And when they were assembled with the elders, and hadtaken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, 'Sayye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept. And if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him andsecure you. ' So they took the money, and did as they were taught:and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day. "

Let us turn now to the Dean's note on Matt. Xxvii. , 62-66. 

With regard to the setting of the watch and sealing of the stone, hetells us that the narrative following (i. E. , the account of the guardand the earthquake) "has been much impugned and its historicalaccuracy very generally given up even by the best of the Germancommentators (Olshausen, Meyer; also De Wette, Hase, and others). The chief difficulties found in it seem to be: (1) How should thechief priests, &c. , KNOW OF HIS HAVING SAID 'in three days I willrise again, ' when the saying was hid even from His own disciples?The answer to this is easy. The MEANING of the saying may have been, and was hid from the disciples; BUT THE FACT OF ITS HAVING BEEN SAIDcould be no secret. Not to lay any stress on John ii. , 19 (Jesusanswered and said unto them, 'Destroy this temple and in three days Iwill build it up'), we have the direct prophecy of Matt. Xii. , 40('For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heartof the earth): besides this there would be a rumour current, throughthe intercourse of the Apostles with others, that He had been in thehabit of so saying. (From what source can Dean Alford know that ourLord WAS in the habit of so saying? What particle of authority isthere for this alleged habit of our Lord?) As to the UNDERSTANDINGof the words we must remember that HATRED IS KEENER SIGHTED THANLOVE: that the RAISING OF LAZARUS would shew WHAT SORT OF A THINGRISING FROM THE DEAD WAS TO BE; and the fulfilment of the Lord'sannouncement of his CRUCIFIXION would naturally lead them to lookfurther to WHAT MORE he had announced. (2) How should the women whowere solicitous about the REMOVAL of the stone not have been stillmore so about its being sealed and a guard set? The answer to thislast has been given above--THEY WERE NOT AWARE OF THE CIRCUMSTANCEBECAUSE THE GUARD WAS NOT SET TILL THE EVENING BEFORE. There wouldbe no need of the application before the APPROACH OF THE THIRD DAY--it is only made for a watch, [Greek text] (ver. 64), and it is notprobable that the circumstance would transpire that night--certainlyit seems not to have done so. (3) That Gamaliel was of the council, and if such a thing as this and its sequel (chap. Xxviii. , 11-15) hadreally happened, he need not have expressed himself doubtfully (Actsv. , 39), but would have been certain that this was from God. But, first, it does not necessarily follow that EVERY MEMBER of theSanhedrim was present, and applied to Pilate, or even had they doneso, that all bore a part in the act of xxviii. , 12" (the bribing ofthe guard to silence). "One who like Joseph had not consented to thedeed before--and we may safely say that there were others such--wouldnaturally withdraw himself from further proceedings against theperson of Jesus. (4) Had this been so the three other Evangelistswould not have passed over so important a testimony to theResurrection. But surely we cannot argue in this way--for thus everyimportant fact narrated by ONE EVANGELIST ALONE must be rejected, e. G. (which stands in much the same relation), THE SATISFACTION OFTHOMAS--ANOTHER SUCH NARRATIONS. TILL WE KNOW MORE ABOUT THECIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH, AND THE SCOPE WITH WHICH, EACH GOSPEL WASCOMPILED, ALL A PRIORI ARGUMENTS OF THIS KIND ARE GOOD FOR NOTHING. "

(The italics in the above, and throughout the notes quoted, are theDean's, unless it is expressly stated otherwise. )

I will now proceed to consider this defence of Matthew's accuracyagainst the objections of the German commentators. 

I. The German commentators maintain that the chief priests are notlikely to have known of any prophecy of Christ's Resurrection whenHis own disciples had evidently heard of nothing to this effect. Dean Alford's answer amounts to this:-

1. They had heard the words but did not understand their meaning;hatred enabled the chief priests to see clearly what love did notreveal to the understanding of the Apostles. True, according toMatthew, Christ had said that as Jonah was three days and threenights in the whale's belly, so the Son of Man should be three daysand three nights in the heart of the earth; but it would be onlyhatred which would suggest the interpretation of so obscure aprophecy: love would not be sufficiently keen-sighted to understandit. 

But in the first place I would urge that if the Apostles had everheard any words capable of suggesting the idea that Christ shouldrise, after they had already seen the raising of Lazarus, on whomcorruption had begun its work, they MUST have expected theResurrection. After having seen so stupendous a miracle, any onewould expect anything which was even suggested by the One who hadperformed it. And, secondly, hatred is not keener sighted than love. 

2. Dean Alford says that the raising of Lazarus would shew the chiefpriests what sort of a thing the Resurrection from the dead was tobe, and that the fulfilment of Christ's prophecy concerning hisCrucifixion would naturally lead them to look further to what else hehad announced. 

But, if the raising of Lazarus would shew the chief priests what sortof thing the Resurrection was to be, it would shew the Apostles also;and again if the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Crucifixion wouldlead the chief priests to look further to the fulfilment of theprophecy of the Resurrection, so would it lead the Apostles; thissupposition of one set of men who can see everything, and of anotherwith precisely the same opportunities and no less interest, who cansee nothing, is vastly convenient upon the stage, but it is notsupported by a reference to Nature; self-interest would have openedthe eyes of the Apostles. 

II. The German commentators ask how was it possible that the womenwho were solicitous about the removal of the stone, should not bestill more so about "its being sealed and a guard set?" If theGerman commentators have asked their question in this shape, theyhave asked it badly, and Dean Alford's answer is sufficient: theymight have asked, how the other three writers could all tell us thatthe stone was already gone when the women got there, and yetMatthew's story be true? and how Matthew's story could be truewithout the other writers having known it? and how the other writerscould have introduced matter contradictory to it, if they had knownit to be true?

III. The German commentators say that in the Acts of the Apostles wefind Gamaliel expressing himself as doubtful whether or noChristianity was of God, whereas had he known the facts related byMatthew he could have had no doubt at all. He must have KNOWN thatChristianity was of God. 

Dean Alford answers that perhaps Gamaliel was not there. To which Iwould rejoin that though Gamaliel might have had no hand in thebribery, supposing it to have taken place, it is inconceivable thatsuch a story should have not reached him; the matter could never havebeen kept so quiet but that it must have leaked out. Men are not soutterly bad or so utterly foolish as Dean Alford seems to imply; andwhether Gamaliel was or was not present when the guard were bribed, he must have been equally aware of the fact before making the speechwhich is assigned to him in the Acts. 

IV. The German commentators argue from the silence of the otherEvangelists: Dean Alford replies by denying that this silence is anyargument: but I would answer, that on a matter which the other threewriters must have known to have been of such intense interest, theirsilence is a conclusive proof either of their ignorance or theirindolence as historians. Dean Alford has well substantiated theindependence of the four narratives, he has well proved that thewriter of the fourth Gospel could never have seen the other Gospels, and yet he supposes that that writer either did not know the factsrelated by Matthew, or thought it unnecessary to allude to them. Neither of these suppositions is tenable: but there wouldnevertheless be a shadow of ground for Dean Alford to stand upon ifthe other Evangelists were simply silent: but why does he omit allnotice of their introducing matter which is absolutely incompatiblewith Matthew's accuracy?

There is one other consideration which must suggest itself to thereader in connection with this story of the guard. It refers to theconduct of the chief priests and the soldiers themselves. Theconduct assigned to the chief priests in bribing the guard to lieagainst one whom they must by this time have known to be undersupernatural protection, is contrary to human nature. The chiefpriests (according to Matthew) knew that Christ had said he shouldrise: in spite of their being well aware that Christ had raisedLazarus from the dead but very recently they did not believe that heWOULD rise, but feared (so Matthew says) that the Apostles wouldsteal the body and pretend a resurrection: up to this point we admitthat the story, though very improbable, is still possible: but whenwe read of their bribing the guards to tell a lie under suchcircumstances as those which we are told had just occurred, we saythat such conduct is impossible: men are too great cowards to becapable of it. The same applies to the soldiers: they would neverdare to run counter to an agency which had nearly killed them withfright on that very selfsame morning. Let any man put himself intheir position: let him remember that these soldiers were previouslyno enemies to Christ, nor, as far as we can judge, is it likely thatthey were a gang of double-dyed villains: but even if they were, they would not have dared to act as Matthew says they acted. 

And now let us turn to another note of Dean Alford's. 

Speaking of the independence of the four narratives (in his note onMatt. Xxviii. , 1-10) and referring to their "minor discrepancies, "the Dean says SUPPOSING US TO BE ACQUAINTED WITH EVERY THING SAID ANDDONE IN ITS ORDER AND EXACTNESS, WE SHOULD DOUBTLESS BE ABLE TORECONCILE, OR ACCOUNT FOR, THE PRESENT FORMS OF THE NARRATIVES; butnot having this key to the harmonising of them, all attempts to do soin minute particulars must be full of arbitrary assumptions, andcarry no certainty with them: and I may remark that OF ALL HARMONIESthose of the INCIDENTS OF THESE CHAPTERS are to me the MOSTUNSATISFACTORY. Giving their compilers all credit for the bestintentions, I confess they seem to me to WEAKEN instead ofstrengthening the evidence, which now rests (speaking merelyOBJECTIVELY) on the unexceptionable testimony of three independentnarrators, and one who besides was an eye witness of much thathappened. If we are to compare the four and ask which is to be takenas most nearly reporting the EXACT words and incidents, on this therecan, I think, be no doubt. On internal as well as external groundTHAT OF JOHN takes the HIGHEST PLACE, but not of course to theexclusion of those parts of the narrative which he DOES NOT TOUCH. "

Surely the above is a very extraordinary note. The difficulty of theirreconcilable differences between the four narratives is not met norattempted to be met: the Dean seems to consider the attempt ashopeless: no one, according to him, has been as yet successful, neither can he see any prospect of succeeding better himself: theexpedient therefore which he proposes is that the whole should betaken on trust; that it should be assumed that no discrepancy whichcould not be accounted for would be found, if the facts were known inthe exact order in which they occurred. In other words, he leavesthe difficulty where it was. Yet surely it is a very grave one. Thesame events are recorded by three writers (one being professedly aneye-witness, and the others independent writers), in a way which isvirtually the same, in spite of some unimportant variations in themanner of telling it, while a fourth gives a totally different andirreconcilable account; the matter stands in such confusion atpresent that even Dean Alford admits that any attempt to reconcilethe differences leaves them in worse confusion than ever; the ablestand most spiritually minded of the German commentators suggest a wayof escape; nevertheless, according to the Dean we are not to profitby it, but shall avoid the difficulty better by a simpler process--the process of passing it over. 

A man does well to be angry when he sees so solemn and momentous asubject treated thus. What is trifling if this is not trifling?What is disingenuousness if not this? It involves some trouble andapparent danger to admit that the same thing has happened to theChristian records which has happened to all others--i. E. , that theyhave suffered--miraculously little, but still something--at the handsof time; people would have to familiarise themselves with new ideas, and this can seldom be done without a certain amount of wrangling, disturbance, and unsettling of comfortable ease: it is therefore byall means and at all risks to be avoided. Who can doubt that somesuch feeling as this was in Dean Alford's mind when the notes abovecriticised were written? Yet what are the means taken to avoid therecognition of obvious truth? They are disingenuous in the veryhighest degree. Can this prosper? Not if Christ is true. 

What is the practical result? The loss of many souls who wouldgladly come to the Saviour, but who are frightened off by seeing themanner in which his case is defended. And what after all is thedanger that would follow upon candour? None. Not one particle. Nevertheless, danger or no danger, we are bound to speak the truth. We have nothing to do with consequences and moral tendencies and riskto this or that fundamental principle of our belief, nor yet with thepossibility of lurid lights being thrown here or there. What arethese things to us? They are not our business or concern, but restwith the Being who has required of US that we should reverently, patiently, unostentatiously, yet resolutely, strive to find out whatthings are true and what false, and that we should give up all, rather than forsake our own convictions concerning the truth. 

This is our plain and immediate duty, in pursuance of which weproceed to set aside the account of the Resurrection given in St. Matthew's Gospel. That account must be looked upon as the inventionof some copyist, or possibly of the translator of the original work, at a time when men who had been eye-witnesses to the actual facts ofthe Resurrection were becoming scarce, and when it was felt that somemore unmistakably miraculous account than that given in the otherthree Gospels would be a comfort and encouragement to succeedinggenerations. We, however, must now follow the example of "even thebest" of the German commentators, and discard it as soon as possible. On having done this the whole difficulty of the confusion of the fouraccounts of the Resurrection vanishes like smoke, and we findourselves with three independent writers whose differences areexactly those which we might expect, considering the time andcircumstances in which they wrote, but which are still so trifling asto disturb no man's faith. 

CHAPTER VI--MORE DISINGENUOUSNESS

[Here, perhaps, will be the fittest place for introducing a letter tomy brother from a gentleman who is well known to the public, but whodoes not authorise me to give his name. I found this letter among mybrother's papers, endorsed with the words "this must be attended to, "but with nothing more. I imagine that my brother would haveincorporated the substance of his correspondent's letter into this orthe preceding chapter, but not venturing to do so myself, I havethought it best to give the letter and extract in full, and thus tolet them speak for themselves. --W. B. O. ]

June 15, 1868. 

My dear Owen, Your brother has told me what you are doing, and the general line ofyour argument. I am sorry that you should be doing it, for I neednot tell you that I do not and cannot sympathise with the great andunexpected change in your opinions. You are the last man in theworld from whom I should have expected such a change: but, as youwell know, you are also the last man in the world whose sincerity inmaking it I should be inclined to question. May you find peace andhappiness in whatever opinions you adopt, and let me trust also thatyou will never forget the lessons of toleration which you learnt asthe disciple of what you will perhaps hardly pardon me for calling afreer and happier school of thought than the one to which you nowbelieve yourself to belong. 

Your brother tells me that you are ill; I need not say that I amsorry, and that I should not trouble you with any personal matter--Iwrite solely in reference to the work which I hear that you haveundertaken, and which I am given to understand consists mainly in theendeavour to conquer unbelief, by really entering into thedifficulties felt by unbelievers. The scheme is a good one IFTHOROUGHLY CARRIED OUT. We imagine that we stand in no danger fromany such course as this, and should heartily welcome any book whichtried to grapple with us, even though it were to compel us to admit agreat deal more than I at present think it likely that even you canextort from us. Much more should we welcome a work which made peopleunderstand us better than they do; this would indeed confer a lastingbenefit both upon them and us. 

However, I know you wish to do your work thoroughly; I want, therefore, to make a trifling suggestion which you will take protanto: it is this:-Paley, in his third book, professes to give "abrief consideration of some popular objections, " and begins Chap. I. With "The discrepancies between the several Gospels. "

Now, I know you have a Paley, but I know also that you are ill, andthat people who are ill like being saved from small exertions. Ihave, therefore, bought a second-hand Paley for a shilling, and havecut out the chapter to which I especially want to call yourattention. Will you kindly read it through from beginning to end?

Is it fair? Is the statement of our objections anything like what weshould put forward ourselves? And can you believe that Paley withhis profoundly critical instinct, and really great knowledge of theNew Testament, should not have been perfectly well aware that he wasmisrepresenting and ignoring the objections which he professed to beremoving?

He must have known very well that the principle of confirmation bydiscrepancy is one of very limited application, and that it will notcover anything approaching to such wide divergencies as those whichare presented to us in the Gospels. Besides, how CAN he talk aboutMatthew's object as he does, and yet omit all allusion to the wideand important differences between his account of the Resurrection, and those of Mark, Luke, and John? Very few know what thosedifferences really are, in spite of their having the Bible alwaysopen to them. I suppose that Paley felt pretty sure that his readerswould be aware of no difficulty unless he chose to put them up to it, and wisely declined to do so. Very prudent, but very (as it seems tome) wicked. Now don't do this yourself. If you are going to meetus, meet us fairly, and let us have our say. Don't pretend to let ushave our say while taking good care that we get no chance of sayingit. I know you won't. 

However, will you point out Paley's unfairness in heading this partof his work "A brief consideration of some popular objections, " andthen proceeding to give a chapter on "the discrepancies between theseveral Gospels, " without going into the details of any of thoseimportant discrepancies which can have been known to none better thanhimself? This is the only place, so far as I remember, in his wholebook, where he even touches upon the discrepancies in the Gospels. Does he do so as a man who felt that they were unimportant and couldbe approached with safety, or as one who is determined to carry thereader's attention away from them, and fix it upon something else bya coup de main?

This chapter alone has always convinced me that Paley did not believein his own book. No one could have rested satisfied with it formoment, if he felt that he was on really strong ground. Besides, howinsufficient for their purpose are his examples of discrepancieswhich do not impair the credibility of the main fact recorded!

How would it have been if Lord Clarendon and three other historianshad each told us that the Marquis of Argyll CAME TO LIFE AGAIN AFTERBEING BEHEADED, and then set to work to contradict each otherhopelessly as to the manner of his reappearance? How if Burnet, Woodrow, and Heath had given an account which was not at allincompatible with a natural explanation of the whole matter, whileClarendon gave a circumstantial story in flat contradiction to allthe others, and carefully excluded any but a supernaturalexplanation? Ought we to, or should we, allow the discrepancies topass unchallenged? Not for an hour--if indeed we did not ratherorder the whole story out of court at once, as too wildly improbableto deserve a hearing. 

You will, I know, see all this, and a great deal more, and will pointit better than I can. Let me as an old friend entreat you not topass this over, but to allow me to continue to think of you as Ialways have thought of you hitherto, namely, as the most impartialdisputant in the world. --Yours, &c. 

(Extract from Paley's "Evidences. "--Part III. , Chapter 1. "TheDiscrepancies between the Gospels. ")

"I know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of theunderstanding, than to reject the substance of a story, by reason ofsome diversity in the circumstances with which it is related. Theusual character of human testimony is substantial truth undercircumstantial variety. This is what the daily experience of courtsof justice teaches. When accounts of a transaction come from themouths of different witnesses, it is seldom that it is not possibleto pick out apparent or real inconsistencies between them. Theseinconsistencies are studiously displayed by an adverse pleader, butoftentimes with little impression upon the minds of the judges. Onthe contrary, close and minute agreement induces the suspicion ofconfederacy and fraud. When written histories touch upon the samescenes of action, the comparison almost always affords ground for alike reflection. Numerous and sometimes important variations presentthemselves; not seldom, also, absolute and final contradictions; yetneither one nor the other are deemed sufficient to shake thecredibility of the main fact. The embassy of the Jews to deprecatethe execution of Claudian's order to place his statue in their templePhilo places in harvest, Josephus in seed-time, both contemporarywriters. No reader is led by this inconsistency to doubt whethersuch an embassy was sent, or whether such an order was given. Ourown history supplies examples of the same kind. In the account ofthe Marquis of Argyll's death in the reign of Charles II. , we have avery remarkable contradiction. Lord Clarendon relates that he wascondemned to be hanged, which was performed the same day; on thecontrary, Burnet, Woodrow, Heath, Echard, concur in stating that hewas condemned upon the Saturday, and executed upon a Monday. {3} Wasany reader of English history ever sceptic enough to raise from hencea question, whether the Marquis of Argyll was executed or not? Yetthis ought to be left in uncertainty, according to the principlesupon which the Christian religion has sometimes been attacked. Dr. Middleton contended that the different hours of the day assigned tothe Crucifixion of Christ by John and the other Evangelists, did notadmit of the reconcilement which learned men had proposed; and thenconcludes the discussion with this hard remark: 'We must be forced, with several of the critics, to leave the difficulty just as we foundit, chargeable with all the consequences of manifest inconsistency. '{4} But what are these consequences? By no means the discreditingof the history as to the principal fact, by a repugnancy (evensupposing that repugnancy not to be resolvable into different modesof computation) in the time of the day in which it is said to havetaken place. 

A great deal of the discrepancy observable in the Gospels arises fromOMISSION; from a fact or a passage of Christ's life being noticed byone writer, which is unnoticed by another. Now, omission is at alltimes a very uncertain ground of objection. We perceive it not onlyin the comparison of different writers, but even in the same writer, when compared with himself. There are a great many particulars, andsome of them of importance, mentioned by Josephus in his Antiquities, which as we should have supposed, ought to have been put down by himin their place in the Jewish Wars. {5} Suetonius, Tacitus, DionCassius have all three written of the reign of Tiberius. Each hasmentioned many things omitted by the rest, {6} yet no objection isfrom thence taken to the respective credit of their histories. Wehave in our own times, if there were not something indecorous in thecomparison, the life of an eminent person, written by three of hisfriends, in which there is very great variety in the incidentsselected by them, some apparent, and perhaps some real, contradictions: yet without any impeachment of the substantial truthof their accounts, of the authenticity of the books, of the competentinformation or general fidelity of the writers. 

But these discrepancies will be still more numerous, when men do notwrite histories, but MEMOIRS; which is perhaps the true name andproper description of our Gospels; that is, when they do notundertake, or ever meant to deliver, in order of time, a regular andcomplete account of ALL the things of importance which the person whois the subject of their history did or said; but only, out of manysimilar ones, to give such passages, or such actions and discourses, as offered themselves more immediately to their attention, came inthe way of their enquiries, occurred to their recollection, or weresuggested by their PARTICULAR DESIGN at the time of writing. 

