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XVI.

EASTER FACTS.

"I have been used for many years to study the history of other times, and to examine and weigh the evidence of those who have written about them, and I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort, to the understanding of a fair inquirer, than the great sign which God hath given us that Christ died and rose again from the dead."-Thomas Arnold.

A Greylock Pulpit.

EASTER

FACTS.

And though they found no cause of death in Him, yet desired they Pilate that He should be slain. And when they had fulfilled all that was written of Him, they took Him down from the tree and laid Him in a sepulcher. But God raised Him from the dead. And He was seen many days of them that came up with Him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are His witnesses unto the people. Acts, 13:28-31.

Jesus said unto her, Mary. say, Master. John 20:16.

She turned herself, and said unto Him, Rabboni; which is to

Easter stands for joy, even among those who are not given to the special observance of special days. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of those few facts, of the first order, which justify universal recognition in the calendar. If we observe too many days we cease to observe any as we ought. The man who shouts every word, so that he can be heard an eighth of a mile, violates almost every principle of emphasis. If he should attempt to raise his voice to indicate the conceptive location or nature of a thing described to his mind but not to others. he would find his resources exhausted at the point of necessary emphasis or change of pitch.

Nearly all the Christian world wisely observes Easter. If some still foolishly neglect it, their repentance will not be long delayed. Without doubt the reaction of the Puritan against extreme formalism went too far. The Presbyterian, the Methodist, the Quaker and others will ever be found ready to stand for the "inner life," but the experience of days gone by, will enable them to keep all they wisely recover. Part of the great reaction by which the Protestant world was robbed of Easter, was due to the complications of church and state, which we may believe to be forever past. That battle is fought. We can not have a state without religion. but we must have it without a church. While we bring out to-day the flowers, poetry, beauty and joy of religion, they now mean much more to us because this summer side of Christianity grows out of snow and severity in the logical, practical earnestness of the north, with the sternness which has made us strong on both sides of the sea. The bitterness and bigotry of the past, are buried. The Roman and Protestant churches join in their observance of this day of joy.

There could be nothing worth celebrating, if the day were but a relic of unfounded tradition, a hollow observance of custom. The return of spring demands a Christian as well as a pagan festival, and all the more if Jesus

rose in the winter. The parable of the seasons, which has ever lifted the human heart with gratitude, never received exposition until the stone was rolled away from a tomb in Judea, by One to whom life and death are no mystery and to whom no fact is a wonder or unnatural.

Great ideas are stronger than rules and great facts stronger than both. The Jews kept the seventh day in obedience to the letter of one of the ten commandments. The intrinsic superiority of Christian consciousness gradually transferred the observance given to the seventh day to the first day of the week. The resurrection was celebrated every seven days not only by those who met at evening and in seclusion to avoid the Jewish persecution, but by the great historic church. It was a day of joy promising the resurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the soul, and the resurrection or transformation of society.

We may examine the spent missiles, which have been hurled at the resurrection of Christ. First is the charge of fraud. It was claimed by the adherents of this view, that the apostles stole and hid the body, and then preached that Christ had risen. They, who were dishonest enough to thus impose on the public, could not be bribed to reveal their secret, and so they imposed upon the credulity of the world, when there was no motive for their

act.

The Pharisees and priests, holding with Renan, that Jesus was a “deceiver, "remembering His prediction that He would rise the third day, set a watch and made the sepulcher secure on the second day by the special permission of Pilate. According to the account, as given by the Gospels, sometime after the Jewish sabbath was passed and before full dawn of the first day of the week, there was a great earthquake, shaking probably the tomb only, and an angel came and rolled away the stone from the door of the sepulcher and sat upon it. He addresses the women, with assurances that the Lord has risen, and points out to them the empty tomb. The soldiers rush from the scene with terror. The women, with a fear which is held in abeyance to great joy, ran to bring the disciples word. The priests and elders assemble and give large money to the soldiers saying,

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Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole Him away, while we slept. And if this come to the governors' ears, we will persuade him and secure you. So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day. (The time of the writing of Matthew's Gospel.)

At the time, many Jews, and later from Celsus on, not a few skeptics, have believed this fraud theory. They admitted that the tomb was empty. A child can see, that if the body had remained as it was on the day of burial, that it would have been impossible for the apostles to preach the resurrection in the adjoining city; because the body could be produced by the authorities and they could prove to the people, that the evangelists were either frauds or self-deceived visionaries. Mary's first thought was the honest, though mistaken one, that some of the evil-disposed had not been content with judicial murder, but had now taken away all that remained of the Lord and she, "knew not where they had laid him. "

The story of the guard is now spreading in the city. How did the disciples elude the guard, is the question. We were asleep, "said they. But

if they were asleep, how could they tell that the disciples stole the body? But passing that, had they really been asleep, would they have dared tell it, when to sleep on guard was a military crime, punishable with death? If the soldiers were awake, how would it be possible for a few worn out timid disciples to over-power the guard, which Pilate had told them to make as secure as they could.

The fraud theory asks us to believe that the disciples received inspiration from a self-invented lie, to strike out a new path, to go into all the world of their day, to die cruel deaths of martyrdom, for which lie they could have no real, but only an apparent belief. This view has long ago broken down by its own weight. Early in the history of the church, many Jews put this forward, but the scholarly, amongst the modern Jews. have abandoned this theory for one which attempts to save the character without granting the claim of the disciples.

Again it has been urged by some, that Christ never died, but only fainted. Men have ransacked medical records to prove that people have rallied from swoons on the third day. Renan urges against this, that the Jews were too anxious to insure His death, not to make sure of the result. The sufferings and wounds including the spear thrust, His inability to carry the cross, the weight of the world upon His heart, were too sure to accomplish His death. The difficulty is before us of answering the question when did He die if not then? If He recovered and lived on, how are we to dispose of the history of the early church as recorded in the Acts and epistles so as to harmonize with this idea? This is also thrown out by scholars as absurd.

There is however a view which is the reliance of the extreme wing of rationalistic critics, known as the vision theory. It is held by this school that Christ did not rise and that the disciples acted under an hallucination. They are supposed to have acted under excitement, to have been led by delusion. This view is as old as the second century, but has been brought out into a new form in modern times by skeptical writers in France and Germany.

There are no other conceivable explanations beside those given, so that if this vision theory falls the New Testament account will stand as historical and authentic. The first difficulty in the time order is, that the vision theory does not account for the empty tomb. Within sight of the sepulcher Peter and John are preaching Jesus and the resurrection. They secure the following of thousands, to the mortification of the Jewish authorities whose only argument is libel and force. The apostles, as those who are sure of their ground, hang all they have to say on the statement that Jesus has been raised from the dead. He had mingled again with them, had eaten with them, walked with them, instructed and commissioned them for a worldwide mission.

There are three conceivable alternatives, and all but one are untenable. One is that the disciples took the body and lied and were able to inspire humanity with a lie in their right hand.

The second is that not the friends, but the enemies, of Christ removed the body, and yet did not attempt by any testimony to show the error of the

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