This particular design may appear sometimes, but not always, noroften. Thus I think that the particular design which St. Matthew hadin view whilst he was writing the history of the Resurrection, was toattest the faithful performance of Christ's promise to his disciplesto go before them into Galilee; because he alone, except Mark, whoseems to have taken it from him, has recorded this promise, and healone has confined his narrative to that single appearance to thedisciples which fulfilled it. It was the preconcerted, the great andmost public manifestation of our Lord's person. It was the thingwhich dwelt upon St. Matthew's mind, and he adapted his narrative toit. But, that there is nothing in St. Matthew's language whichnegatives other appearances, or which imports that this hisappearance to his disciples in Galilee, in pursuance of his promise, was his first or only appearance, is made pretty evident by St. Mark's Gospel, which uses the same terms concerning the appearance inGalilee as St. Matthew uses, yet itself records two other appearancesprior to this: 'Go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that hegoeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he saidunto you' (xvi. , 7). We might be apt to infer from these words, thatthis was the FIRST time they were to see him: at least, we mightinfer it with as much reason as we draw the inference from the samewords in Matthew; yet the historian himself did not perceive that hewas leading his readers to any such conclusion, for in the twelfthand two following verses of this chapter, he informs us of twoappearances, which, by comparing the order of events, are shown tohave been prior to the appearance in Galilee. 'He appeared inanother form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into thecountry: and they went and told it unto the residue: neitherbelieved they them. Afterward He appeared unto the eleven as theysat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief, because theybelieved not them which had seen Him after He was risen. ' Probablythe same observation, concerning the PARTICULAR DESIGN which guidedthe historian, may be of use in comparing many other passages of theGospels. "

[My brother's work, which has been interrupted by the letter andextract just given, will now be continued. What follows should beconsidered as coming immediately after the preceding chapter. --W. B. O. ]

But there is a much worse set of notes than those on the twenty-eighth chapter of St. Matthew, and so important is it that we shouldput an end to such a style of argument, and get into a manner whichshall commend itself to sincere and able adversaries, that I shallnot apologise for giving them in full here. They refer to the spearwound recorded in St. John's Gospel as having been inflicted upon thebody of our Lord. 

The passage in St. John's Gospel stands thus (John xix. , 32-37)--"Then came the soldiers and brake the legs of the first and of theother which was crucified with Him. But when they came to Jesus andsaw that He was dead already they brake not His legs: but one of thesoldiers with a spear pierced His side, and forthwith came there outblood and water. And he that saw it bare record, and we know thathis record is true, and he knoweth that he saith true that ye mightbelieve. For these things were done that the Scripture should befulfilled, 'A bone of Him shall not be broken' and again anotherScripture saith, 'They shall look on Him whom they pierced. '

In his note upon the thirty-fourth verse Dean Alford writes--"Thelance must have penetrated deep, for the object was to ENSURE death. "Now what warrant is there for either of these assertions? We aretold that the soldiers saw that our Lord was dead already, and thatfor this reason they did not break his legs: if there had been anydoubt about His being dead can we believe that they would havehesitated? There is ample proof of the completeness of the death inthe fact that those whose business it was to assure themselves of itshaving taken place were so satisfied that they would be at no furthertrouble; what need to kill a dead man? If there had been anyquestion as to the possibility of life remaining, it would not havebeen resolved by the thrust of the spear, but in a way which we mustshudder to think of. It is most painful to have had to write theforegoing lines, but are they not called for when we see a man sowell intentioned and so widely read as the late Dean Alfordcondescending to argument which must only weaken the strength of hiscause in the eyes of those who have not yet been brought to know theblessings and comfort of Christianity? From the words of St. John noone can say whether the wound was a deep one, or why it was given--yet the Dean continues, "and see John xx. , 27, " thereby implying thatthe wound must have been large enough for Thomas to get his hand intoit, because our Lord says, "reach hither thine hand and thrust itinto my side. " This is simply shocking. Words cannot be pressed inthis way. Dean Alford then says that the spear was thrust "probablyinto the LEFT side on account of the position of the soldier" (no onecan arrive at the position of the soldier, and no one would attemptto do so, unless actuated by a nervous anxiety to direct the spearinto the heart of the Redeemer), "and of what followed" (the Deanhere implies that the water must have come from the pericardium; yetin his next note we are led to infer that he rejects thissupposition, inasmuch as the quantity of water would have been "sosmall as to have scarcely been observed"). Is this fair and manlyargument, and can it have any other effect than to increase thescepticism of those who doubt?

Here this note ends. The next begins upon the words "blood andwater. "

"The spear, " says the Dean, "perhaps pierced the pericardium orenvelope of the heart" (but why introduce a "perhaps" when there isample proof of the death without it?), "in which case a liquidanswering to the description of water may have" (MAY have) "flowedwith the blood, but the quantity would have been so small as scarcelyto have been observed" (yet in the preceding note he has led us tosuppose that he thinks the water "probably came from near the heart). "It is scarcely possible that the separation of the blood intoplacenta and serum should have taken place so soon, or that if ithad, it should have been described by an observe as blood and water. It is more probable that the fact here so strongly testified was aconsequence of the extreme exhaustion of the body of the Redeemer. "(Now if this is the case, the spear-wound does not prove the death ofHim on whom it was inflicted, and Dean Alford has weakened a strongcase for nothing. ) "The medical opinions on the subject are veryvarious and by no means satisfactory. " Satisfactory! What does DeanAlford mean by satisfactory? If the evidence does not go to provethat the spear-wound must have been necessarily fatal why not havesaid so at once, and have let the whole matter rest in the obscurityfrom which no human being can remove it. The wound may have beensevere or may not have been severe, it may have been given in merewanton mockery of the dead King of the Jews, for the indignity'ssake: or it may have been the savage thrust of an implacable foe, who would rejoice at the mutilation of the dead body of his enemy:none can say of what nature it was, nor why it was given; but theobject of its having been recorded is no mystery, for we areexpressly told that it was in order to shew THAT PROPHECY WAS THUSFULFILLED: the Evangelist tells us so in the plainest language: heeven goes farther, for he says that these things were DONE for thisend (not only that they were RECORDED)--so that the primary motive ofthe Almighty in causing the soldier to be inspired with a desire toinflict the wound is thus graciously vouchsafed to us, and we have noreason to harrow our feelings by supposing that a deeper thrust wasgiven than would suffice for the fulfilment of the prophecy. May wenot then well rest thankful with the knowledge which the Holy Spirithas seen fit to impart to us, without causing the weak brother tooffend by our special pleading?

The reader has now seen the two first of Dean Alford's notes uponthis subject, and I trust he will feel that I have used no greaterplainness, and spoken with no greater severity than the case not onlyjustifies but demands. We can hardly suppose that the Dean himselfis not firmly convinced that our Lord died upon the Cross, but thereare millions who are not convinced, and whose conviction should bethe nearest wish of every Christian heart. How deeply, therefore, should we not grieve at meeting with a style of argument from the penof one of our foremost champions, which can have no effect but thatof making the sceptic suspect that the evidences for the death of ourLord are felt, even by Christians, to be insufficient. For this iswhat it comes to. 

Let us, however, go on to the note on John xix. , 35, that is to sayon St. John's emphatic assertion of the truth of what he isrecording. The note stands thus, "This emphatic assertion of thefact seems rather to regard the whole incident than the mereoutflowing of the blood and water. It was the object of John to shewthat the Lord's body was a REAL BODY and UNDERWENT REAL DEATH. (Thisis not John's own account--supposing that John is the writer of thefourth Gospel--either of his own object in recording, or yet of theobject of the wound's having been inflicted; his words, as we haveseen above, run thus:- "and he that saw it bare record, and we knowthat his record is true; and he knoweth that he saith true that yemight believe. FOR THESE THINGS WERE DONE THAT THE SCRIPTURE SHOULDBE FULFILLED which saith 'a bone of him shall not be broken, ' and, again, another Scripture saith, 'they shall look upon' him whom theypierced. '" Who shall dare to say that St. John had any other objectthan to show that the event which he relates had been long foreseen, and foretold by the words of the Almighty?) And both these wereshewn by what took place, NOT SO MUCH BY THE PHENOMENON OF THE WATERAND BLOOD" (then here we have it admitted that so muchdisingenuousness has been resorted to for no advantage, inasmuch asthe fact of the water and blood having flowed is not per se proof ofa necessarily fatal wound) "as by the infliction of such a wound"(Such a wound! What can be the meaning of this? What has DeanAlford made clear about the wound? We know absolutely nothing aboutthe severity or intention of the wound, and it is mere baselessconjecture and assumption to say that we do; neither do we knowanything concerning its effect unless it be shewn that the issuing ofthe blood and water PROVE that death must have ensued, and this DeanAlford has just virtually admitted to be not shewn), after which, EVEN IF DEATH HAD NOT TAKEN PLACE BEFORE (this is intolerable), THERECOULD NOT BY ANY POSSIBILITY BE LIFE REMAINING. " (The italics onthis page are mine. )

With this climax of presumptuous assertion these disgraceful notesare ended. They have shewn clearly that the wound does not in itselfprove the death: they shew no less clearly that the Dean does notconsider that the death is proved beyond possibility of doubt WITHOUTthe wound; what therefore should be the legitimate conclusion?Surely that we have no proof of the completeness of Christ's deathupon the Cross--or in other words no proof of His having died at all!Couple this with the notes upon the Resurrection considered above, and we feel rather as though we were in the hands of some Jesuiticalunbeliever, who was trying to undermine our faith in our mostprecious convictions under the guise of defending them, than in thoseof one whom it is almost impossible to suspect of such any design. What should we say if we had found Newton, Adam Smith or Darwin, arguing for their opinions thus? What should we think concerning anyscientific cause which we found thus defended? We should exceedinglywell know that it was lost. And yet our leading theologians are tobe applauded and set in high places for condescending to such sharppractice as would be despised even by a disreputable attorney, as tootransparently shallow to be of the smallest use to him. 

After all that has been said either by Dean Alford or any one else, we know nothing more than what we are told by the Apostle, namely, that immediately before being taken down from the Cross our Lord'sbody was wounded more severely, or less severely, as the case may be, with the point of a spear, that from this wound there flowedsomething which to the eyes of the writer resembled blood and water, and that the whole was done in order that a well-known prophecy mightbe fulfilled. Yet his sentences in reference to this fact beingended, without his having added one iota to our knowledge upon thesubject, the Dean gravely winds up by throwing a doubt upon thecertainty of our Lord's death which was not felt by a single one ofthose upon the spot, and resting his clenching proof of its havingtaken place upon a wound, which he has just virtually admitted tohave not been necessarily fatal. Nothing can be more deplorableeither as morality or policy. 

Yet the Dean is justified by the event. One would have thought hecould have been guilty of nothing short of infatuation in hoping thatthe above notes would pass muster with any ordinarily intelligentperson, but he knew that he might safely trust to the force of habitand prejudice in the minds of his readers, and his confidence has notbeen misplaced. Of all those engaged in the training of our youngmen for Holy Orders, of all our Bishops and clergy and tutors atcolleges, whose very profession it is to be lovers of truth andcandour, who are paid for being so, and who are mere shams and wolvesin sheep's clothing if they are not ever on the look-out forfalsehood, to make war upon it as the enemy of our souls--not one, NO, NOT A SINGLE ONE, so far as I know, has raised his voice inprotest. If a man has not lost his power of weeping let him weep forthis; if there is any who realises the crime of self-deception, asperhaps the most subtle and hideous of all forms of sin, let him liftup his voice and proclaim it now; for the times are not of peace, butof a sowing of wind for the reaping of whirlwinds, and of the calmthat is the centre of the hurricane. 

Either Christianity is the truth of truths--the one which should inthis world overmaster all others in the thoughts of all men, andcompared with which all other truths are insignificant except asgrouping themselves around it--or it is at the best a mistake whichshould be set right as soon as possible. There is no middle course. Either Jesus Christ was the Son of God, or He was not. If He was, His great Father forbid that we should juggle in order to prove Himso--that we should higgle for an inch of wound more, or an inch less, and haggle for the root ??y in the Greek word e???e. Better admitthat the death of Christ must be ever a matter of doubt, should sogreat a sacrifice be demanded of us, than go near to the handling ofa lie in order to make assurance doubly sure. No truthful mind candoubt that the cause of Christ is far better served by exposing aninsufficient argument than by silently passing it over, or else thatthe cause of Christ is one to be attacked and not defended. 

CHAPTER VII--DIFFICULTIES FELT BY OUR OPPONENTS

There are some who avoid all close examination into the circumstancesattendant upon the death of our Lord, using the plea that howeverexcellent a quality intellect may be, and however desirable that thefacts connected with the Crucifixion should be intelligentlyconsidered, yet that after all it is spiritual insight which iswanted for a just appreciation of spiritual truths, and that the wayto be preserved from error is to cultivate holiness and purity oflife. This is well for those who are already satisfied with theevidences for their convictions. We could hardly give them anybetter advice than simply to "depart from evil, do good, seek peaceand ensue it" (Psalm xxxiv. , 14), if we could only make sure thattheir duty would never lead them into contact with those who hold theexternal evidences of Christianity to be insufficient. When, however, they meet with any of these unhappy persons they will findtheir influence for good paralysed; for unbelievers do not understandwhat is meant by appealing to their spiritual insight as a thingwhich can in any way affect the evidence for or against an allegedfact in history--or at any rate as forming evidence for a fact whichthey believe to be in itself improbable and unsupported by externalproof. They have not got any spiritual insight in matters of thissort; nor, indeed, do they recognise what is meant by the words atall, unless they be interpreted as self-respect and regard for thefeelings and usages of other people. What spiritual insight theyhave, they express by the very nearly synonymous terms, "currentfeeling, " or "common sense, " and however deep their reverence forthese things may be, they will never admit that goodness or rightfeeling can guide them into intuitive accuracy upon a matter ofhistory. On the contrary, in any such case they believe thatsentiment is likely to mislead, and that the well-disciplinedintellect is alone trustworthy. The question is, whether it is worthwhile to try and rescue those who are in this condition or not. Ifit IS worth while, we must deal with them according to their sense ofright and not ours: in other words, if we meet with an unbeliever wemust not expect him to accept our faith unless we take much painswith him, and are prepared to make great sacrifice of our own peaceand patience. 

Yet how many shrink from this, and think that they are doing Godservice by shrinking; the only thing from which they should reallyshrink, is the falsehood which has overlaid the best established factin all history with so much sophistry, that even our own side hascome to fear that there must be something lurking behind which willnot bear daylight; to such a pass have we been brought by the desireto prove too much. 

Now for the comfort of those who may feel an uneasy sense of dread, as though any close examination of the events connected with theCrucifixion might end in suggesting a natural instead of a miraculousexplanation of the Resurrection, for the comfort of such--and theyindeed stand in need of comfort--let me say at once that the ablestof our adversaries would tell them that they need be under no suchfear. Strauss himself admits that our Lord died upon the Cross; hedoes not even attempt to dispute it, but writes as though he werewell aware that there was no room for any difference of opinion aboutthe matter. He has therefore been compelled to adopt thehallucination theory, with a result which we have already considered. Yet who can question that Strauss would have maintained the positionthat our Lord did not die upon the Cross, unless he had felt that itwas one in which he would not be able to secure the support even ofthose who were inclined to disbelieve? We cannot doubt that theconviction of the reality of our Lord's death has been forced uponhim by a weight of testimony which, like St. Paul, he has foundhimself utterly unable to resist. 

Here then, we might almost pause. Strauss admits that our Lord diedupon the Cross. Yet can the reader help feeling that the vindicationof the reality of our Lord's reappearances, and the refutation ofStrauss's theories with which this work opened, was triumphant andconclusive? Then what follows? That Christ died and rose again!The central fact of our faith is proved. It is proved externally bythe most solid and irrefragable proofs, such as should appeal even tominds which reject all spiritual evidence, and recognise no canons ofinvestigation but those of the purest reason. 

But anything and everything is believable concerning one whoseresurrection from death to life has been established. What need, then, to enter upon any consideration of the other miracles? Of theAscension? Of the descent of the Holy Spirit? Who can feeldifficulty about these things? Would not the miracle rather be thatthey should NOT have happened! May we not now let the wings of oursoul expand, and soar into the heaven of heavens, to the footstool ofthe Throne of Grace, secure that we have earned the right to hope andto glory by having consented to the pain of understanding?

We may: and I have given the reader this foretaste of the prizewhich he may justly claim, lest he should be swallowed up in overmuchgrief at the journey which is yet before him ere he shall have doneall which may justly be required of him. For it is not enough thathis own sense of security should be perfected. This is well; but lethim also think of others. 

What then is their main difficulty, now that it has been shewn thatthe reappearances of our Lord were not due to hallucination?

I propose to shew this by collecting from all the sources with whichI was familiar in former years, and throwing the whole together as ifit were my own. I shall spare no pains to make the argument tellwith as much force as fairness will allow. I shall be compelled tobe very brief, but the unbeliever will not, I hope, feel thatanything of importance to his side has been passed over. Thebeliever, on the other hand, will be thankful both to know the worstand to see how shallow and impotent it will appear when it comes tobe tested. Oh! that this had been done at the beginning of thecontroversy, instead of (as I heartily trust) at the end of it. 

Our opponents, therefore, may be supposed to speak somewhat after thefollowing manner:- "Granted, " they will say, "for the sake ofargument, that Jesus Christ did reappear alive after his Crucifixion;it does not follow that we should at once necessarily admit that hisreappearance was due to miracle. What was enough, and reasonablyenough, to make the first Christians accept the Resurrection, andhence the other miracles of Christ, is not enough and ought not to beenough to make men do so now. If we were to hear now of thereappearance of a man who had been believed to be dead, our firstimpulse would be to learn the when and where of the death, and thewhen and where of the first reappearance. What had been the natureof the death? What conclusive proof was there that the death hadbeen actual and complete? What examination had been made of thebody? And to whom had it been delivered on the completeness of thedeath having been established? How long had the body been in thegrave--if buried? What was the condition of the grave on its beingfirst revisited? It is plain to any one that at the present day weshould ask the above questions with the most jealous scrutiny andthat our opinion of the character of the reappearance would dependupon the answers which could be given to them. 

"But it is no less plain that the distance of the supposed event fromour own time and country is no bar to the necessity for the samequestions being as jealously asked concerning it, as would be askedif it were alleged to have happened recently and nearer home. On thecontrary, distance of time and space introduces an additionalnecessity for caution. It is one thing to know that the firstChristians unanimously believed that their master had miraculouslyrisen from death to life; it is another to know their reasons for sothinking. Times have changed, and tests of truth are infinitelybetter understood, so that the reasonable of those days is reasonableto us no longer. Nor would it be enough that the answers given couldbe just strained into so much agreement with one another as to allowof a modus vivendi between them, AND NOT TO EXCLUDE THE POSSIBILITYOF DEATH, THEY MUST EXCLUDE ALL POSSIBILITY OF LIFE HAVING REMAINED, or we should not hesitate for a moment about refusing to believe thatthe reappearance had been miraculous: indeed, so long as any chinkor cranny or loophole for escape from the miraculous was afforded tous, we should unhesitatingly escape by it; this, at least, is thecourse which would be adopted by any judge and jury of sensible menif such a case were to come before their unprejudiced minds in thecommon course of affairs. 

"We should not refuse to believe in a miracle even now, if it weresupported by such evidence as was considered to be conclusive by thebench of judges and by the leading scientific men of the day: insuch a case as this we should feel bound to accept it; but we cannotbelieve in a miracle, no matter how deeply it has been engrained intothe creeds of the civilised world, merely because it was believed by'unlettered fishermen' two thousand years ago. This is not a sourcefrom which such an event as a miracle should be received without theclosest investigation. We know, indeed, that the Apostles weresincere men, and that they firmly believed that Jesus Christ hadrisen from the dead; their lives prove their faith; but we cannotforget that the fact itself of Christ's having been crucified andafterwards seen alive, would be enough, under the circumstances, toincline the men of that day to believe that he had died and had beenmiraculously restored to life, although we should ourselves be boundto make a far more searching inquiry before we could arrive at anysuch conclusion. A miracle was not and could not be to them, what itis and ought to be to ourselves--a matter to be regarded a prioriwith the very gravest suspicion. To them it was what it is now tothe lower and more ignorant classes of Irish, French, Spanish andItalian peasants: that is to say, a thing which was always more orless likely to happen, and which hardly demanded more than a primafacie case in order to establish its credibility. If we would knowwhat the Apostles felt concerning a miracle, we must ask ourselveshow the more ignorant peasants of to-day feel: if we do this weshall have to admit that a miracle might have been accepted upon veryinsufficient grounds, and that, once accepted, it would not have hadone-hundredth part so good a chance of being refuted as it would havenow. 

"It should be borne in mind, and is too often lost sight of, that WEHAVE NO ACCOUNT OF THE RESURRECTION FROM ANY SOURCE WHATEVER. Wehave accounts of the visit of certain women to a tomb which theyfound empty; but this is not an account of a resurrection. We aretold that Jesus Christ was seen alive after being thought to havebeen dead, but this again is not an account of a resurrection. It isa statement of a fact, but it is not an account of the circumstanceswhich attended that fact. In the story told by Matthew we have whatcomes nearest to an account of the Resurrection, but even here theprincipal figure is wanting; the angel rolls away the stone and sitsupon it, but we hear nothing about the body of Christ emerging fromthe tomb; we only meet with this, when we come to the Italianpainters. 

"Moreover, St. Matthew's account is utterly incredible from first tolast; we are therefore thrown back upon the other three Evangelists, none of whom professes to give us the smallest information as to thetime and manner of Christ's Resurrection. THERE IS NOTHING IN ANY OFTHEIR ACCOUNTS TO PRECLUDE HIS HAVING RISEN WITHIN TWO HOURS FROM HISHAVING BEEN LAID IN THE TOMB. 

"If a man of note were condemned to death, crucified and afterwardsseen alive, the almost instantaneous conclusion in the days of theApostles, and in such minds as theirs, would be that he had risenfrom the dead; but the almost instantaneous conclusion now, among allwhose judgement would carry the smallest weight, would be that he hadnever died--that there must have been some mistake. Children andinexperienced persons believe readily in all manner ofimprobabilities and impossibilities, which when they become older andwiser they cannot conceive their having ever seriously accepted. Aswith men, so with ages; an unusual train of events brings aboutunusual results, whereon the childlike age turns instinctively tomiracle for a solution of the difficulty. In the days of Christ menwould ask for evidence of the Crucifixion and the reappearance; whenthese two points had been established they would have been satisfied--not unnaturally--that a great miracle had been performed: but nosane man would be contented now with the evidence that was sufficientthen, any more than he would be content to accept many things which achild must take upon authority, and authority only. WE ought torequire the most ample evidence that not only the appearance ofdeath, but death itself, must have inevitably ensued upon theCrucifixion, and if this were not forthcoming we should not for amoment hesitate about refusing to believe that the reappearance wasmiraculous. 

"And this is what would most assuredly be done now by impartialexaminers--by men of scientific mind who had no wish either tobelieve or disbelieve except according to the evidence; but even now, if their affections and their hopes of a glorious kingdom in a worldbeyond the grave were enlisted on the side of the miracle, it wouldgo hard with the judgement of most men. How much more would this beso, if they had believed from earliest childhood that miracles werestill occasionally worked in England, and that a few generations agothey had been much more signal and common?

"Can we wonder then, if we ourselves feel so strongly concerningevents which are hull down upon the horizon of time, that those wholived in the very thick of them should have been possessed with anall absorbing ecstasy or even frenzy of excitement? Assuredly thereis no blame on the score of credulity to be attached to those whopropagated the Christian religion, but the beliefs which were naturaland lawful to them, are, if natural, yet not lawful to ourselves:they should be resisted: they are neither right nor wise, and do notform any legitimate ground for faith: if faith means only thebelieving facts of history upon insufficient evidence, we deny themerit of faith; on the contrary, we regard it as one of the mostdeplorable of all errors--as sapping the foundations of all the moraland intellectual faculties. It is grossly immoral to violate one'sinner sense of truth by assenting to things which, though they mayappear to be supported by much, are still not supported by enough. The man who can knowingly submit to such a derogation from the rightsof his self-respect, deserves the injury to his mental eye-sightwhich such a course will surely bring with it. But the mischief willunfortunately not be confined to himself; it will devolve upon allwho are ill-fated enough to be in his power; he will be reckless ofthe harm he works them, provided he can keep its consequences frombeing immediately offensive to himself. No: if a good thing can bebelieved legitimately, let us believe it and be thankful, otherwisethe goodness will have departed out of it; it is no longer ours; wehave no right to it, and shall suffer for it, we and our children, ifwe try to keep it. It has been said that the fathers have eaten sourgrapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge, but, more truly, itis the eating of sweet and stolen fruit by the fathers that sets theteeth of the children jarring. Let those who love their childrenlook to this, for on their own account they may be mainly trusted toavoid the sour. Hitherto the intensity of the belief of the Apostleshas been the mainstay of our own belief. But that mainstay is now nolonger strong enough. A rehearing of the evidence is imperativelydemanded, that it may either be confirmed or overthrown. "

It cannot be denied that there is much in the above with which alltrue Christians will agree, and little to find fault with except theself-complacency which would seem to imply that common sense andplain dealing belong exclusively to the unbelieving side. It is timethat this spirit should be protested against not in word only but indeed. The fact is, that both we and our opponents are agreed thatnothing should be believed unless it can be proved to be true. Werepudiate the idea that faith means the accepting historical factsupon evidence which is insufficient to establish them. We do notcall this faith; we call it credulity, and oppose it to the utmost ofour power. 

Our opponents imply that we regard as a virtue well-pleasing in thesight of God, and dignify with the name of faith, a state of mindwhich turns out to be nothing but a willingness to stand by all sortsof wildly improbable stories which have reached us from a remote ageand country, and which, if true, must lead us to think otherwise ofthe whole course of nature than we should think if we were left toourselves. This accusation is utterly false and groundless. Faithis the "evidence of things not seen, " but it is not "insufficientevidence for things alleged to have been seen. " It is "the substanceof things hoped for, " but "reasonably hoped for" was unquestionablyintended by the Apostle. We base our faith in the deeper mysteriesof our religion, as in the nature of the Trinity and the sacramentalgraces, upon the certainty that other things which are within thegrasp of our reason can be shewn to be beyond dispute. We know thatChrist died and rose again; therefore we believe whatever He sees fitto tell us, and follow Him, or endeavour to follow Him, whereinsoeverHe commands us, but we are not required to take both the commands ofthe Mediator AND HIS CREDENTIALS upon faith. It is because certainthings within our comprehension are capable of the most irrefragableproof, that certain others out of it may justly be required to bebelieved, and indeed cannot be disbelieved without contumacy andpresumption. And this applies to a certain extent to the credentialsalso: for although no man should be captious, nor ask for moreevidence than would satisfy a well-disciplined mind concerning thetruth of any ordinary fact (as one who not contented with theevidence of a seal, a handwriting and a matter not at variance withprobability, would nevertheless refuse to act upon instructionsbecause he had not with his own eyes actually seen the sender writeand sign and seal), yet it is both reasonable and indeed necessarythat a certain amount of care should be taken before the credentialsare accepted. If our opponents mean no more than this we are at onewith them, and may allow them to proceed. 

"Turn then, " they say, "to the account of the events which arealleged to have happened upon the morning of the Resurrection, asgiven in the fourth Gospel: and assume for the sake of the argumentthat that account, if not from John's own hand, is nevertheless froma Johannean source, and virtually the work of the Apostle. Theaccount runs as follows:

"'The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene while it was yetdark unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from thesepulchre. Then she runneth and cometh to Simon Peter and to theother disciple whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, 'They havetaken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where theyhave laid Him. ' Peter therefore went forth and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre. So they both ran together: and the otherdisciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre. And hestooping down and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying, yet wenthe not in. Then cometh Simon Peter following him and went into thesepulchre and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin that wasabout His head not lying with the linen clothes but wrapped togetherin a place by itself. Then went in also that other disciple, whichcame first to the sepulchre, and he saw and believed. For as yetthey knew not the Scripture that he must rise from the dead. Thenthe disciples went away again to their own home. But Mary stoodwithout at the sepulchre weeping; and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, the other at the feet, where the body of Jesushad lain, and they say unto her, 'Woman, why weepest thou?' Shesaith unto them, 'Because they have taken away my Lord and I know notwhere they have laid him. '"

"Then Mary sees Jesus himself, but does not at first recognise him. 

"Now, let us see what the above amounts to, and, dividing it into twoparts, let us examine first what we are told as having come actuallyunder John's own observation, and, secondly, what happenedafterwards. 

I. "It is clear that Mary had seen nothing miraculous before shecame running to the two Apostles, Peter and John. She had found thetomb empty when she reached it. She did not know where the body ofher Lord then was, NOR WAS THERE ANYTHING TO SHEW HOW LONG IT HADBEEN REMOVED: all she knew was that within thirty-six hours from thetime of its having been laid in the tomb it had disappeared, but howmuch earlier it had been gone neither did she know, nor shall we. Peter and John went into the sepulchre and thoroughly examined it:they saw no angel, nor anything approaching to the miraculous, simplythe grave clothes (WHICH WERE PROBABLY OF WHITE LINEN), lying IN TWOSEPARATE PLACES. Then, AND NOT TILL THEN, do they appear to haveentertained their first belief or hope that Christ might have risenfrom the dead. 

"This is plain and credible; but it amounts to an empty tomb, and toan empty tomb only. 

"Here, for a moment, we must pause. Had these men but a few weekspreviously seen Lazarus raised from the corruption of the grave--tosay nothing of other resurrections from the dead? Had they seentheir master override every known natural law, and prove that, as faras he was concerned, all human experience was worthless, by walkingupon rough water, by actually talking to a storm of wind and makingit listen to him, by feeding thousands with a few loaves, and causingthe fragments that remained after all had eaten, to be more than thefood originally provided? Had they seen events of this kindcontinually happening for a space of some two years, and finally hadthey seen their master transfigured, conversing with the greatest oftheir prophets (men who had been dead for ages), and recognised by avoice from heaven as the Son of the Almighty, and had they also heardanything approaching to an announcement that he should himself risefrom the dead--or had they not? They might have seen the raising ofLazarus and the rest of the miracles, but might not have anticipatedthat Christ himself would rise, for want of any announcement thatthis should be so; or, again, they might have heard a prophecy of hisResurrection from the lips of Christ, but disbelieved it for the wantof any previous miracles which should convince them that the prophecycame from no ordinary person; so that their not having expected theResurrection is explicable by giving up either the prophecies, or themiracles, but it is impossible to believe that IN SPITE BOTH OF THEMIRACLES AND THE PROPHECIES, the Apostles should have been stillwithout any expectation of the Resurrection. If they had both seenthe miracles and heard the prophecies, they must have been in a stateof inconceivably agitated excitement in anticipation of theirmaster's reappearance. And this they were not; on the contrary, theywere expecting nothing of the kind. The condition of mind ascribedto them considering their supposed surroundings, is one which belongsto the drama only; it is not of nature: it is so utterly at variancewith all human experience that it should be dismissed at once asincredible. 

"But it is very credible if Christ was seen alive after hisCrucifixion, and his reappearance, though due to natural causes, wasonce believed to be miraculous, that this one seemingly wellsubstantiated miracle should become the parent of all the others, andof the prophecies of the Resurrection. Thirty years in allprobability elapsed between the reappearances of Christ and theearliest of the four Gospels; thirty years of oral communication andspiritual enthusiasm, among an oriental people, and in anunscientific age; an age by which the idea of an interference withthe modes of the universe from a point outside of itself, was takenas a matter of course; an age which believed in an anthropomorphicDeity who had back parts, which Moses had been allowed to see throughthe hand of God; an age which, over and above all this, was at thetime especially convulsed with expectations of deliverance from theRoman yoke. Have we not here a soil suitable for the growth ofmiracles, if the seed once fell upon it? Under such conditions theywould even spring up of themselves, seedless. 

"Once let the reappearances of Christ have been believed to bemiraculous (and under all the circumstances they might easily havebeen believed to be so, though due to natural causes), and it is notwonderful that, in such an age and among such a people, the othermiracles and the prophecies of the Resurrection should have becomecurrent within thirty years. Even we ourselves, with all ourincalculably greater advantages, could not withstand so great atemptation to let our wish become father to our thoughts. If we hadbeen the especially favoured friends of one whom we believed to havedied, but who yet was not to beholden by death, no matter how carefuland judicially minded we might be by nature, we should be blind toeverything except the fact that we had once been the chosencompanions of an immortal. There lives no one who could withstandthe intoxication of such an idea. A single well-substantiatedmiracle in the present day, even though we had not seen it ourselves, would uproot the hedges of our caution; it would rob us of that senseof the continuity of nature, in which our judgements are, consciouslyor unconsciously, anchored; but if we were very closely connectedwith it in our own persons, we should dwell upon the recollection ofit and on little else. 

"Few of us can realise what happened so very long ago. Men believein the Christian miracles, though they would reject the notion of amodern miracle almost with ridicule, and would hardly even examinethe evidence in its favour. But the Christian miracles stand intheir minds as things apart; their PRESTIGE is greater than thatattaching to any other events in the whole history of mankind. Theyare hallowed by the unhesitating belief of many, many generations. Every circumstance which should induce us to bow to their authoritysurrounds them with a bulwark of defences which may make us wellbelieve that they must be impregnable, and sacred from attack. Smallwonder then that the many should still believe them. Neverthelessthey do not believe them so fully, nor nearly so fully, as they thinkthey do. For even the strongest imagination can travel but a verylittle way beyond a man's own experience; it will not bear the burdenof carrying him to a remote age and country; it will flag, wander anddream; it will not answer truly, but will lay hold of the mostobvious absurdity, and present it impudently to its tired master, whowill accept it gladly and have done with it. Even recollectionfails, but how much more imagination! It is a high flight ofimagination to be able to realise how weak imagination is. 

"We cannot therefore judge what would be the effect of immediatecontact even with the wild hope of a miracle, from our conventionalacceptance of the Christian miracles. If we would realise this wemust look to modern alleged miracles--to the enthusiasm of the Irishand American revivals, when mind inflames mind till strong men burstinto hysterical tears like children; we must look for it in theeffect produced by the supposed Irvingite miracles on those whobelieved in them, or in the miracles that followed the Port Royalmiracle of the holy thorn. There never was a miracle solitary yet:one will soon become the parent of many. The minds of those who havebelieved in a single miracle as having come within their ownexperience become ecstatic; so deeply impressed are they with themomentous character of what they have known, that their power ofenlisting sympathy becomes immeasurably greater than that of men whohave never believed themselves to have come into contact with themiraculous; their deep conviction carries others along with it, andso the belief is strengthened till adverse influences check it, ortill it reaches a pitch of grotesque horror, as in the case of thelater Jansenist miracles. There is nothing, therefore, extraordinaryin the gradual development within thirty years of all the Christianmiracles, if the Resurrection were once held to be wellsubstantiated; and there is nothing wonderful, under thecircumstances, in the reappearance of Christ alive after hisCrucifixion having been assigned to miracle. He had already madesufficient impression upon his followers to require but little helpfrom circumstances. He had not so impressed them as to want NO helpfrom any supposed miracle, but nevertheless any strange event inconnection with him would pass muster, with little or no examination, as being miraculous. He had undoubtedly professed himself to be, andhad been half accepted as, the promised Messiah. He had no lessundoubtedly appeared to be dead, and had been believed to be so bothby friends and foes. Let us also grant that he reappeared alive. Would it, then, be very astonishing that the little missing link inthe completeness of the chain of evidence--ABSOLUTE CERTAINTYCONCERNING THE ACTUALITY OF THE DEATH--should have been allowed todrop out of sight?

"Round such a centre, and in such an age, the other miracles wouldspring up spontaneously, and be accepted the moment that they arose;there is nothing in this which is foreign to the known tendencies ofthe human mind, but there would be something utterly foreign to allwe know of human nature, in the fact of men not anticipating thatChrist would rise, if they had already seen him raise others from thedead and work the miracles ascribed to him, and if they had alsoheard him prophesy that he should himself rise from the dead. Infact nothing can explain the universally recorded incredulity of theApostles as to the reappearance of Christ, except the fact that theyhad never seen him work a single miracle, or else that they had neverheard him say anything which could lead them to suppose that he wasto rise from the dead. 

"We are therefore not unwilling to accept the facts recorded in thefourth Gospel, in so far as they inform us of things which came underthe knowledge of the writer. Mary found the tomb empty. Ignorantalike of what had taken place and of what was going to happen, shecame to Peter and John to tell them that the body was gone; this wasall she knew. The two go to the tomb, and find all as Mary had said;on this it is not impossible that a wild dream of hope may haveflashed upon their minds, that the aspirations which they had alreadyindulged in were to prove well founded. Within an hour or two Christwas seen alive, nor can we wonder if the years which intervenedbetween the morning of the Resurrection and the writing of the fourthGospel, should have sufficed to make the writer believe that John hadhad an actual belief in the Resurrection, while in truth he had onlywildly hoped it. This much is at any rate plain, that neither he norPeter had as yet heard any clearly intelligible prophecy that theirmaster should rise from the dead. Whatever subsequent interpretationmay have been given to some of the sayings of Jesus Christ, no sayingwas yet known which would of itself have suggested any suchinference. We may justly doubt the caution and accuracy of the firstfounders of Christianity, without, even in our hearts, for one momentimpugning the honesty of their intentions. We are ready to admitthat had we been in their places we should in all likelihood havefelt, believed, and, we will hope, acted as they did; but we cannotand will not admit, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, that they were superior to the intelligence of their times, or, inother words, that they were capable critics of an event, in whichboth their feelings and the prima facie view of the facts would be solikely to mislead them. 

II. "Turning now to the narrative of what passed when Peter and Johnwere gone, we find that Mary, stooping down, looked through her tearsinto the darkness of the tomb, and saw two angels clothed in white, who asked her why she wept. We must remember the wide differencebetween believing what the writer of the fourth Gospel tells us thatJohn saw, and what he tells us that Mary Magdalene saw. All we knowon this point is that he believed that Mary had spoken truly. Peterand John were men, they went into the tomb itself, and we may say fora certainty that they saw no angel, nor indeed anything at all, butthe grave clothes (WHICH WERE PROBABLY OF WHITE LINEN), lying IN TWOSEPARATE PLACES within it. Mary was a woman--a woman whose parallelwe must look for among Spanish or Italian women of the lower ordersat the present day; she had, we are elsewhere told, been at one timepossessed with devils; she was in a state of tearful excitement, andlooking through her tears from light into comparative darkness. Isit possible not to remember what Peter and John DID see when theywere in the tomb? Is it possible not to surmise that Mary in goodtruth saw nothing more? She thought she saw more, but the excitementunder which she was labouring at the time, an excitement which wouldincrease tenfold after she had seen Christ (as she did immediatelyafterwards and before she had had time to tell her story), wouldeasily distort either her vision or her memory, or both. 

"The evidence of women of her class--especially when they are highlyexcited--is not to be relied upon in a matter of such importance anddifficulty as a miracle. Who would dare to insist upon such evidencenow? And why should it be considered as any more trustworthyeighteen hundred years ago? We are indeed told that the angels spoketo her; but the speech was very short; the angels simply ask her whyshe weeps; she answers them as though it were the common question ofcommon people, and then leaves them. This is in itself incredible;but it is not incredible that if Mary looking into the tomb saw twowhite objects within, she should have drawn back affrighted, and thather imagination, thrown into a fever by her subsequent interview withChrist, should have rendered her utterly incapable of recollectingthe true facts of the case; or, again, it is not incredible that sheshould have been believed to have seen things which she never didsee. All we can say for certain is that before the fourth Gospel waswritten, and probably shortly after the first reappearance of Christ, Mary Magdalene believed, or was thought to have believed, that shehad seen angels in the tomb; and this being so, the development ofthe short and pointless question attributed to them--possibly as muchdue to the eager cross-questioning of others as to Mary herself--isnot surprising. 

"Before the Sunday of the Resurrection was over, the facts asderivable from the fourth Gospel would stand thus. Jesus Christ, whowas supposed to have been verily and indeed dead, was known to bealive again. He had been seen, and heard to speak. He had been seenby those who were already prepared to accept him as their leader, andwhose previous education, and tone of mind, would lead them rather toan excess of faith in a miracle, than of scepticism concerning itsmiraculous character. The Apostles would be in no impartial norsceptical mood when they saw that Christ was alive. The miracle wastoo near themselves--too fascinating in its supposed consequences forthemselves--to allow of their going into curious questions about thecompleteness of the death. The Master whom they had loved, and inwhom they had hoped, had been crucified and was alive again. Is it aharsh or strained supposition, that what would have assuredly beenenough for ourselves, if we had known and loved Christ and had beenattuned in mind as the Apostles were, should also have been enoughfor them? Who can say so? The nature of our belief in our Masterwould have been changed once and for ever; and so we find it to havebeen with the Christian Apostles. 

"Over and above the reappearance of Christ, there would also be areport (probably current upon the very Sunday of the Resurrection), that Mary Magdalene had seen a vision of angels in the tomb in whichChrist's body had been laid; and this, though a matter of smallmoment in comparison with the reappearance of Christ himself, willnevertheless concern us nearly when we come to consider thenarratives of the other Evangelists. "

CHAPTER VIII--THE PRECEDING CHAPTER CONTINUED

"Let us now turn to Luke. His account runs as follows:-

"'Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, theycame unto the sepulchre bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. AND THEY FOUND THE STONE ROLLED AWAYFROM THE SEPULCHRE. AND THEY ENTERED IN, AND FOUND NOT THE BODY OFTHE LORD JESUS. And it came to pass as they were much perplexedthereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments, AND ASTHEY WERE AFRAID, AND BOWED THEIR FACES TO THE EARTH, they said untothem, "WHY SEEK YE THE LIVING AMONG THE DEAD? He is not here, but isrisen: REMEMBER HOW HE SPAKE UNTO YOU WHEN HE WAS YET IN GALILEE, saying, 'THE SON OF MAN MUST BE DELIVERED INTO THE HANDS OF SINFULMEN AND BE CRUCIFIED, AND THE THIRD DAY RISE AGAIN. " AND THEYREMEMBERED HIS WORDS, and returned from the sepulchre, and told allthese things unto the eleven, and to all the rest. It was MaryMagdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other womenthat were with them which told these things unto the Apostles. ANDTHEIR WORDS SEEMED UNTO THEM AS IDLE TALES, AND THEY BELIEVED THEMNOT. Then arose Peter, and went unto the sepulchre: and, stoopingdown, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departedwondering in himself at that which was come to pass. '

"When we compare this account with John's we are at once struck withthe resemblances and the discrepancies. Luke and John indeed areboth agreed that Christ was seen alive after the Crucifixion. Bothagree that the tomb was found empty very early on the Sunday morning(i. E. , within thirty-six hours of the deposition from the Cross), andneither writer affords us any clue whatever as to the time and mannerof the removal of the body; but here the resemblances end; theangelic vision of Mary, seen AFTER Peter and John had departed fromthe tomb, and seen apparently by Mary alone, in Luke finds its wayinto the van of the narrative, and Peter is represented as havinggone to the tomb, NOT IN CONSEQUENCE OF HAVING BEEN SIMPLY TOLD THATTHE BODY OF CHRIST WAS MISSING, BUT BECAUSE HE REFUSED TO BELIEVE THEMIRACULOUS STORY WHICH WAS TOLD HIM BY THE WOMEN. In the fourthGospel we heard of no miraculous story being carried by Mary to Peterand John. The angels instead of being seen by one person only, aswould have appeared from the fourth Gospel, are now seen BY MANY; andthe women instead of being almost stolidly indifferent to thepresence of supernatural beings, are afraid, and bow down their facesto the earth; instead of merely wanting to be informed why Mary wasweeping, the angels speak with definite point, and as angels might beexpected to speak; they allude, also, to past prophecy, which thewomen at once remember. 

"Strange, that they should want reminding! And stranger still that afew verses lower down we should find the Apostles remembering noprophetic saying, but regarding the story of the women as mere idletales. What shall we say? Are not these differences preciselysimilar to those which we are continually meeting with, when a caseof exaggeration comes before us? Can we accept BOTH the stories? Isthis one of those cases in which all would be made clear if we didbut know ALL the facts, or is it rather one in which we canunderstand how easily the story given by the one writer might becomedistorted into the version of the other? Does it seem in any wayimprobable that within the forty years or so between the occurrencesrecorded by John and the writing of Luke's Gospel, the apparentlytrifling, yet truly most important, differences between the twowriters should have been developed?

"No one will venture to say that the facts, upon the face of them, donot strongly suggest such an inference, and that, too, with noconscious fraud on the part of any of those through whose mouths thestory must have passed. If the fourth Gospel be assigned to John(and if it is NOT assigned to John the difficulties on the Christianside become so great that the cause may be declared lost), his storyis that of a principal actor and eye-witness; it bears every impressof truth and none of exaggeration upon any point which came under hisown observation. Even when he tells of what Mary Magdalene said shesaw, we see the myth in its earliest and crudest form; there is noattempt at circumstance in connection with it, and abundant reasonfor suspecting its supernatural character is given along with it;reason which to our minds is at any rate sufficient to make us doubtit, but which would naturally have no weight whatever with John afterhe had once seen Christ alive, or indeed with us if we had been inhis place. It is not to be wondered at that in such times many afresh bud should be grafted on to the original story; indeed it wassimply inevitable that this should have been the case. No one wouldmean to deceive, but we know how, among uneducated and enthusiasticpersons, the marvellous has an irresistible tendency to become moremarvellous still; and, as far as we can gather, all the causes whichbring this about were more actively at work shortly after the time ofChrist's first reappearance than at any other time which can bereadily called to mind. The main facts, as we derive them from theconsent of BOTH writers, were simply these:- That the tomb of Christwas found unexpectedly empty on the Sunday morning; that this factwas reported to the Apostles; that Peter went into the tomb and sawthe linen clothes laid by themselves; that Mary Magdalene said thatshe had seen angels; and that eventually Christ shewed himselfundoubtedly alive. Both writers agree so far, but it is impossibleto say that they agree farther. 

"Some may say that it is of little moment whether the angels appearedfirst or last; whether they were seen by many or by one; whether, ifseen only by one, that one had previously been insane; whether theyspoke as angels might be expected to speak, i. E. , to the point, andare shewn to have been recognised as angels by the fear which theirappearance caused; or whether they caused no alarm, and said nothingwhich was in the least equal to the occasion. But most men will feelthat the whole complexion of the story changes according to theanswers which can be made to these very questions. Surely they willalso begin to feel a strong suspicion that the story told by Luke isone which has not lost in the telling. How natural was it that theangelic vision should find its way into the foreground of thepicture, and receive those little circumstantial details of which itappeared most to stand in need; how desirable also that the testimonyof Mary should be corroborated by that of others who were with her, and out of whom no devils had been cast. The first Christians wouldnot have been men and women at all unless they had felt thus; butthey WERE men and women, and hence they acted after the fashion oftheir age and unconsciously exaggerated; the only wonder is that theydid not exaggerate more, for we must remember that even though theApostles themselves be supposed to have been more judiciallyunimpassioned and less liable to inaccuracy than we have reason tobelieve they were, yet that from the very earliest ages of the Churchthere would be some converts of an inferior stamp. No matter howsmall a society is, there will be bad in it as well as good--therewas a Judas even in the twelve. 

"But to speak less harshly, there must from the first have been someconverts who would be capable of reporting incautiously; visions anddreams were vouchsafed to many, and not a few marvels may bereferable to this source; there is no trusting an age in which menare liable to give a supernatural interpretation to an extraordinarydream, nor is there any end to what may come of it, if people beginseriously confounding their sleeping and waking impressions. In suchtimes, then, Luke may have said with a clear conscience that he hadcarefully sifted the truth of what he wrote; but the world has notpassed through the last two thousand years in vain, and we are boundto insist upon a higher standard of credibility. Luke would believeat once, and as a matter of course, things which we should as amatter of course reject; yet it is probable that he too had heardmuch that he rejected; he seems to have been dissatisfied with allthe records with the existence of which he was aware; the accountwhich he gives is possibly derived from some very early report; evenif this report arose at Jerusalem, and within a week after theCrucifixion, it might well be very inaccurate, though apparentlysupported by excellent authority, so that there is no necessity forcharging Luke with unusual credulity. No one can be expected to begreatly in advance of his surroundings; it is well for every oneexcept himself if he should happen to be so, but no man is to beblamed if he is not; it is enough to save him if he is fairly up tothe standard of his own times. 'Morality' is rather of the customwhich IS, than of the custom which ought to be. 

"Turning now to the account of Mark, we find the following:-

"'And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the motherof James, and Salome had bought sweet spices that they might come andanoint him. And very early in the morning, the first day of theweek, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. Andthey said among themselves, "Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?"And when they looked they saw that the stone was rolled away; for itwas very great. And entering into the sepulchre they saw A YOUNG MANsitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and theywere affrighted. And he saith unto them, "Be not affrighted; ye seekJesus of Nazareth which was crucified; he is risen; he is not here;behold the place where they laid him. But go your way, tell hisdisciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there yeshall see him, as he said unto you. " And they went out quickly, andfled from the sepulchre; FOR THEY TREMBLED AND WERE AMAZED, NEITHERSAID THEY ANY THING TO ANY MAN, FOR THEY WERE AFRAID. Now when Jesuswas risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to MaryMagdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. And she went andtold them that had been with him as they mourned and wept. And they, when they heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, BELIEVEDNOT. '

"Here we have substantially the same version as that given by Luke;there is only one angel mentioned, but it may be said that it ispossible that there may have been another who is not mentioned, inasmuch as he remained silent; the angelic vision, however, is againbrought into the foreground of the story and the fear of the women iseven more strongly insisted on than it was in Luke. The angelreminds the women that Christ had said that he should be seen by hisApostles in Galilee, of which saying we again find that the Apostlesseem to have had no recollection. The linen clothes have quitedropped out of the story, and we can detect no trace of Peter andJohn's visit to the tomb, but it is remarkable that the women arerepresented as not having said anything about the presence of theangel immediately on their having seen him; and this fact, whichmight be in itself suspicious, is apologised for on the score offear, notwithstanding that their silence was a direct violation ofthe command of the being whom they so greatly feared. We should haveexpected that if they had feared him so much they would have done ashe told them, but here again everybody seems to act as in a dream ordrama, in defiance of all the ordinary principles of human action. 

"Throughout the preceding paragraph we have assumed that Markintended his readers to understand that the young man seen in thetomb was an angel; but, after all, this is rather a bold assumption. On what grounds is it supported? Because Luke tells us that when thewomen reached the tomb they found TWO white angels within it, are wetherefore to conclude that Mark, who wrote many years earlier, and asfar as we can gather with much greater historical accuracy, must havemeant an angel when he spoke of a 'young man'? Yet this can be theonly reason, unless the young man's having worn a long white robe isconsidered as sufficient cause for believing him to have been anangel; and this, again, is rather a bold assumption. But if St. Markmeant no more than he said, and when he wrote of a 'young man'intended to convey the idea of a young man and of nothing more, whatbecomes of the angelic visions at the tomb of Christ? For St. Matthew's account is wholly untenable; St. Luke is a much laterwriter, who must have got all his materials second or third hand; andalthough we granted, and are inclined to believe, that the accountsof the visits of Mary Magdalene, and subsequently of Peter and Johnto the tomb, which are given in the fourth Gospel, are from aJohannean source, if we were asked our reasons for this belief, weshould be very hard put to it to give them. Nevertheless we think itprobable. 

"But take it either way; if the account in the fourth Gospel issupposed to have been derived from the Apostle John, we have alreadyseen that there is nothing miraculous about it, so far as it dealswith what came under John's own observation; if, on the other hand, it is NOT authentic we are thrown back upon St. Mark as incomparablyour best authority for the facts that occurred on the Sunday afterthe Crucifixion, and he tells us of nothing but a tomb found empty, with the exception that there was a young man in it who wore a longwhite dress and told the women to tell the Apostles to go to Galilee, where they should see Christ. On the strength of this we are askedto believe that the reappearance of Christ alive, after a hurriedcrucifixion, must have been due to supernatural causes, andsupernatural causes only! It will be easily seen what a number ofthreads might be taken up at this point, and followed with notuninteresting results. For the sake, however, of brevity, we grantit as most probable that St. Mark meant the young man said to havebeen seen in the tomb, to be considered as an angel; but we must alsoexpress our conviction that this supposed angelic vision is amisplaced offshoot of the report that Mary Magdalene had seen angelsin the tomb after Peter and John had left it. 

"It is possible that Mark's account may be the most historic of allthose that we have; but we incline to think otherwise, inasmuch asthe angelic vision placed in the foreground by Mark and Luke, wouldnot be likely to find its way into the background again, as it doesin the fourth Gospel, unless in consequence of really authenticinformation; no unnecessary detraction from the miraculous element isconceivable as coming from the writer who has handed down to us thestory of the raising of Lazarus, where we have, indeed, A REALACCOUNT OF A RESURRECTION, the continuity of the evidence beingunbroken, and every link in the chain forged fast and strong, even tothe unwrapping of the grave clothes from the body as it emerged fromthe sepulchre. Is it possible that the writer may have given thestory of the raising of Lazarus (of which we find no trace except inthe fourth Gospel), because he felt that in giving the Apostolicversion with absolute or substantial accuracy, he was so weakeningthe miraculous element in connection with the Resurrection of JesusChrist himself, that it became necessary to introduce anincontrovertible account of the resurrection of some other person, which should do, as it were, vicarious duty?

"Nevertheless there are some points on which all the three writersare agreed: we have the same substratum of facts, namely, THE TOMBFOUND ALREADY EMPTY WHEN THE WOMEN REACHED IT, a confused andcontradictory report of an angel or angels seen within it, and thesubsequent reappearance of Christ. Not one of the three writersaffords us the slightest clue as to the time and manner of theremoval of the body from the tomb; there is nothing in any of thenarratives which is incompatible with its having been taken away onthe very night of the Crucifixion itself. 

"Is this a case in which the defenders of Christianity would clamourfor ALL the facts, unless they exceedingly well knew that there wasno chance of their getting them? ALL the facts, indeed--what tricksdoes our imagination play us! One would have thought that there werequite enough facts given as the matter stands to make the defendersof Christianity wish that there were not so many; and then for themto say that if we had more, those that we have would become lesscontradictory! What right have they to assume that if they had allthe facts, the accounts of the Resurrection would cease to puzzle us, more than we have to say that if we had all the facts, we should findthese accounts even more inexplicable than we do at present? Had WEargued thus we should have been accused of shameless impudence; of adesire to maintain any position in which we happened to findourselves, and by which we made money, regardless of every commonprinciple of truth or honour, or whatever else makes the differencebetween upright men and self-deceivers. 

"It may be said by some that the discrepancies between the threeaccounts given above are discrepancies concerning details only, butthat all three writers agree about the 'main fact. ' We arecontinually hearing about this 'main fact, ' but nobody is good enoughto tell us precisely what fact is meant. Is the main fact the factthat Jesus Christ was crucified? Then no one denies it. We alladmit that Jesus Christ was crucified. Or, is it that he was seenalive several times after the Crucifixion? This also we are notdisposed to deny. We believe that there is a considerablepreponderance of evidence in its favour. But if the 'main fact'turns out to be that Christ was crucified, DIED, and then came tolife again, we admit that here too all the writers are agreed, but wecannot find with any certainty that one of them was present whenChrist died or when his body was taken down from the Cross, or thatthere was any such examination of the body as would be absolutelynecessary in order to prove that a man had been dead who wasafterwards seen alive. If Christ reappeared alive, there is not onlyno tittle of evidence in support of his death which would be allowedfor a moment in an English court of justice, but there is anoverwhelming amount of evidence which points inexorably in thedirection of his never having died. If he reappeared, there is noevidence of his having died. If he did not reappear, there is noevidence of his having risen from the dead. 

"We are inclined, however, as has been said already, to believe thatJesus Christ really did reappear shortly after the Crucifixion, andthat his reappearance, though due to natural causes, was conceived tobe miraculous. We believe also that Mary fancied that she had seenangels in the tomb, and openly said that she had done so; who woulddoubt her when so far greater a marvel than this had been madepalpably manifest to all? Who would care to inquire veryparticularly whether there were two angels or only one? Whetherthere were other women with Mary or whether she was quite alone? Whowould compare notes about the exact moment of their appearing, andwhat strictly accurate account of their words could be expected inthe ferment of such excitement and such ignorance? Any speech whichsounded tolerably plausible would be accepted under thecircumstances, and none will complain of Mark as having wilfullyattempted to deceive, any more than he will of Luke: theamplification of the story was inevitable, and the very candour andinnocence with which the writers leave loophole after loophole forescape from the miraculous, is alone sufficient proof of theirsincerity; nevertheless, it is also proof that they were all more orless inaccurate; we can only say in their defence, that in thereappearance of Christ himself we find abundant palliation of theirinaccuracy. Given one great miracle, proved with a sufficiency ofevidence for the capacities and proclivities of the age, and the restis easy. The groundwork of the after-structure of the other miraclesis to be found in the fact that Christ was crucified, and wasafterwards seen alive. "

There is no occasion for me to examine St. Matthew's account of theResurrection in company with the unhappy men whose views I have beenendeavouring to represent above. For reasons which have already beensufficiently dwelt upon I freely own that I agree with them inrejecting it. I shall therefore admit that the story of the sealingof the tomb, and setting of the guard, the earthquake, the descent ofthe angel from Heaven, his rolling away the stone, sitting upon it, and addressing the women therefrom, is to be treated for allcontroversial purposes as though it had never been written. By thisadmission, I confess to complete ignorance of the time when the stonewas removed from the mouth of the tomb, or the hour when the Redeemerrose. I should add that I agree with our opponents in believing thatour Lord never foretold His Resurrection to the Apostles. But howlittle does it matter whether He foretold His Resurrection or not, and whether He rose at one hour or another. It is enough for me thathe rose at all; for the rest I care not. 

"Yet, see, " our opponents will exclaim in answer, "what a mightyriver has come from a little spring. We heard first of two men goinginto an empty tomb, finding two bundles of grave clothes, anddeparting. Then there comes a certain person, concerning whom we areelsewhere told a fact which leaves us with a very uncomfortableimpression, and SHE sees, not two bundles of grave clothes, but twowhite angels, who ask a dreamy pointless question, and receive anappropriate answer. Then we find the time of this apparitionshifted; it is placed in the front, not in the background, and isseen by many, instead of being vouchsafed to no one but to a weepingwoman looking into the bottom of a tomb. The speech of the angels, also, becomes effective, and the linen clothes drop out of sightentirely, unless some faint trace of them is to be found in the 'longwhite garment' which Mark tells us was worn by the young man who wasin the tomb when the women reached it. Finally, we have a guard setupon the tomb, and the stone which was rolled in front of it issealed; the angel IS SEEN TO DESCEND FROM HEAVEN, to roll away thestone, and sit upon it, and there is a great earthquake. Oh! howthings grow, how things grow! And, oh! how people believe!

"See by what easy stages the story has grown up from the smallestseed, as the mustard tree in the parable, and how the account givenby Matthew changes the whole complexion of the events. And see howthis account has been dwelt upon to the exclusion of the others bythe great painters and sculptors from whom, consciously orunconsciously, our ideas of the Christian era are chiefly drawn. Yes. These men have been the most potent of theologians, for theirtheology has reached and touched most widely. We have mistaken theirecho of the sound for the sound itself, and what was to them anaspiration, has, alas! been to us in the place of science andreality. 

"Truly the ease with which the plainest inferences from the Gospelnarratives have been overlooked is the best apology for those whohave attributed unnatural blindness to the Apostles. If we are soblind, why not they also? A pertinent question, but one which raisesmore difficulties than it solves. The seeing of truth is as thefinding of gold in far countries, where the shepherd has drunk of thestream and used it daily to cleanse the sweat of his brow, and reckedlittle of the treasure which lay abundantly concealed therein, untilone luckier than his fellows espies it, and the world comes flockingthither. So with truth; a little care, a little patience, a littlesympathy, and the wonder is that it should have lain hidden even fromthe merest child, not that it should now be manifest. 

"How early must it have been objected that there was no evidence thatthe tomb had not been tampered with (not by the Apostles, for theywere scattered, and of him who laid the body in the tomb--Joseph ofArimathaea--we hear no more) and that the body had been delivered notto enemies, but friends; how natural that so desirable an addition tothe completeness of the evidences in favour of a miraculousResurrection should have been early and eagerly accepted. Would nottwenty years of oral communication and Spanish or Italianexcitability suffice for the rooting of such a story? Yet, as far aswe can gather, the Gospel according to St. Matthew was even thenunwritten. And who was Matthew? And what was his original Gospel?

"There is one part of his story, and one only, which will stand thetest of criticism, and that is this:- That the saying that thedisciples came by night and stole the body of Jesus away was currentamong the Jews, at the time when the Gospel which we now haveappeared. Not that they did so--no one will believe this; but theallegation of the rumour (which would hardly have been venturedunless it would command assent as true) points in the direction ofsearch having been made for the body of Jesus--and made in vain. 

"We have now seen that there is no evidence worth the name, for anymiracle in connection with the tomb of Christ. He probablyreappeared alive, but not with any circumstances which we arejustified in regarding as supernatural. We are therefore at lengthled to a consideration of the Crucifixion itself. Is there evidencefor more than this--that Christ was crucified, was afterwards seenalive, and that this was regarded by his first followers as asufficient proof of his having risen from the dead? This wouldaccount for the rise of Christianity, and for all the other miracles. Take the following passage from Gibbon:- 'The grave and learnedAugustine, whose understanding scarcely admits the excuse ofcredulity, has attested the innumerable prodigies which were workedin Africa by the relics of St. Stephen, and this marvellous narrativeis inserted in the elaborate work of "The City of God, " which theBishop designed as a solid and immortal proof of the truth ofChristianity. Augustine solemnly declares that he had selected thosemiracles only which had been publicly certified by persons who wereeither the objects or the spectators of the powers of the martyr. Many prodigies were omitted or forgotten, and Hippo had been lessfavourably treated than the other cities of the province, yet theBishop enumerates above seventy miracles, of which three wereresurrections from the dead, within the limits of his own diocese. If we enlarge our view to all the dioceses and all the saints of theChristian world, it will not be easy to calculate the fables anderrors which issued from this inexhaustible source. But we maysurely be allowed to observe that a miracle in that age ofsuperstition and credulity lost its name and its merits, since itcould hardly be considered as a deviation from the established lawsof Nature. '--(Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chap. Xxviii. , sec. 2). 

"Who believes in the miracles, or who would dare to quote them? Yeton what better foundation do those of the New Testament rest? Forthe death of Christ there is no evidence at all. There is evidencethat he was believed to have been dead (under circumstances where amisapprehension was singularly likely to arise), by men whose mindswere altogether in a different clef to ours as regards themiraculous, and whom we cannot therefore fairly judge by any modernstandard. We cannot judge THEM, but we are bound to weigh the factswhich they relate, not in their balance, but in our own. It is notwhat might have seemed reasonably believable to them, but what isreasonably believable in our own more enlightened age which can bealone accepted sinlessly by ourselves. Men's modes of thoughtconcerning facts change from age to age; but the facts change not atall, and it is of them that we are called to judge. 

"We turn to the fourth Gospel, as that from which we shall derive themost accurate knowledge of the facts connected with the Crucifixion. Here we find that it was about twelve o'clock when Pilate brought outChrist for the last time; the dialogue that followed, thepreparations for the Crucifixion, and the leading Christ outside thecity to the place where the Crucifixion was to take place, couldhardly have occupied less than an hour. By six o'clock (by consentof all writers) the body was entombed, so that the actual time duringwhich Christ hung upon the cross was little more than four hours. Let us be thankful to hope that the time of suffering may have beenso short--but say five hours, say six, say whatever the readerchooses, the Crucifixion was avowedly too hurried for death in anordinary case to have ensued. The thieves had to be killed, as yetalive. Immediately before being taken down from the cross the bodywas delivered to friends. Within thirty-six hours afterwards thetomb in which it had been laid was discovered to have been opened;for how long it had been open we do not know, but a few hours laterChrist was seen alive. 

"Let it be remembered also that the fact of the body having beendelivered to Joseph BEFORE the taking down from the cross, greatlyenhanced the chance of an escape from death, inasmuch as the dutiesof the soldiers would have ended with the presentation of the orderfrom Pilate. If any faint symptom of returning animation sheweditself in consequence of the mere change of position and theinevitable shock attendant upon being moved, the soldiers would notknow it; their task was ended, and they would not be likely either towish, or to be allowed, to have anything to do with the matter. Joseph appears to have been a rich man, and would be followed byattendants. Moreover, although we are told by Mark that Pilate sentfor the centurion to inquire whether Christ was dead, yet the samewriter also tells us that this centurion had already come to theconclusion that Christ was the Son of God, a statement which issupported by the accounts of Matthew and Luke; Mark is the onlyEvangelist who tells us that the centurion WAS sent for, but evengranting that this was so, would not one who had already recognisedChrist as the Son of God be inclined to give him every assistance inhis power? He would be frightened, and anxious to get the body downfrom the cross as fast as possible. So long as Christ appeared to bedead, there would be no unnecessary obstacle thrown in the way of thedelivery of the body to Joseph, by a centurion who believed that hehad been helping to crucify the Son of God. Besides Joseph was rich, and rich people have many ways of getting their wishes attended to. 

"We know of no one as assisting at the taking down or the removal ofthe body, except Joseph of Arimathaea, for the presence of Nicodemus, and indeed his existence, rests upon the slenderest evidence. Noneof the Apostles appear to have had anything to do with thedeposition, nor yet the women who had come from Galilee, who arerepresented as seeing where the body was laid (and by Luke as seeingHOW it was laid), but do not seem to have come into close contactwith the body. 

"Would any modern jury of intelligent men believe under similarcircumstances that the death had been actual and complete? Wouldthey not regard--and ought they not to regard--reappearance asconstituting ample proof that there had been no death? Mostassuredly, unless Christ had had his head cut off, or had been seento be burnt to ashes. Again, if unexceptionable medical testimony asto the completeness of the death had reached us, there would be nohelp for it; we should have to admit that something had happenedwhich was at variance with all our experience of the course ofnature; or again if his legs had been broken, or his feet pierced, wecould say nothing; but what irreparable mischief is done to any vitalfunction of the body by the mere act of crucifixion? The feet werenot always, 'nor perhaps generally, ' pierced (so Dean Alford tellsus, quoting from Justin Martyr), nor is there a particle of evidenceto shew that any exception was made in the present instance. A manwho is crucified dies from sheer exhaustion, so that it cannot bedeemed improbable that he might swoon away, and that every outwardappearance of death might precede death by several hours. 

"Are we to suppose that a handful of ignorant soldiers should beabove error, when we remember that men have been left for dead, beenlaid out for burial and buried by their best friends--nay, that theyhave over and over again been pronounced dead by skilled physicians, when the facilities for knowing the truth were far greater, and whena mistake was much less likely to occur, than at the hurriedCrucifixion of Jesus Christ? The soldiers would apply no polishedmirror to the lips, nor make use of any of those tests which, underthe circumstances, would be absolutely necessary before life could bepronounced to be extinct; they would see that the body was lifeless, inanimate, to all outward appearance like the few other dead bodieswhich they had probably observed closely; with this they would restcontented. 

"It is true, they probably believed Christ to be dead at the timethey handed over the body to his friends, and if we had heard nothingmore of the matter we might assume that they were right; but thereappearance of Christ alive changes the whole complexion of thestory. It is not very likely that the Roman soldiers would have beenmistaken in believing him to be dead, unless the hurry of the wholeaffair, and the order from Pilate, had disposed them to carelessness, and to getting the matter done as fast as possible; but it is muchless likely that a dead man should come to life again than that amistake should have been made about his having being dead. Thelatter is an event which probably happens every week in one part ofthe world or another; the former has never yet been known. 

"It is not probable that a man officially executed should escapedeath; but that a DEAD MAN should escape from it is more improbablestill; in addition to the enormous preponderance of probability onthe side of Christ's never having died which arises from thisconsideration alone, we are told many facts which greatly lessen theimprobability of his having escaped death, inasmuch as theCrucifixion was hurried, and the body was immediately delivered tofriends without the known destruction of any organic function, andwhile still hanging upon the cross. 

"Joseph and Nicodemus (supposing that Nicodemus was indeed a party tothe entombment) may be believed to have thought that Christ was deadwhen they received the body, but they could not refuse him theirassistance when they found out their mistake, nor, again, could theyforfeit their high position by allowing it to be known that they hadrestored the life of one who was so obnoxious to the authorities. They would be in a very difficult position, and would take theprudent course of backing out of the matter at the first moment thathumanity would allow, of leaving the rest to chance, and of keepingtheir own counsel. It is noticeable that we never hear of themagain; for there were no two people in the world better able to knowwhether the Resurrection was miraculous or not, and none who would bemore deeply interested in favour of the miracle. They had beenfaithful when the Apostles themselves had failed, and if their faithhad been so strong while everything pointed in the direction of theutter collapse of Christianity, what would it be, according to everynatural impulse of self-approbation, when so transcendent a miracleas a resurrection had been worked almost upon their own premises, andupon one whose remains they had generously taken under theirprotection at a time when no others had ventured to shew themrespect?

"We should have fancied that Mary would have run to Joseph andNicodemus, not to the Apostles; that Joseph and Nicodemus would thenhave sent for the Apostles, or that, to say the least of it, weshould have heard of these two persons as having been prominentmembers of the Church at Jerusalem; but here again the experience ofthe ordinary course of nature fails us, and we do not find anotherword or hint concerning them. This may be the result of accident, but if so, it is a very unfortunate accident, and we have already hada great deal too much of unfortunate accidents, and of truths whichMAY be truths, but which are uncommonly like exaggeration. Storiesare like people, whom we judge of in no small degree by the dressthey wear, the company they keep, and that subtle indefinablesomething which we call their expression. 

"Nevertheless, there arise the questions how far the spear woundrecorded by the writer of the fourth Gospel must be regarded, firstly, as an actual occurrence, and, secondly, as having beennecessarily fatal, for unless these things are shewn to beindisputable we have seen that the balance of probability liesgreatly in favour of Christ's having escaped with life. If, however, it can be proved that it is a matter of certainty both that the woundwas actually inflicted, and that death must have inevitably followed, then the death of Christ is proved. The Resurrection becomessupernatural; the Ascension forthwith ceases to be marvellous; theMiraculous Conception, the Temptation in the Wilderness, all theother miracles of Christ and his Apostles, become believable at onceupon so signal a failure of human experience; human experience ceasesto be a guide at all, inasmuch as it is found to fail on the verypoint where it has been always considered to be most firmlyestablished--the remorselessness of the grip of death. But before wecan consent to part with the firm ground on which we tread, in theconfidence of which we live, move, and have our being--the trust inthe established experience of countless ages--we must prove theinfliction of the wound and its necessarily fatal character beyondall possibility of mistake. We cannot be expected to reject anatural solution of an event however mysterious, and to adopt asupernatural in its place, so long as there is any element of doubtupon the supernatural side. 

"The natural solution of the origin of belief in the Resurrectionlies very ready to our hands; once admit that Christ was crucifiedhurriedly, that there is no proof of the destruction of any organicfunction of the body, that the body itself was immediately deliveredto friends, and that thirty-six hours afterwards Christ was seenalive, and it is impossible to understand how any human being candoubt what he ought to think. We must own also that once let Josephhave kept his own counsel (and he had a great stake to lose if he didNOT keep it), once let the Apostles believe that Christ's restorationto life was miraculous (and under the circumstances they would besure to think so), and their reason would be so unsettled that in avery short time all the recognised and all the apocryphal miracles ofChrist would pass current with them without a shadow of difficulty. "

It will be observed that throughout both this and the precedingchapter I have been dealing with those of our opponents who, whileadmitting the reappearances of our Lord, ascribe them to naturalcauses only. I consider this position to be only second inimportance to the one taken by Strauss, and as perhaps in somerespects capable of being supported with an even greater outwardappearance of probability. I therefore resolved to combat it, and asa preliminary to this, have taken care that it shall be stated in theclearest and most definite manner possible. But it is plain thatthose who accept the fact that our Lord reappeared after theCrucifixion differ hardly less widely from Strauss than they do fromourselves; it will therefore be expedient to shew how they maintaintheir ground against so formidable an antagonist. Let it beremembered that Strauss and his followers admit that THE DEATH of ourLord is proved, while those of our opponents who would deny this, nevertheless admit that we can establish THE REAPPEARANCES; itfollows therefore that each of our most important propositions isadmitted by one section or other of the enemy, and each section wouldprobably be heartily glad to be able to deny what it admits. Canthere be any doubt about the significance of this fact? Would not alittle reflection be likely to suggest to the distracted host of ouradversaries that each of its two halves is right, as FAR AS IT GOES, but that agreement will only be possible between them when each partyhas learnt that it is in possession of only half the truth, and hascome to admit both the DEATH OF OUR LORD AND HIS RESURRECTION?

Returning, however, to the manner in which the section of ouropponents with whom I am now dealing meet Strauss, they may besupposed to speak as follows:-

"Strauss believes that Christ died, and says (New Life of Jesus, Vol. I. , p. 411) that 'the account of the Evangelists of the death ofJesus is clear, unanimous, and connected. ' If this means that theEvangelists would certainly know whether Christ died or not, we demurto it at once. Strauss would himself admit that not one of thewriters who have recorded the facts connected with the Crucifixionwas an eyewitness of that event, and he must also be aware that thevery utmost which any of these writers can have KNOWN, was THATCHRIST WAS BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN. DEAD. It is strange to see Straussso suddenly struck with the clearness, unanimity, and connectednessof the Evangelists. In the very next sentence he goes on to say, 'Equally fragmentary, full of contradiction and obscurity, is allthat they tell us of the opportunities of observing him which hisadherents are supposed to have had after his resurrection. ' Now, this seems very unfair, for, after all, the gospel writers are quiteas unanimous in asserting the main fact that Christ reappeared, asthey are in asserting that he died; they would seem to be just as'clear, unanimous, and connected, ' about the former event as thelatter (for the accounts of the Crucifixion vary not a little), andthey must have had infinitely better means of knowing whether Christreappeared than whether he had actually died. There is not the samescope for variation in the bare assertion that a man died, as thereis in the narration of his sayings and doings upon the severaloccasions of his reappearance. Besides, in support of thereappearances, we have the evidence of Paul, who, though not an eye-witness, was well acquainted with those who were; whereas no man canmake more out of the facts recorded concerning the death of Jesus, than that he was believed to be dead under circumstances in whichmistake might easily arise, that there is no reason to think that anyorganic function of the body had been destroyed at the time that itwas delivered over to friends, and that none of those who testifiedto Christ's death appear to have verified their statement by personalinspection of the body. On these points the Evangelists do indeedappear to be 'clear, unanimous, and connected. '

"Later on Strauss is even more unsatisfactory, for on the page whichfollows the one above quoted from, he writes: 'Besides which, it isquite evident that this (the natural) view of the resurrection ofJesus, apart from the difficulties in which it is involved, does noteven solve the problem which is here under consideration: theorigin, that is, of the Christian Church by faith in the miraculousresurrection of the Messiah. It is impossible that a being who hadstolen half-dead out of a sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treatment, who required bandaging, strengthening, andindulgence, and who still, at last, yielded to his sufferings, couldhave given to the disciples the impression that he was a conquerorover death and the grave, the Prince of Life, an impression which layat the bottom of their future ministry. Such a resuscitation couldonly have weakened the impression which he had made upon them in lifeand in death; at the most could only have given it an elegiac voice, but could by no possibility have changed their sorrow intoenthusiasm, have elevated their reverence into worship. '

"Now, the fallacy in the above is obvious; it assumes that CHRIST wasin such a state as to be compelled to creep about, weak and ill, &c. , and ultimately to die from the effects of his sufferings; whereasthere is not a word of evidence in support of all this. He may havebeen weak and ill when he forbade Mary to touch him, on the firstoccasion of his being seen alive; but it would be hard to prove eventhis, and on no subsequent occasion does he shew any sign ofweakness. The supposition that he died of the effects of hissufferings is quite gratuitous; one would like to know where Straussgot it from. He MAY have done so, or he may have been assassinatedby some one commissioned by the Jewish Sanhedrim, or he may have feltthat his work was done, and that any further interference upon hispart would only mar it, and therefore resolved upon withdrawinghimself from Palestine for ever, or Joseph of Arimathaea may havefeared the revolution which he saw approaching--or twenty thingsbesides might account for Christ's final disappearance. The onlything, however, which we can say with any certainty is that hedisappeared, and that there is no reason to believe that he died ofhis wounds. All over and above this is guesswork. 

"Again, if Christ on reappearing had continued in daily intercoursewith his disciples, it might have been impossible that they shouldnot find out that he was in all respects like themselves. But heseems to have been careful to avoid seeing them much. Paul onlymentions five reappearances, only one of which was to anyconsiderable number of people. According also to the gospel writers, the reappearances were few; they were without preparation, andnothing seems to have been known of where he resided between eachvisit; this rarity and mysteriousness of the reappearances of Christ(whether dictated by fear of his enemies or by policy) would heightentheir effect, and prevent the Apostles from knowing much more abouttheir master than the simple fact that he was indisputably alive. They saw enough to assure them of this, but they did not see enoughto prevent their being able to regard their master as a conquerorover death and the grave, even though it could be shewn (whichcertainly cannot be done) that he continued in infirm health, andultimately died of his wounds. 

"If the Apostles had been highly educated English or GermanProfessors, it might be hard to believe them capable of making anymistake; but they were nothing of the kind; they were ignorantEastern peasants, living in the very thick of every conceivable kindof delusive influence. Strauss himself supposes their minds to havebeen so weak and unhinged that they became easy victims tohallucination. But if this was the case, they would be liable toother kinds of credulity, and it seems strange that one who wouldbring them down so low, should be here so suddenly jealous for theirintelligence. There is no reason to suppose that Christ WAS weak andill after the first day or two, any more than there is for believingthat he died of his wounds. This being so, is it not more simple andnatural to believe that the Apostles were really misled by a solidsubstratum of strange events--a substratum which seems to besupported by all the evidence which we can get--than that the wholestory of the appearances of Christ after the Crucifixion should bedue to baseless dreams and fancies? At any rate, if the Apostlescould be misled by hallucination, much more might they be misled by anatural reappearance, which looked not unlike a supernatural one. 

"The belief in the miraculous character of the Resurrection is thecentral point of the whole Christian system. Let this be oncebelieved, and considering the times, which, it must always beremembered, were in respect of credulity widely different from ourown, considering the previous hopes and expectations of the Apostles, considering their education, Oriental modes of thought and speech, familiarity with the ideas of miracle and demonology, andunfamiliarity with the ideas of accuracy and science, and consideringalso the unquestionable beauty and wisdom of much which is recordedas having been taught by Christ, and the really remarkablecircumstances of the case--we say, once let the Resurrection bebelieved to be miraculous, and the rest is clear; there is no furthermystery about the origin of the Christian religion. 

"So the matter has now come to this pass, that we are to jeopardiseour faith in all human experience, if we are unable to see our wayclearly out of a few words about a spear wound, recorded as havingbeen inflicted in a distant country nearly two thousand years ago, bya writer concerning whom we are entirely ignorant, and whoseconnection with any eye-witness of the events which he records is amatter of pure conjecture. We will see about this hereafter; allthat is necessary now is to make sure that we do not jeopardise it, if we DO see a way of escape, and this assuredly exists. "

I will not pain either the reader or myself by a recapitulation ofthe arguments which have led our opponents as well as the Dean ofCanterbury, and I may add, with due apology, myself, to conclude thatnothing is known as to the severity or purpose of the spear wound. The case, therefore, of our adversaries will rest thus:- that thereis not only no sufficient reason for believing that Christ died uponthe cross, but that there are the strongest conceivable reasons forbelieving that He did not die; that the shortness of time duringwhich He remained upon the cross, the immediate delivery of the bodyto friends, and, above all, the subsequent reappearance alive, areample grounds for arriving at such a conclusion. They add furtherthat it would seem a monstrous supposition to believe that a good andmerciful God should have designed to redeem the world by theinfliction of such awful misery upon His own Son, and yet determinedto condemn every one who did not believe in this design, in spite ofsuch a deficiency of evidence that disbelief would appear to be amoral obligation. No good God, they say, would have left a matter ofsuch unutterable importance in a state of such miserable uncertainty, when the addition of a very small amount of testimony would have beensufficient to establish it. 

In the two following chapters I shall show the futility andirrelevancy of the above reasoning--if, indeed, that can be calledreasoning which is from first to last essentially unreasonable. Plausible as, in parts, it may have appeared, I have little doubtthat the reader will have already detected the greater number of thefallacies which underlie it. But before I can allow myself to enterupon the welcome task of refutation, a few more words from ouropponents will yet be necessary. However strongly I disapprove oftheir views, I trust they will admit that I have throughout expressedthem as one who thoroughly understands them. I am convinced that thecourse I have taken is the only one which can lead to their beingbrought into the way of truth, and I mean to persevere in it until Ihave explained the views which they take concerning our Lord'sAscension, with no less clearness than I shewed forth their opinionsconcerning the Resurrection. 

"In St. Matthew's Gospel, " they will say, "we find no trace whateverof any story concerning the Ascension. The writer had either neverheard anything about the matter at all, or did not consider it ofsufficient importance to deserve notice. 

"Dean Alford, indeed, maintains otherwise. In his notes on thewords, 'And lo! I am with you always unto the end of the world, ' hesays, 'These words imply and set forth the Ascension'; it is truethat he adds, 'the manner of which is not related by the Evangelist':but how do the words quoted, 'imply and set forth' the Ascension?They imply a belief that Christ's spirit would be present with hisdisciples to the end of time; but how do they set forth the fact thathis body was seen by a number of people to rise into the air andactually to mount up far into the region of the clouds?

"The fact is simply this--and nobody can know it better than DeanAlford--that Matthew tells us nothing about the Ascension. 

"The last verses of Mark's Gospel are admitted by Dean Alford himselfto be not genuine, but even in these the subject is dismissed in asingle verse, and although it is stated that Christ was received intoHeaven, there is not a single word to imply that any one was supposedto have seen him actually on his way thither. 

"The author of the fourth Gospel is also silent concerning theAscension. There is not a word, nor hint, nor faintest trace of anyknowledge of the fact, unless an allusion be detected in the words, 'What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascending where he wasbefore?' (John vi. , 62) in reference to which passage Dean Alford, inhis note on Luke xxiv. , 52, writes as follows:- 'And might not wehave concluded from the wording of John vi. , 62, that our Lord musthave intended an ascension INSIGHT OF SOME OF THOSE TO WHOM HE SPOKE, and that the Evangelist GIVES THAT HINT, BY RECORDING THOSE WORDSWITHOUT COMMENT, THAT HE HAD SEEN IT?' That is to say, we are toconclude that the writer of the fourth Gospel actually SAW theAscension, because he tells us that Christ uttered the words, 'Whatand if ye shall see the Son of Man ascending where he was before?'

"But who WAS the author of the fourth Gospel? And what reason isthere for thinking that that work is genuine? Let us make anotherextract from Dean Alford. In his prolegomena, chapter v. , section 6, on the genuineness of the fourth Gospel, he writes:- 'Neither Papias, who carefully sought out all that Apostles and Apostolic men hadrelated regarding the life of Christ; nor Polycarp, who was himself adisciple of the Apostle John; nor Barnabas, nor Clement of Rome, intheir epistles; nor, lastly, Ignatius (in his genuine writings), makes any mention of, or allusion to, this gospel. SO THAT IN THEMOST ANCIENT CIRCLE OF ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY, IT APPEARS TO BEUNKNOWN. OR NOT RECOGNISED. ' We may add that there is no trace ofits existence before the latter half of the second century, and thatthe internal evidence against its genuineness appears to be more andmore conclusive the more it is examined. 

"St. Paul, when enumerating the last appearances of his master, in apassage where the absence of any allusion to the Ascension is almostconclusive as to his never having heard a word about it, is alsosilent. In no part of his genuine writings does he give any sign ofhis having been aware that any story was in existence as to themanner in which Christ was received into Heaven. 

"Where, then, does the story come from, if neither Matthew, Mark, John, nor Paul appear to have heard of it?

"It comes from a single verse in St. Luke's Gospel--written more thanhalf a century after the supposed event, when few, or more probablynone, of those who were supposed to have seen it were either livingor within reach to contradict it. Luke writes (xxiv. , 51), 'And itcame to pass that while he blessed them, he was parted from them, andcarried up into Heaven. ' This is the only account of the Ascensiongiven in any part of the Gospels which can be considered genuine. Itgives Bethany as the place of the miracle, whereas, if Dean Alford isright in saying that the words of Matthew 'set forth' the Ascension, they set it forth as having taken place on a mountain in Galilee. But here, as elsewhere, all is haze and contradiction. Perhaps someChristian writers will maintain that it happened both at Bethany andin Galilee. 

"In his subsequent work, written some sixty or seventy years afterthe Ascension, St. Luke gives us that more detailed account which iscommonly present to the imagination of all men (thanks to the Italianpainters), when the Ascension is alluded to. The details, it wouldseem, came to his knowledge after he had written his Gospel, and manya long year after Matthew and Mark and Paul had written. How he cameby the additional details we do not know. Nobody seems to care toknow. He must have had them revealed to him, or been told them bysome one, and that some one, whoever he was, doubtless knew what hewas saying, and all Europe at one time believed the story, and thisis sufficient proof that mistake was impossible. 

"It is indisputable that from the very earliest ages of the Churchthere existed a belief that Christ was at the right hand of God; butno one who professes to have seen him on his way thither has left asingle word of record. It is easy to believe that the facts may havebeen revealed in a night vision, or communicated in one or other ofthe many ways in which extraordinary circumstances ARE communicated, during the years of oral communication and enthusiasm which elapsedbetween the supposed Ascension of Christ and the writing of Luke'ssecond work. It is not surprising that a firm belief in Christ'shaving survived death should have arisen in consequence of the actualcircumstances connected with the Crucifixion and entombment. Was itthen strange that this should develop itself into the belief that hewas now in Heaven, sitting at the right hand of God the Father? Andfinally was it strange that a circumstantial account of the manner inwhich he left this earth should be eagerly accepted?"

[In an appendix at the end of the book I have given the extracts fromthe Gospels which are necessary for a full comprehension of thepreceding chapters. --W. B. O. ]

CHAPTER IX--THE CHRIST-IDEAL

I have completed a task painful to myself and the reader. Painful tomyself inasmuch as I am humiliated upon remembering the power whicharguments, so shallow and so easily to be refuted, once had upon me;painful to the reader, as everything must be painful which evenappears to throw doubt upon the most sublime event that has happenedin human history. How little does all that has been written abovetouch the real question at issue, yet, what self-discipline andmental training is required before we learn to distinguish theessential from the unessential. 

Before, however, we come to close quarters with our opponentsconcerning the views put forward in the preceding chapters, it willbe well to consider two questions of the gravest and most interestingcharacter, questions which will probably have already occurred to thereader with such force as to demand immediate answer. They arethese. 

Firstly, what will be the consequences of admitting any considerabledeviation from historical accuracy on the part of the sacred writers?

Secondly, how can it be conceivable that God should have permittedinaccuracy or obscurity in the evidence concerning the Divinecommission of His Son?

If God so loved the World that He sent His only begotten Son into itto rescue those who believed in Him from destruction, how is itcredible that He should not have so arranged matters as that allshould find it easy to believe? If He wanted to save mankind andknew that the only way in which mankind could be saved was bybelieving certain facts, how can it be that the records of the factsshould have been allowed to fall into confusion?

To both these questions I trust that the following answers may appearconclusive. 

I. As regards the consequences which may be supposed to follow upongiving up any part of the sacred writings, no matter how seeminglyunimportant, it is undoubtedly true that to many minds they haveappeared too dangerous to be even contemplated. Thus through fear ofsome supposed unutterable consequences which would happen to thecause of truth if truth were spoken, people profess to believe in thegenuineness of many passages in the Bible which are universallyacknowledged by competent judges of every shade of theologicalopinion to be interpolations into the original text. To say nothingof the Old Testament, where many whole books are of disputedgenuineness or authenticity, there are portions of the New which nonewill seriously defend;--for example, the last verses of St. Mark'sGospel, --containing, as they do, the sentence of damnation againstall who do not believe--the second half of the third, and the wholeof the fourth verse of the fifth chapter of St. John's Gospel, thestory of the woman taken in adultery, and probably the whole of thelast chapter of St. John's Gospel, not to mention the Epistle to theHebrews, the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and to the Ephesians, theEpistles of Peter and James, the famous verses as to the threewitnesses in the First Epistle of St. John, and perhaps also the bookof Revelation. These are passages and works about which there iseither no doubt at all as to their not being genuine, or over whichthere hangs so much uncertainty that no dependence can be placed uponthem. 

But over and above these, there are not a few parts of each of theGospels which, though of undisputed genuineness, cannot be acceptedas historical; thus the account of the Resurrection given by St. Matthew, and parts of those by Luke and Mark, the cursing of thebarren fig-tree, and the prophecies of His Resurrection ascribed toour Lord Himself, will not stand the tests of criticism which we arebound to apply to them if we are to exercise the right of privatejudgement; instead of handing ourselves over to a priesthood as thesole custodians and interpreters of the Bible. It has been said bysome that the miracle of the penny found in the fish's mouth shouldbe included in the above category, but it should be remembered thatwe have only the injunction of our Lord to St. Peter that he shouldcatch the fish and the promise that he should find the penny in itsmouth, but that we have no account of the sequel, it is thereforepossible that in the event of St. Peter's faith having failed him hemay have procured the money from some other source, and that thus themiracle, though undoubtedly intended, was never actually performed. How unnecessary therefore as well as presumptuous are theRationalistic interpretations which have been put upon the event bycertain German writers!

Now there are few, if any, who would be so illiberal as to wish forthe exclusion from the sacred volume of all those books or passageswhich, though neither genuine nor perhaps edifying, have remained inthe Canon of Scripture for many centuries. Any serious attempt toreconstruct the Canon would raise a theological storm which would notsubside in this century. The work could never be done perfectly, andeven if it could, it would have to be done at the expense of tearingall Christendom in pieces. The passages do little or no harm wherethey are, and have received the sanction of time; let them thereforeby all means remain in their present position. But the question isstill forced upon us whether the consequences of openly admitting thecertain spuriousness of many passages, and the questionable nature ofothers as regards morality, genuineness and authenticity, should befeared as being likely to prejudice the main doctrines ofChristianity. 

The answer is very plain. He who has vouchsafed to us the Christiandispensation may be safely trusted to provide that no harm shallhappen, either to it or to us, from an honest endeavour to attain thetruth concerning it. What have we to do with consequences? Theseare in the hands of God. Our duty is to seek out the truth in prayerand humility, and when we believe that we have found it, to cleave toit through evil and good report; TO FAIL IN THIS IS TO FAIL IN FAITH;to fail in faith is to be an infidel. Those who suppose that it iswiser to gloss over this or that, and who consider it "injudicious"to announce the whole truth in connection with Christianity, shouldhave learnt by this time that no admission which can by anypossibility be required of them can be so perilous to the cause ofChrist as the appearance of shirking investigation. It has alreadybeen insisted upon that cowardice is at the root of the infidelitywhich we see around us; the want of faith in the power of truth whichexists in certain pious but timid hearts has begotten utter unbeliefin the minds of all superficial investigators into Christianevidences. Such persons see that the defenders have something in thebackground, something which they would cling to although they aresecretly aware that they cannot justly claim it. This is enough formany, and hence more harm is done by fear than could ever have beendone by boldness. Boldness goes out into the fight, and if in thewrong gets slain, childless. Fear stays at home and is prolific of abrood of falsehoods. 

It is immoral to regard consequences at all, where truth and justiceare concerned; the being impregnated with this conviction to theinmost core of one's heart is an axiom of common honesty--one of theessential features which distinguish a good man from a bad one. Nevertheless, to make it plain that the consequences of outspokentruthfulness in connection with the scriptural writings would have noharmful effect whatever, but would, on the contrary, be of the utmostservice as removing a stumbling-block from the way of many--let usfor the moment suppose that very much more would have to be given upthan can ever be demanded. 

Suppose we were driven to admit that nothing in the life of our Lordcan be certainly depended upon beyond the facts that He was begottenby the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary; that He worked many miraclesupon earth, and delivered St. Matthew's version of the sermon on themount and most of the parables as we now have them; finally, that Hewas crucified, dead, and buried, that He rose again from the deadupon the third day, and ascended unto Heaven. Granting for the sakeof argument that we could rely on no other facts, what would follow?Nothing which could in any way impair the living power ofChristianity. 

The essentials of Christianity, i. E. , a belief in the Divinity of theSaviour and in His Resurrection and Ascension, have stood, and willstand, for ever against any attacks that can be made upon them, andthese are probably the only facts in which belief has ever beenabsolutely necessary for salvation; the answer, therefore, to thequestion what ill consequences would arise from the open avowal ofthings which every student must know to be the fact concerning thebiblical writings is that there would be none at all. The Christ-ideal which, after all, is the soul and spirit of Christianity wouldremain precisely where it was, while its recognition would be farmore general, owing to the departure on the part of its apologistsfrom certain lines of defence which are irreconcilable with the idealitself. 

II. Returning to the objection how it could be possible that Godshould have left the records of our Lord's history in such a vagueand fragmentary condition, if it were really of such intenseimportance for the world to understand it and believe in it, we findourselves face to face with a question of far greater importance anddifficulty. 

The old theory that God desired to test our faith, and that therewould be no merit in believing if the evidence were such as tocommend itself at once to our understanding, is one which need onlybe stated to be set aside. It is blasphemy against the goodness ofGod to suppose that He has thus laid as it were an ambuscade for man, and will only let him escape on condition of his consenting toviolate one of the very most precious of God's own gifts. There isan ingenious cruelty about such conduct which it is revolting even toimagine. Indeed, the whole theory reduces our Heavenly Father to alevel of wisdom and goodness far below our own; and this issufficient answer to it. 

But when, turning aside from the above, we try to adopt some otherand more reasonable view, we naturally set ourselves to consider whythe Almighty should have required belief in the Divinity of His Sonfrom man. What is there in this belief on man's part which can be sograteful to God that He should make it a sine qua non for man'ssalvation? As regards Himself, how can it matter to Him what manshould think of Him? Nay, it must be for man's own good that thebelief is demanded. 

And why? Surely we can see plainly that it is the beauty of theChrist-ideal which constitutes the working power of Christianity overthe hearts and lives of men, leading them to that highest of allworships which consists in imitation. Now the sanction which isgiven to this ideal by belief in the Divinity of our Lord, raises itat once above all possibility of criticism. If it had not been sosanctioned it might have been considered open to improvement; onecritic would have had this, and another that; comparison would havebeen made with ideals of purely human origin such as the Greek ideal, exemplified in the work of Phidias, and in later times with themediaeval Italian ideal, as deducible from the best fifteenth andearly sixteenth Italian painting and sculpture, the Madonnas ofBellini and Raphael, or the St. George of Donatello; or again withthe ideal derivable from the works of our own Shakespeare, and thereare some even now among those who deny the Divinity of Christ whowill profess that each one of these ideals is more universal, morefitted for the spiritual food of a man, and indeed actually higher, than that presented by the life and death of our Saviour. But oncelet the Divine origin of this last ideal be admitted, and there canbe no further uncertainty; hence the absolute necessity for belief inChrist's Divinity as closing the most important of all questions, Whereunto should a man endeavour to liken both himself and hischildren?

Seeing then that we have reasonable ground for thinking that beliefin the Divinity of our Lord is mainly required of us in order toexalt our sense of the paramount importance of following and obeyingthe life and commands of Christ, it is natural also to suppose THATWHATEVER MAY HAVE HAPPENED TO THE RECORDS OF THAT LIFE should havebeen ordained with a view to the enhancing of the preciousness of theideal. 

Now, the fragmentary character, and the partial obscurity--I mighthave almost written, the incomparable chiaroscuro--of theEvangelistic writings have added to the value of our Lord's characteras an ideal, not only in the case of Christians, but as bringing theChrist-ideal within the reach and comprehension of an infinitelygreater number of minds than it could ever otherwise have appealedto. It is true that those who are insensible to spiritualinfluences, and whose materialistic instinct leads them to denyeverything which is not as clearly demonstrable by external evidenceas a fact in chemistry, geography, or mathematics, will fail to findthe hardness, definition, tightness, and, let me add, littleness ofoutline, in which their souls delight; they will find rather thegloom and gleam of Rembrandt, or the golden twilight of theVenetians, the losing and the finding, and the infinite liberty ofshadow; and this they hate, inasmuch as it taxes their imagination, which is no less deficient than their power of sympathy; they wouldhave all found, as in one of those laboured pictures wherein eachform is as an inflated bladder and, has its own uncompromisingoutline remorselessly insisted upon. 

Looking to the ideals of purely human creation which have come downto us from old times, do we find that the Theseus suffers because weare unable to realise to ourselves the precise features of theoriginal? Or again do the works of John Bellini suffer because thehand of the painter was less dexterous than his intention pure? Itis not what a man has actually put upon his canvas, but what he makesus feel that he felt, which makes the difference between good and badin painting. Bellini's hand was cunning enough to make us feel whathe intended, and did his utmost to realise; but he has not realisedit, and the same hallowing effect which has been wrought upon theTheseus by decay (to the enlarging of its spiritual influence), hasbeen wrought upon the work of Bellini by incapacity--the incapacityof the painter to utter perfectly the perfect thought which waswithin. The early Italian paintings have that stamp of individualityupon them which assures us that they are not only portraits, but asfaithful portraits as the painter could make them, more than this weknow not, but more is unnecessary. 

Do we not detect an analogy to this in the records of theEvangelists? Do we not see the child-like unself-seeking work ofearnest and loving hearts, whose innocence and simplicity more thanatone for their many shortcomings, their distorted renderings, andtheir omissions? We can see THROUGH these things as through a glassdarkly, or as one looking upon some ineffable masterpiece of Venetianportraiture by the fading light of an autumnal evening, when thebeauty of the picture is enhanced a hundredfold by the gloom andmystery of dusk. We may indeed see less of the actual lineamentsthemselves, but the echo is ever more spiritually tuneful than thesound, and the echo we find within us. Our imagination is in closercommunion with our longings than the hand of any painter. 

Those who relish definition, and definition only, are indeed keptaway from Christianity by the present condition of the records, buteven if the life of our Lord had been so definitely rendered as tofind a place in their system, would it have greatly served theirsouls? And would it not repel hundreds and thousands of others, whofind in the suggestiveness of the sketch a completeness ofsatisfaction, which no photographic reproduction could have given?The above may be difficult to understand, but let me earnestlyimplore the reader to endeavour to master its import. 

People misunderstand the aim and scope of religion. Religion is onlyintended to guide men in those matters upon which science is silent. God illumines us by science as with a mechanical draughtsman's plan;He illumines us in the Gospels as by the drawing of a great artist. We cannot build a "Great Eastern" from the drawings of the artist, but what poetical feeling, what true spiritual emotion was everkindled by a mechanical drawing? How cold and dead were scienceunless supplemented by art and by religion! Not joined with them, for the merest touch of these things impairs scientific value--whichdepends essentially upon accuracy, and not upon any feeling for thebeautiful and lovable. In like manner the merest touch of sciencechills the warmth of sentiment--the spiritual life. The mechanicaldrawing is spoiled by being made artistic, and the work of the artistby becoming mechanical. The aim of the one is to teach men how toconstruct, of the other how to feel. 

For the due conservation therefore of both the essential requisitesof human well-being--science, and religion--it is requisite that theybe kept asunder and reserved for separate use at different times. Religion is the mistress of the arts, and every art which does notserve religion truly is doomed to perish as a lying and unprofitableservant. Science is external to religion, being a separatedispensation, a distinct revelation to mankind, whereby we are putinto full present possession of more and more of God's modes ofdealing with material things, according as we become more fitted toreceive them through the apprehension of those modes which have beenalready laid open to us. 

We ought not therefore to have expected scientific accuracy from theGospel records--much less should we be required to believe that suchaccuracy exists. Does any great artist ever dream of aiming directlyat imitation? He aims at representation--not at imitation. In orderto attain true mastery here, he must spend years in learning how tosee; and then no less time in learning how NOT to see. Finally, helearns how to translate. Take Turner for example. Who conveys soliving an impression of the face of nature? Yet go up to his canvasand what does one find thereon? Imitation? Nay--blotches and daubsof paint; the combination of these daubs, each one in itself whentaken alone absolutely untrue, forms an impression which is quitetruthful. No combination of minute truths in a picture will give sofaithful a representation of nature as a wisely arranged tissue ofuntruths. 

Absolute reproduction is impossible even to the photograph. The workof a great artist is far more truthful than any photograph; but noteven the greatest artist can convey to our minds the whole truth ofnature; no human hand nor pigments can expound all that lies hiddenin "Nature's infinite book of secrecy"; the utmost that can be doneis to convey an impression, and if the impression is to be conveyedtruthfully, the means must often be of the most unforeseen character. The old Pre-Raphaelites aimed at absolute reproduction. They weresucceeded by a race of men who saw all that their predecessors hadseen, but also something higher. The Van Eycks and Memling paved theway for painters who found their highest representatives in Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt--the mightiest of them all. Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio and Mantegna were succeeded by Titian, Giorgione, andTintoretto; Perugino was succeeded by Raphael. It is everywhere thesame story; a reverend but child-like worship of the letter, followedby a manful apprehension of the spirit, and, alas! in due time by analmost total disregard of the letter; then rant and cant and bombast, till the value of the letter is reasserted. In theology the earlymen are represented by the Evangelicals, the times of utter decadenceby infidelity--the middle race of giants is yet to come, and will befound in those who, while seeing something far beyond either minuteaccuracy or minute inaccuracy, are yet fully alive both to the letterand to the spirit of the Gospels. 

Again, do not the seeming wrongs which the greatest ideals of purelyhuman origin have suffered at the hands of time, add to their valueinstead of detracting from it? Is it not probable that if we were tosee the glorious fragments from the Parthenon, the Theseus and theIlyssus, or even the Venus of Milo, in their original and unmutilatedcondition, we should find that they appealed to us much less forciblythan they do at present? All ideals gain by vagueness and lose bydefinition, inasmuch as more scope is left for the imagination of thebeholder, who can thus fill in the missing detail according to hisown spiritual needs. This is how it comes that nothing which isrecent, whether animate or inanimate, can serve as an ideal unless itis adorned by more than common mystery and uncertainty. A newCathedral is necessarily very ugly. There is too much found and toolittle lost. Much less could an absolutely perfect Being be of thehighest value as an ideal, as long as He could be clearly seen, forit is impossible that He could be known as perfect by imperfect men, and His very perfections must perforce appear as blemishes to any butperfect critics. To give therefore an impression of perfection, tocreate an absolutely unsurpassable ideal, it became essential thatthe actual image of the original should become blurred and lost, whereon the beholder now supplies from his own imagination that whichis TO HIM more perfect than the original, though objectively it mustbe infinitely less so. 

It is probably to this cause that the incredulity of the Apostlesduring our Lord's life-time must be assigned. The ideal was too nearthem, and too far above their comprehension; for it must be alwaysremembered that the convincing power of miracles in the days of theApostles must have been greatly weakened by the current belief intheir being events of no very unusual occurrence, and in theexistence both of good and evil spirits who could take possession ofmen and compel them to do their bidding. A resurrection from thedead or a restoration of sight to the blind, must have seemed evenless portentous to them, than an unusually skilful treatment ofdisease by a physician is to us. We can therefore understand how ithappened that the faith of the Apostles was so little to be dependedupon even up to the Crucifixion, inasmuch as the convincing power ofmiracles had been already, so to speak, exhausted, a fact which mayperhaps explain the early withdrawal of the power to work them; wecannot indeed believe that it could have been so far weakened as tomake the Apostles disregard the prophecies of their Master that Heshould rise from the dead, if He had ever uttered them, and we havealready seen reason to think that these prophecies are the ex postfacto handiwork of time; but the incredulity of the disciples, whenseen through the light now thrown upon it, loses that whollyinexplicable character which it would otherwise bear. 

But to return to the subject of the ideal presented by the life anddeath of our Lord. In the earliest days of the Church there can havebeen no want of the most complete and irrefragable evidence for theobjective reality of the miracles, and especially of the Resurrectionand Ascension. The character of Christ would also stand out revealedto all, with the most copious fulness of detail. The limits withinwhich so sharply defined an ideal could be acceptable were narrow, but as the radius of Christian influence increased, so also would thevagueness and elasticity of the ideal; and as the elasticity of theideal, so also the range of its influence. 

A beneficent and truly marvellous provision for the greatercomplexity of man's spiritual needs was thus provided by a gradualloss of detail and gain of breadth. Enough evidence was given in thefirst instance to secure authoritative sanction for the ideal. During the first thirty or forty years after the death of our Lord noone could be in want of evidence, and the guilt of unbelief istherefore brought prominently forward. Then came the loss of detailwhich was necessary in order to secure the universal acceptability ofthe ideal; but the same causes which blurred the distinctness of thefeatures, involved the inevitable blurring of no small portions ofthe external evidences whereby the Divine origin of the ideal wasestablished. The primary external evidence became less and lesscapable of compelling instantaneous assent, according as it was lesswanted, owing to the greater mass of secondary evidence, and to thegrowth of appreciation of the internal evidences, a growth whichwould be fostered by the growing adaptability of the ideal. 

Some thirty or forty years, then, from the death of our Saviour thecase would stand thus. The Christ-ideal would have become infinitelymore vague, and hence infinitely more universal: but the causeswhich had thus added to its value would also have destroyed whateverprimary evidence was superabundant, and the vagueness which hadoverspread the ideal would have extended itself in some measure overthe evidences which had established its Divine origin. 

But there would of course be limits to the gain caused by decay. Time came when there would be danger of too much vagueness in theideal, and too little distinctness in the evidences. It becamenecessary therefore to provide against this danger. 

PRECISELY AT THAT EPOCH THE GOSPELS MADE THEIR APPEARANCE. Notsimultaneously, not in concert, and not in perfect harmony with eachother, yet with the error distributed skilfully among them, as in awell-tuned instrument wherein each string is purposely something outof tune with every other. Their divergence of aim, and differentauthorship, secured the necessary breadth of effect when the accountswere viewed together; their universal recognition afforded thenecessary permanency, and arrested further decay. If I may bepardoned for using another illustration, I would say that as theroundness of the stereoscopic image can only be attained by thecombination of two distinct pictures, neither of them in perfectharmony with the other, so the highest possible conception of Christ, cannot otherwise be produced than through the discrepancies of theGospels. 

From the moment of the appearing of the Gospels, and, I should add, of the Epistles of St. Paul, the external evidences of Christianitybecame secured from further change; as they were then, so are theynow, they can neither be added to nor subtracted from; they have lainas it were sleeping, till the time should come to awaken them. Andthe time is surely now, for there has arisen a very numerous andincreasing class of persons, whose habits of mind unfit them forappreciating the value of vagueness, but who have each one of them asoul which may be lost or saved, and on whose behalf the evidencesfor the authority whereby the Christ-ideal is sanctioned, should berestored to something like their former sharpness. Christianitycontains provision for all needs upon their arising. The work ofrestoration is easy. It demands this much only--the recognition thattime has made incrustations upon some parts of the evidences, andthat it has destroyed others; when this is admitted, it becomes easy, after a little practice, to detect the parts that have been added, and to remove them, the parts that are wanting, and to supply them. Only let this be done outside the pages of the Bible itself, and notto the disturbance of their present form and arrangement. 

The above explanation of the causes for the obscurity which restsupon much of our Lord's life and teaching, may give us ground forhoping that some of those who have failed to feel the force of theexternal evidences hitherto, may yet be saved, provided they havefully recognised the Christ-ideal and endeavoured to imitate it, although irrespectively of any belief in its historical character. 

It is reasonable to suppose that the duty of belief was soimperatively insisted upon, in order that the ideal might thus beexalted above controversy, and made more sacred in the eyes of menthan it could have been if referable to a purely human source. Maynot, then, one who recognises the ideal as his summum bonum findgrace although he knows not, or even cares not, how it should havecome to be so? For even a sceptic who regarded the whole NewTestament as a work of art, a poem, a pure fiction from beginning toend, and who revered it for its intrinsic beauty only, as though itwere a picture or statue, even such a person might well find that itengendered in him an ideal of goodness and power and love and humansympathy, which could be derived from no other source. If, then, ourblessed Lord so causes the sun of His righteousness to shine uponthese men, shall we presume to say that He will not in another worldrestore them to that full communion with Himself which can only comefrom a belief in His Divinity?

We can understand that it should have been impossible to proclaimthis in the earliest ages of the Church, inasmuch as no weakening ofthe sanctions of the ideal could be tolerated, but are we bound toextend the operation of the many passages condemnatory of unbelief toa time so remote as our own, and to circumstances so widely differentfrom those under which they were uttered? Do we so extend thecommand not to eat things strangled or blood, or the assertion of St. Paul that the unmarried state is higher than the married? May we nottherefore hope that certain kinds of unbelief have become lesshateful in the sight of God inasmuch as they are less dangerous tothe universal acceptance of our Lord as the one model for theimitation of all men? For, after all, it is not belief in the factswhich constitutes the essence of Christianity, but rather the beingso impregnated with love at the contemplation of Christ thatimitation becomes almost instinctive; this it is which draws thehearts of men to God the Father, far more than any intellectualbelief that God sent our Lord into the world, ordaining that heshould be crucified and rise from the dead. Christianity isaddressed rather to the infinite spirit of man than to his finiteintelligence, and the believing in Christ through love is moreprecious in the sight of God than any loving through belief. May wenot hope, then, that those whose love is great may in the end findacceptance, though their belief is small? We dare not answer thispositively; but we know that there are times of transition in theclearness of the Christian evidences as in all else, and thetreatment of those whose lot is cast in such times will surely notescape the consideration of our Heavenly Father. 

But with reference to the many-sidedness of the Christ-ideal, ashaving been part of the design of God, and not attainable otherwisethan as the creation of destruction--as coming out of the waste oftime--it is clear that the perception of such a design could only bean offspring of modern thought; the conception of such an apparentlyself-frustrating scheme could only arise in minds which were familiarwith the manner in which it is necessary "to hound nature in herwanderings" before her feints can be eluded, and her prevaricationsbrought to book. A deep distrust of the over-obvious is wanted, before men can be brought to turn aside from objections which at thefirst blush appear to be very serious, and to take refuge insolutions which seem harder than the problems which they are intendedto solve. What a shock must the discovery of the rotation of theearth have given to the moral sense of the age in which it was made. How it contradicted all human experience. How it must have outragedcommon sense. How it must have encouraged scepticism even about themost obvious truths of morality. No question could henceforth beconsidered settled; everything seemed to require reopening; for ifman had once been deceived by Nature so entirely, if he had been soutterly led astray and deluded by the plausibility of her pretencethat the earth was immovably fixed, what else, that seemed no lessincontrovertible, might not prove no less false?

It is probable that the opposition to Galileo on the part of theRoman church was as much due to some such feelings as these, as totheological objections; the discovery was felt to unsettle not onlythe foundations of the earth, but those of every branch of humanknowledge and polity, and hence to be an outrage upon moralityitself. A man has no right to be very much in advance of otherpeople; he is as a sheep, which may lead the mob, but must not strayforward a quarter of a mile in front of it; if he does this, he mustbe rounded up again, no matter how right may have been his direction. He has no right to be right, unless he can get a certain following tokeep him company; the shock to morality and the encouragement tolawlessness do more harm than his discovery can atone for. Let himhold himself back till he can get one or two more to come with him. In like manner, had reflections as to the advantage gained by theChrist ideal in consequence of the inaccuracies and inconsistenciesof the Gospels--reflections which must now occur to any one--been putforward a hundred years ago, they would have met justly with theseverest condemnation. But now, even those to whom they may not haveoccurred already will have little difficulty in admitting theirforce. 

But be this as it may, it is certain that the inability to understandhow the sense of Christ in the souls of men could be strengthened bythe loss of much knowledge of His character, and of the factsconnected with His history, lies at the root of the error even of theApostle St. Paul, who exclaims with his usual fervour, but with lessthan his usual wisdom, "Has Christ been divided?" (I. Cor. I. , 13). "Yea, " we may make answer, "He is divided and is yet divisible thatall may share in Him. " St. Paul himself had realised that it was thespiritual value of the Christ-ideal which was the purifier andrefresher of our souls, inasmuch as he elsewhere declares that eventhough he had known Christ Himself after the flesh, he knew Him nomore; the spiritual Christ, that is to say the spirit of Christ asrecognisable by the spirits of men, was to him all in all. But helived too near the days of our Lord for a full comprehension of theChristian scheme, and it is possible that had he known Christ afterthe flesh, his soul might have been less capable of recognising thespiritual essence, rather than more so. Have we here a faintglimmering of the motive of the Almighty in not having allowed theGentile Apostle to see Christ after the flesh? We cannot say. Butwe may say this much with certainty, that had he been living now, St. Paul would have rejoiced at the many-sidedness of Christ, which heappears to have hardly recognised in his own life-time. 

The apparently contradictory portraits of our Lord which we find inthe Gospels--so long a stumbling-block to unbelievers--are now seento be the very means which enable men of all ranks, and all shades ofopinion, to accept Christ as their ideal; they are like the sea, which from having seemed the most impassable of all objects, turnsout to be the greatest highway of communication. To the artisan, forinstance, who may have long been out of work, or who may havesuffered from the greed and selfishness of his employers, or again, to the farm labourer who has been discharged perhaps at the approachof winter, the parable of "the Labourers in the Vineyard" offersitself as a divinely sanctioned picture of the dealings of God withman; few but those who have mixed much with the less educatedclasses, can have any idea of the priceless comfort which thisparable affords daily to those whose lot it has been to remainunemployed when their more fortunate brethren have been in full work. How many of the poor, again, are drawn to Christianity by the parableof Dives and Lazarus. How many a humble-minded Christian whilereflecting upon the hardness of his lot, and tempted to cast alonging eye upon the luxuries which are at the command of his richerneighbours, is restrained from seriously coveting them, byremembering the awful fate of Dives, and the happy future which wasin store for Lazarus. "Dives, " they exclaim, "in his life-timepossessed good things and in like manner Lazarus evil things, but nowthe one is comforted in the bosom of Abraham, and the other tormentedin a lake of fire. " They remember, also, that it is easier for acamel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enterinto the kingdom of Heaven. 

It has been said by some that the poor are thus encouraged to gloatover the future misery of the rich, and that many of the sayingsascribed to our Lord have an unhealthy influence over their minds. Iremember to have thought so once myself, but I have seen reason tochange my mind. Hope is given by these sayings to many whose liveswould be otherwise very nearly hopeless, and though I fully grantthat the parable of Dives and Lazarus can only afford comfort to thevery poor, yet it is most certain that it DOES afford comfort to thisnumerous class, and helps to keep them contented with many thingswhich they would not otherwise endure. 

On the other hand, though the poor are first provided for, the richare not left without their full share of consolation. Joseph ofArimathaea was rich, and modern criticism forbids us to believe thatthe parable of Dives and Lazarus was ever actually spoken by ourLord--at any rate not in its present form. Neither are the childrenof the rich forgotten; the son who repents at length of a course ofextravagant or riotous living is encouraged to return to virtue, andto seek reconciliation with his father, by reflecting upon theparable of the Prodigal Son, wherein he will find an everlastingmodel for the conduct of all earthly fathers. I will say nothing ofthe parable of the Unjust Steward, for it is one of which theinterpretation is most uncertain; nevertheless I am sure that itaffords comfort to a very large number of persons. 

Christ came not to the whole, but to those that were sick; he camenot to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. Even our fallensisters are remembered in the story of the woman taken in adultery, which reminds them that they can only be condemned justly by thosewho are without sin. It is to the poor, the weak, the ignorant andthe infirm that Christianity appeals most strongly, and to whoseneeds it is most especially adapted--but these form by far thegreater portion of mankind. "Blessed are they that mourn!" Whosesorrow is not assuaged by the mere sound of these words? Who againis not reassured by being reminded that our Heavenly Father feeds thesparrows and clothes the lilies of the field, and that if we willonly seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness we need take noheed for the morrow what we shall eat, and what we shall drink, norwherewithal we shall be clothed. God will provide these things forus if we are true Christians, whether we take heed concerning them ornot. "I have been young and now am old, " saith the Psalmist, "yetnever saw I the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging their bread. "

How infinitely nobler and more soul-satisfying is the ideal of theChristian saint with wasted limbs, and clothed in the garb ofpoverty--his upturned eyes piercing the very heavens in the ecstasyof a divine despair--than any of the fleshly ideals of gross humanconception such as have already been alluded to. If a man does notfeel this instinctively for himself, let him test it thus--whom doeshis heart of hearts tell him that his son will be most like God inresembling? The Theseus? The Discobolus? or the St. Peters and St. Pauls of Guido and Domenichino? Who can hesitate for a moment as towhich ideal presents the higher development of human nature? Andthis I take it should suffice; the natural instinct which draws us tothe Christ-ideal in preference to all others as soon as it has beenonce presented to us, is a sufficient guarantee of its being the onemost tending to the general well-being of the world. 

CHAPTER X--CONCLUSION

It only remains to return to the seventh and eighth chapters, and topass in review the reasons which will lead us to reject theconclusions therein expressed by our opponents. 

These conclusions have no real bearing upon the question at issue. Our opponents can make out a strong case, so long as they confinethemselves to maintaining that exaggeration has to a certain extentimpaired the historic value of some of the Gospel records of theResurrection. They have made out this much, but have they made outmore? They have mistaken the question--which is this--"Did JesusChrist die and rise from the dead?" And in the place of it they haveraised another, namely, "Has there been any inaccuracy in the recordsof the time and manner of His reappearing?"

Our error has been that instead of demurring to the relevancy of theissue raised by our opponents, we have accepted it. We have thusplaced ourselves in a false position, and have encouraged ouropponents by doing so. We have undertaken to fight them upon groundof their own choosing. We have been discomfited; but instead ofowning to our defeat, and beginning the battle anew from a fresh baseof operations, we have declared that we have not been defeated; hencethose lamentable and suicidal attempts at disingenuous reasoningwhich we have seen reason to condemn so strongly in the works of DeanAlford and others. How deplorable, how unchristian they are!

The moment that we take a truer ground, the conditions of the strifechange. The same spirit of candid criticism which led us to rejectthe account of Matthew in toto, will make it easy for us to admitthat those of Mark, Luke, and John, may not be so accurate as wecould have wished, and yet to feel that our cause has sustained noinjury. There are probably very few who would pin their faith to thefact that Julius Caesar fell exactly at the feet of Pompey's statue, or that he uttered the words "Et tu, Brute. " Yet there are stillfewer who would dispute the fact that Julius Caesar was assassinatedby conspirators of whom Brutus and Cassius were among the leaders. As long as we can be sure that our Lord DIED AND ROSE FROM THE DEAD, we may leave it to our opponents to contend about the details of themanner in which each event took place. 

We had thought that these details were known, and so thinking, we hada certain consolation in realising to ourselves the precise manner inwhich every incident occurred; yet on reflection we must feel thatthe desire to realise is of the essence of idolatry, which, notcontent with knowing that there is a God, will be satisfied withnothing if it has not an effigy of His face and figure. If it hasnot this it falls straight-way to the denial of God's existence, being unable to conceive how a Being should exist and yet beincapable of representation. We are as those who would fall down andworship the idol; our opponents, as those who upon the destruction ofthe idol would say that there was no God. 

We have met sceptics hitherto by adhering to the opinions as to thenecessity of accuracy which prevailed among our forefathers, andinstead of saying, "You are right--we do NOT know all that we thoughtwe did--nevertheless we know enough--we know the fact, though themanner of the fact be hidden, " we have preferred to say, "You aremistaken, our severe outline, our hard-and-fast lines are allperfectly accurate, there is not a detail of our theories which weare not prepared to stand by. " On this comes recrimination andmutual anger, and the strife grows hotter and hotter. 

Let us now rather say to the unbeliever, "We do not deny the truth ofmuch which you assert. We give up Matthew's account of theResurrection; we may perhaps accept parts of those of Mark and Lukeand John, but it is impossible to say which parts, unless those inwhich all three agree with one another; and this being so, it becomeswiser to regard all the accounts as early and precious memorials ofthe certainty felt by the Apostles that Christ died and rose again, but as having little historic value with regard to the time andmanner of the Resurrection. "

Once take this ground, and instead of demurring to the truth of manyof the assertions of our opponents, demur to their relevancy, and theunbeliever will find the ground cut away from under his feetindependently of the fact that the reasonableness of the concession, and the discovery that we are not fighting merely to maintain aposition, will incline him to calmness and to the reconsideration ofhis own opinions--which will in itself be a great gain--he will soonperceive that we are really standing upon firm ground, from which noenemy can dislodge us. The discovery that we know less of the timeand manner of our Lord's death and Resurrection than we thought wedid, does not invalidate a single one of the irresistible argumentswhereby we can establish the fact of His having died and risen again. The reader will now perhaps begin to perceive that the sad divisionbetween Christians and unbelievers has been one of those common casesin which both are right and both wrong; Christians being right intheir chief assertion, and wrong in standing out for the accuracy oftheir details, while unbelievers are right in denying that ourdetails are accurate, but wrong in drawing the inference that becausecertain facts have been inaccurately recorded, therefore certainothers never happened at all. Both the errors are natural; it ishigh time, however, that upon both sides they should be recognisedand avoided. 

But as regards the demolition of the structure raised in the seventhand eighth chapters of this book, whereinsoever, that is to say, itseems to menace the more vital part of our faith, the ease with whichthis will effected may perhaps lead the reader to think that I havenot fulfilled the promise made in the outset, and have failed to putthe best possible case for our opponents. This supposition would beunjust; I have done the very best for them that I could. For it isplain that they can only take one of two positions, namely, EITHERthat Christ really died upon the Cross but was never seen alive againafterwards at all, and that the stories of His having been so seenare purely mythical, OR, if they admit that He was seen alive afterHis Crucifixion, they must deny the completeness of the death; inother words, if they are to escape miracle, they must either deny thereappearances or the death. 

Now in the commencement of this work I dealt with those who deny thatour Lord rose from the dead, and as the exponent of those who takethis view I selected Strauss, who is undoubtedly the ablest writerthey have. Whether I shewed sufficient reason for thinking that histheory was unsound must remain for the decision of the reader, but Icertainly believe that I succeeded in doing so. Perhaps the ablestof all the writers who have treated the facts given us in the Gospelsfrom the Rationalistic point of view, is the author of an anonymouswork called The Jesus of History (Williams and Norgate, 1866); butthis writer (and it is a characteristic feature of the Rationalisticschool to become vague precisely at this very point) leaves usentirely in doubt as to whether he accepts the reappearances ofChrist or not, and his treatment of the facts connected both with theCrucifixion and Resurrection is less definite than that of any otherpart of the life of our Lord. He does not seem to see his own wayclearly, and appears to consider that it must for ever remain amatter of doubt whether the Death of Christ or His reappearance is tobe rejected. 

It is evident that it was most desirable to examine BOTH sets ofarguments, i. E. , those against the Resurrection, and those againstthe completeness of the Death; I have therefore mainly drawn theopinions of those who deny the Death from the same pamphlet as thatfrom which I drew the criticisms on Dean Alford's notes. I know ofno other English work, indeed, in which whatever can be said againstus upon this all-important head has been put forward, and wastherefore compelled to draw from this source, or to invent thearguments for our opponents, which would have subjected me to theaccusation of stating them in such way as should best suit my ownpurpose. The reader, however, must now feel that since there can beno other position taken but one or other of the two alluded to above, and since the one taken by Strauss has been shewn to be untenable, there remains nothing but to shew that the other is untenable also, whereupon it will follow that our Saviour did actually die, and didactually shew Himself subsequently alive; and this amounts to ademonstration of the miraculous character of the Resurrection. If, then, this one miracle be established, I think it unnecessary todefend the others, because I cannot think that any will attack them. 

But, as has been seen already, Strauss admits that our Lord died uponthe Cross, and denies the reality of the reappearances. It is notprobable that Strauss would have taken refuge in the hallucinationtheory if he had felt that there was the remotest chance ofsuccessfully denying our Lord's death; for the difficulties of hispresent position are overwhelming, as was fully pointed out in thesecond, third, and fourth chapters of this work. I regret, however, to say that I can nowhere find any detailed account of the reasonswhich have led him to feel so positively about our Lord's Death. Such reasons must undoubtedly be at his command, or he wouldindisputably have referred the Resurrection to natural causes. Is itpossible that he has thought it better to keep them to himself, asproving the Death of our Lord TOO convincingly? If so, the coursewhich he has adopted is a cruel one. 

We must endeavour, however, to dispense with Strauss's assistance, and will proceed to inquire what it is that those who deny the Deathof our Lord, call upon us to reject. 

I regret to pass so quickly over one great field of evidence which injustice to myself I must allude to, though I cannot dwell upon it, for in the outset I declared that I would confine myself to thehistorical evidence, and to this only. I refer to spiritual insight;to the testimony borne by the souls of living persons, who frompersonal experience KNOW that their Redeemer liveth, and that thoughworms destroy this body, yet in their flesh shall they see God. Howmany thousands are there in the world at this moment, who have knownChrist as a personal friend and comforter, and who can testify to thework which He has wrought upon them! I cannot pass over suchtestimony as this in silence. I must assign it a foremost place inreviewing the reasons for holding that our hope is not in vain, but Imay not dwell upon it, inasmuch as it would carry no weight withthose for whom this work is designed, I mean with those to whom thisprecious experience of Christ has not yet been vouchsafed. Suchpersons require the external evidence to be made clear todemonstration before they will trust themselves to listen to thevoices of hope or fear, and it is of no use appealing to theknowledge and hopes of others without making it clear upon what thatknowledge and those hopes are grounded. Nevertheless, I may beallowed to point out that those who deny the Death and Resurrectionof our Lord, call upon us to believe that an immense multitude ofmost truthful and estimable people are no less deceivers of their ownselves and others, than Mohammedans, Jews and Buddhists are. Howmany do we not each of us know to whom Christ is the spiritual meatand drink of their whole lives. Yet our opponents call upon us toignore all this, and to refer the emotions and elation of soul, whichthe love of Christ kindles in his true followers, to an inheritanceof delusion and blunder. Truly a melancholy outlook. 

Again, let a man travel over England, North, South, East, and West, and in his whole journey he shall hardly find a single spot fromwhich he cannot see one or several churches. There is hardly ahamlet which is not also a centre for the celebration of ourRedemption by the Death and Resurrection of Christ. Not one of thesechurches, say the Rationalists, not one of the clergymen who ministertherein, not one single village school in all England, but must beregarded as a fountain of error, if not of deliberate falsehood. Look where they may, they cannot escape from the signs of a vitalbelief in the Resurrection. All these signs, they will tell us, aresigns of superstition only; it is superstition which they celebrateand would confirm; they are founded upon fanaticism, or at the bestupon sheer delusion; they poison the fountain heads of moral andintellectual well-being, by teaching men to set human experience onthe one side, and to refer their conduct to the supposed will of apersonal anthropomorphic God who was actually once a baby--who wasborn of one of his own creatures--and who is now locally andcorporeally in Heaven, "of reasonable soul and HUMAN FLESHsubsisting. "

Thus do our opponents taunt us, but when we think not only of thepresent day, but of the nearly two thousand years during whichChristianity has flourished, not in England only, but over allEurope, that is to say, over the quarter of the globe which is mostcivilised, and whose civilisation is in itself proof both of capacityto judge and of having judged rightly--what an awful admission dounbelievers require us to make, when they bid us think that all theseages and countries have gone astray to the imagining of a vain thing. All the self-sacrifice of the holiest men for sixty generations, allthe wars that have been waged for the sake of Christ and His truth, all the money spent upon churches, clergy, monasteries and religiouseducation, all the blood of martyrs, all the celibacy of priests andnuns, all the self-denying lives of those who are now ministers ofthe Gospel--according to the Rationalist, no part of all thisdevotion to the cause of Christ has had any justifiable base onactual fact. The bare contemplation of such a stupendousmisapplication of self-sacrifice and energy, should be enough toprevent any one from ever smiling again to whose mind such adeplorable view was present: we wonder that our opponents do notshrink back appalled from the contemplation of a picture which theymust regard as containing so much of sin, impudence and folly; yet itis to the contemplation of such a picture, and to a belief in itstruthfulness to nature, that they would invite us; they cannot evensee a clergyman without saying to themselves, "There goes one whosetrade is the promotion of error; whose whole life is devoted to theupholding of the untrue. " To them the sight of people flocking to achurch must be as painful as it would be to us to see a congregationof Jews or Mohammedans: they ought to have no happiness in life solong as they believe that the vast majority of their fellow-countrymen are so lamentably deluded; yet they would call on us tojoin them, and half despise us upon our refusing to do so. 

But upon this view also I may not dwell; it would have been easy andI think not unprofitable, had my aim been different, to have drawn anampler picture of the heart-rending amount of falsehood, stupidity, cruelty and folly which must be referable to a belief inChristianity, if, as our opponents maintain, there is no solid groundfor believing it; but my present purpose is to prove that there ISsuch ground, and having said enough to shew that I do not ignore thefields of evidence which lie beyond the purpose of my work, I willreturn to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. 

What, then, let me ask of freethinkers, BECAME OF CHRIST EVENTUALLY?Several answers may be made to this question, BUT THERE IS NONE BUTTHE ONE GIVEN IN SCRIPTURE WHICH WILL SET IT AT REST. Thus it hasbeen said that Christ survived the Cross, lingered for a few weeks, and in the end succumbed to the injuries which He had sustained. Onthis there arises the question, did the Apostles know of His death?And if so, were they likely to mistake the reappearance of a dyingman, so shattered and weak as He must have been, for the glory of animmortal being? We know that people can idealise a great deal, butthey cannot idealise as much as this. The Apostles cannot have knownof any death of Christ except His Death upon the Cross, and it is notcredible that if He had died from the effects of the Crucifixion theApostles should not have been aware of it. No one will pretend thatthey were, so it is needless to discuss this theory further. 

It has also been said that our Lord, having seen the effect of Hisreappearance on the Apostles, considered that further converse withthem would only weaken it; and that He may have therefore thought itwiser to withdraw Himself finally from them, and to leave Histeaching in their hands, with the certainty that it would neverhenceforth be lost sight of; but this view is inconsistent with thecharacter which even our adversaries themselves assign to ourSaviour. The idea is one which might occur to a theorist sitting inhis study, and enlightened by a knowledge of events, but it would notsuggest itself to a leader in the heat of action. 

Another supposition has been that our Lord on recoveringconsciousness after He had been left alone in the tomb, or perhapseven before Joseph had gone, may have been unable to realise toHimself the nature of the events that had befallen Him, and may haveactually believed that He had been dead, and been miraculouslyrestored to life; that He may yet have felt a natural fear of againfalling into the hands of His enemies; and partly from this cause, and partly through awe at the miracle that He supposed had beenworked upon Him, have only shewn Himself to His disciples hurriedly, in secret, and on rare occasions, spending the greater part of Histime in some one or other of the secret places of resort, in which Hehad been wont to live apart from the Apostles before the Crucifixion. 

I have known it urged that our Lord never said or even thought thatHe had risen from the dead, but shewed Himself alive secretly andfearfully, and bade His disciples follow Him to Galilee, where Hemight, and perhaps did, appear more openly, though still rarely andwith caution; that the rarity and mystery of the reappearances wouldadd to the impression of a miraculous resurrection which hadinstantly presented itself to the minds of the Apostles on seeingChrist alive; that this impression alone would prevent them fromheeding facts which must have been obvious to any whose minds werenot already unhinged by the knowledge that Christ was alive, and bythe belief that He had been dead; and that they would be blinded byawe, which awe would be increased by the rarity of the reappearances--a rarity that was in reality due, perhaps to fear, perhaps to self-delusion, perhaps to both, but which was none the less politic fornot having been dictated by policy; finally that the report ofChrist's having been seen alive reached the Chief Priests (or perhapsJoseph of Arimathaea), and that they determined at all hazards to nipthe coming mischief in the bud; that they therefore watched theiropportunity, and got rid of so probable a cause of disturbance by theknife of the assassin, or induced Him to depart by threats, which Hedid not venture to resist. 

But if our Lord was secretly assassinated how could it have happenedthat the body should never have been found, and produced, when theApostles began declaring publicly that Christ had risen? What couldbe easier than to bring it forward and settle the whole matter? Itcannot be doubted that the body must have been looked for when theApostles began publishing their story; we saw reason for believingthis when we considered the account of the Resurrection given by St. Matthew. NOW THOSE THAT HIDE CAN FIND; and if the enemies of Christhad got rid of Him by foul play, they would know very well where tolay their hands upon that which would be the death blow toChristianity. If then Christ did not go away of His own accord, asfeeling that His teaching would be better preserved by His absence, and if He did not die from wounds received upon the Cross, and if Hewas not assassinated secretly, what remains as the most reasonableview to be taken concerning His disappearance? Surely the one thatWAS taken; the view which commended itself to those who were bestable to judge--namely, THAT HE HAD ASCENDED BODILY INTO HEAVEN ANDWAS SITTING AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD THE FATHER. 

Where else could He be?

For that He disappeared, and disappeared finally, within six weeks ofthe Crucifixion must be considered certain; there is no one who willbe bold enough even to hazard a conjecture that the appearance ofChrist alluded to by St. Paul, as having been vouchsafed to him someyears later, was that of the living Christ, who had chosen upon thisone occasion to depart from the seclusion and secrecy which he hadmaintained hitherto. But if Christ was still living on earth, howwas it possible that no human being should have the smallest clue toHis whereabouts? If He was dead how is it that no one should haveproduced the body? Such a mysterious and total disappearance, evenin the face of great jeopardy, has never yet been known, and can onlybe satisfactorily explained by adopting the belief which hasprevailed for nearly the last two thousand years, and which willprevail more and more triumphantly so long as the world shall last--the belief that Christ was restored to the glory which He had sharedwith the Father, as soon as ever He had given sufficient proofs ofHis being alive to ensure the devotion of His followers. 

Before we can reject the supernatural solution of a mystery otherwiseinexplicable, we should have some natural explanation which will meetthe requirements of the case. A confession of ignorance is notenough here. WE are NOT ignorant; we KNOW that Christ died, inasmuchas we have the testimony of all the four Evangelists to this effect, the testimony of the Apostle Paul, and through him that of all theother Apostles; we have also the certainty that the centurion incharge of the soldiers at the Crucifixion would not have committed sograve a breach of discipline as the delivery of the body to Josephand Nicodemus, unless he had felt quite sure that life was extinct;and finally we have the testimony of the Church for sixtygenerations, and that of myriads now living, whose experience assuresthem that Christ died and rose from the dead; in addition to thistremendous body of evidence we have also the story of the spear woundrecorded in a Gospel which even our opponents believe to be from aJohannean source in its later chapters; and though, as has beenalready stated, this wound cannot be insisted upon as in itselfsufficient to prove our Lord's death, yet it must assuredly beallowed its due weight in reviewing the evidence. The unbelievercannot surely have considered how shallow are all the arguments whichhe can produce, in comparison with those that make against him. Hecannot say that I have not done him justice, and I feel confidentthat when he reconsiders the matter in that spirit of humilitywithout which he cannot hope to be guided to a true conclusion, hewill feel sure that Strauss is right in believing that the death ofour Lord cannot be seriously called in question. 

But this being so, the reappearances, which we have seen to beestablished by the collapse of the hallucination theory, must bereferred to supernatural or miraculous agency; that is to say, ourLord died and rose again on the third day, according to theScriptures. Whereon His disappearance some six weeks later must belooked upon very differently from that of any ordinary person. Ifour Lord could have been shewn to have been a mere man, who hadescaped death only by a hair's breadth, but still escaped it, perhapssome one of the theories for His disappearance, or some combinationof them, or some other explanation which has not yet been thought of, might be held to be sufficient; but in the case of One who died androse from the dead, there is no theory which will stand, except theone which it has been reserved for our own lawless and self-seekingtimes to question. Through the light of the Resurrection theAscension is clearly seen. 

My task is now completed. In an age when Rationalism has becomerecognised as the only basis upon which faith can rest securely, Ihave established the Christian faith upon a Rationalistic basis. 

I have made no concession to Rationalism which did not place all thevital parts of Christianity in a far stronger position than they werein before, yet I have. Conceded everything which a sincereRationalist is likely to desire. I have cleared the ground forreconciliation. It only remains for the two contending parties tocome forward and occupy it in peace jointly. May it be mine to seethe day when all traces of disagreement have been long obliterated!

To the unbeliever I can say, "Never yet in any work upon theChristian side have your difficulties been so fully and fairlystated; never yet has orthodox disingenuousness been so unsparinglyexposed. " To the Christian I can say with no less justice, "Neveryet have the true reasons for the discrepancies in the Gospels beenso put forward as to enable us to look these discrepancies boldly inthe face, and to thank God for having graciously allowed them toexist. " I do not say this in any spirit of self-glorification. Weare children of the hour, and creatures of our surroundings. As ithas been given unto us, so will it be required at our hands, and weare at best unprofitable servants. Nevertheless I cannot refrainfrom expressing my gratitude at having been born in an age whenChristianity and Rationalism are not only ceasing to appearantagonistic to one another, BUT HAVE EACH BECOME ESSENTIAL TO THEVERY EXISTENCE OF THE OTHER. May the reader feel this no lessstrongly than I do, and may he also feel that I have supplied themissing element which could alone cause them to combine. If he asksme what element I allude to, I answer Candour. This is the pilotthat has taken us safely into the Fair Haven of universal brotherhoodin Christ. 

APPENDIX

I--THE BURIAL

(John xix. 38-42)

And after this Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus, butsecretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might takeaway the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave. He cametherefore, and took the body of Jesus. And there came alsoNicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought amixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight. Then tookthey the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with thespices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury. Now in the place wherehe was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a newsepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesustherefore because of the Jews' preparation day; for the sepulchre wasnigh at hand. 

(Luke xxiii. 50-56)

And, behold, there was a man named Joseph, a counsellor; and he was agood man, and a just: (the same had not consented to the counsel anddeed of them;) he was of Arimathaea, a city of the Jews: who alsohimself waited for the kingdom of God. This man went unto Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus. And he took it down, and wrapped it inlinen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, whereinnever man before was laid. And that day was the preparation, and thesabbath drew on. And the women also, which came with him fromGalilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his bodywas laid. And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; andrested the sabbath day according to the commandment. 

(Mark xv. 42-47)

And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation, thatis, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathaea, an honourablecounsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and wentin boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus. And Pilatemarvelled if he were already dead: and calling unto him thecenturion, he asked him whether he had been any while dead. And whenhe knew it of the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph. And hebought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and rolleda stone unto the door of the sepulchre. And Mary Magdalene and Marythe mother of Joseph beheld where he was laid. 

(Matthew xxvii. 57-61)

When the even was come, there came a rich man of Arimathaea, namedJoseph, who also himself was Jesus' disciple. He went to Pilate, andbegged the body of Jesus. Then Pilate commanded the body to bedelivered. And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in aclean linen cloth. And laid it in his own new tomb, which he hadhewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of thesepulchre, and departed. And there was Mary Magdalene, and the otherMary, sitting over against the sepulchre. 

II--THE GUARD SET UPON THE TOMB (Peculiar to Matthew)

(Matthew xxvii. 62-66)

Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation, the chiefpriests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate. Saying, Sir, weremember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After threedays I will rise again. Command therefore that the sepulchre be madesure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and stealhim away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so thelast error shall be worse than the first. Pilate said unto them, Yehave a watch: go your way, make it as sure as ye can. So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch. 

III--VISIT OF MARY MAGDALENE, AND OTHERS, TO THE TOMB

(John xx. 1-13)

The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it wasyet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from thesepulchre. Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to theother disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They havetaken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where theyhave laid him. Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre. So they ran both together: and the otherdisciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre. And hestooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet wenthe not in. Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into thesepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie. And the napkin, that wasabout his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrappedtogether in a place by itself. Then went in also that otherdisciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, andbelieved. For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must riseagain from the dead. Then the disciples went away again unto theirown home. But Mary stood without the sepulchre weeping: and as shewept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, And seeth twoangels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at thefeet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they havetaken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. 

(Luke xxiv. 1-12)

Now upon the first day of the week very early in the morning, theycame unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled awayfrom the sepulchre. And they entered in, and found not the body ofthe Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexedthereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: andas they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, theysaid unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is nothere, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yetin Galilee, saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the handsof sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again. Andthey remembered his words, and returned from the sepulchre, and toldall these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest. It was MaryMagdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other womenthat were with them, which told these things unto the apostles. Andtheir words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not. Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, hebeheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wonderingin himself at that which was come to pass. 

(Mark xvi. 1-8)

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother ofJames, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come andanoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they saidamong themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door ofthe sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone wasrolled away: for it was very great. And entering into thesepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed ina long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith untothem, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which wascrucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where theylaid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that hegoeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he saidunto you. And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre;for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they anything to anyman; for they were afraid. 

(Matthew xxviii. 1-8)

In the end of the sabbath, as it began to draw toward the first dayof the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see thesepulchre. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angelof the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stonefrom the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow, and for fear of him the keepers didshake, and became as dead men. And the angel answered and said untothe women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which wascrucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, seethe place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciplesthat he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you intoGalilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you. And theydeparted quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and didrun to bring his disciples word. 

IV--APPEARANCE OF CHRIST TO MARY MAGDALENE AND OTHERS

(John xx. 14-18)

And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesusstanding, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? She, supposing him tobe the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesussaith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. Jesus saith unto her, Touch menot; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and tomy God, and your God. Mary Magdalene came and told the disciplesthat she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things untoher. 

(Mark xvi. 9-11)

Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appearedfirst to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. Andshe went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned andwept. And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had beenseen of her, believed not. 

(Matthew xxvii. 9-10)

And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And they came and held him by the feet, andworshipped him. Then said Jesus unto them, Be not afraid: go tellmy brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me. 

V--THE BRIBING OF THE GUARD (Peculiar to Matthew)

(Matthew xxviii. 11-15)

Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into thecity, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that weredone. And when they were assembled with the elders, and had takencounsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, Say ye, Hisdisciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept. And ifthis come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and secureyou. So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and thissaying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day. 

VI--APPEARANCE TO CLEOPAS (AND JAMES?)

(Luke xxiv. 13-35)

And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village calledEmmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And theytalked together of all these things which had happened. And it cameto pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesushimself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holdenthat they should not know him. And he said unto them, What manner ofcommunications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, andare sad? And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering saidunto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not knownthe things which are come to pass there in these days? And he saidunto them, What things? And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus ofNazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God andall the people: And how the chief priests and our rulers deliveredhim to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. But we trustedthat it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and besideall this, to-day is the third day since these things were done. Yea, and certain women also of our company made us astonished, which wereearly at the sepulchre; and when they found not his body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said thathe was alive, and certain of them which were with us went to thesepulchre, and found it even so as the women had said: but him theysaw not. Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart tobelieve all that the prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ to havesuffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning atMoses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all thescriptures the things concerning himself. And they drew nigh untothe village, whither they went: and he made as though he would havegone further. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: forit is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in totarry with them. And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. Andtheir eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out oftheir sight. And they said one to another, Did not our heart burnwithin us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened tous the scriptures? And they rose up the same hour, and returned toJerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that werewith them, saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared toSimon. And they told what things were done in the way, and how hewas known of them in breaking of bread. 

(Mark xvi. 12-13)

After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as theywalked, and went into the country. And they went and told it untothe residue: neither believed they them. 

VII--APPEARANCE TO THE APOSTLES (Twice in John)

(John xx. 19-29)

Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, whenthe doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear ofthe Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had so said, he shewed them his handsand his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord. Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hathsent me, even, so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathedon them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soeversins ye retain, they are retained. But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The otherdisciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But hesaid unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of thenails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust myhand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days againhis disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be untoyou. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold myhands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and benot faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hastseen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. 

[I have not quoted the twenty-first chapter of St. John's Gospel onaccount of its exceedingly doubtful genuineness. --W. B. O. ]

(Luke xxiv. 36-49)

And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, andsaith unto them, Peace be unto you. But they were terrified andaffrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. And he saidunto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in yourhearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet. And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said untothem, Have ye here any meat? And they gave him a piece of a broiledfish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them. And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, whichwere written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in thepsalms concerning me. Then opened he their understanding, that theymight understand the scriptures. And said unto them, Thus it iswritten, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from thedead the third day: And that repentance and remission of sins shouldbe preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And ye are witnesses of these things. And, behold, I send thepromise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city ofJerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high. 

(Mark xvi. 14-18)

Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, andupbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, becausethey believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. And hesaith unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel toevery creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shallfollow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; theyshall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and ifthey drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall layhands on the sick, and they shall recover. 

(Matthew xviii. 16-20)

Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountainwhere Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, theyworshipped him: but some doubted. And Jesus came and spake untothem, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth, goye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name ofthe Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them toobserve all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I amwith you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen. 

VIII--THE ASCENSION

(Luke xxiv. 50-53)

And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he wasparted from them, and carried up into heaven. And they worshippedhim, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And were continuallyin the temple, praising and blessing God. Amen. 

(Mark xvi. 19-20)

So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up intoheaven, and sat on the right hand of God. And they went forth, andpreached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming theword with signs following. Amen. 

(Acts i. 1-12)

The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesusbegan both to do and teach, Until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto theapostles whom he had chosen. To whom also he shewed himself aliveafter his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them fortydays, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God:and, being assembled together with them, commanded them that theyshould not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of theFather, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. For John trulybaptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost notmany days hence. When they therefore were come together, they askedof him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again thekingdom to Israel? And he said unto them, It is not for you to knowthe times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come uponyou: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in allJudaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was takenup; and a cloud received him out of their sight, And while theylooked stedfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stoodby them in white apparel; Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, whystand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken upfrom you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seenhim go into heaven. Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mountcalled Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a sabbath day's journey. 

IX--ST. PAUL'S ACCOUNT OF OUR LORD'S REAPPEARANCES

(I. Corinthians xv. 3-8)

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, howthat Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and thathe was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to thescriptures: and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve;after that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; ofwhom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallenasleep. After that, he was seen of James: then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also as of one born out of duetime. 

Footnotes:

{1} It should be borne in mind that this passage was written five orsix years ago, before the commencement of the Franco-Prussian war, What would my brother have said had he been able to comprehend theevents of 1870 and 1871?--W. B. O. 

{2} This pamphlet was by Butler himself. 

{3} See Biog. Britann. 

{4} Middleton's Reflections answered by Benson. Hist. Christ, vol. Iii. , p. 50. 

{5} Lardner, part I. , vol. Ii. , p. 135 et seq. 

{6} Ibid. , part I. , vol. Ii. , p. 742.