disciples, either by producing the body or producing some one who had seen the body. The last and true statement is, that God raised Jesus from the dead. It has often appeared a diffcult thing for some to accept. The last view does not ask us to believe that the words recorded in the closing parts of the Gospels were the recorded visions of Mary Magdalene to whose report the disciples were slow to give credence. It does not ask us to believe that the despondent couple on the way to Emmaus were in a visionary mood expecting a resurrection. They were going off into the country, even after some reports had reached them from the tomb. These reports were not regarded by them as trustworthy. They turned their backs upon the city as unwilling to believe the women as Renan himself. We are not told what business took them to Emmaus, but it would have been more important than any they ever transacted before, if they had left the city after giving credence to the reports of the women. Consider further that they calmly discussed both the vision side and the more tangible side of the news from the tomb, which they themselves had not taken the pains to visit, though they could go three score furlongs from the city. Note how considering all the circumstances, they incur the rebuke of Christ for being too lieve." slow"" to be "Yea, and certain woman also of our company made us astonished, which were early at the sepulcher; and when they found not His body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said He was alive. And certain of them which were with us went to the sepulcher, and found it even as the women had said: but Him they saw not. Then said He unto them, O fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken." It was with the greatest difficulty that Thomas was convinced. Only after He had eaten with them and repeatedly manifested Himself, did Christ overcome that weight of despair, which three days before His first reappearance, had settled upon them with all but unconquerable power. The actual resurrection of Jesus, is the only rational explanation of the sudden change from gloom to joy' in the apostolic circle. Their sorrow fastened upon the physical and earthly side of their loss. "We trusted that it had been He, who should have redeemed Israel" said they who sought to escape from the scenes of their final defeat. And when the Lord overtook them, He reasoned with them along the lines of the continuity of Messianic prophecy, leading their minds away from the wonder side of their experience, to show them that the drift of the ages is stronger than death. Their "hearts burned within" them, while still distrustful of the consciousness soon to enjoy an open physical vision. Jerusalem was not a strange city to the Galilean disciples, but in the dusk of that awful Friday night, she must have seemed the dismal haunt of fiends. We can not imagine the depth of their descending anguish and despair. A few days pass and some event takes place which transforms their mood to one of joy. A movement was resumed which has changed the whole character of civilization. The seekers after God in every nation, the deep and deepening stream of Hebrew prophecy, the witness of four independent biographers, the epistles of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, the history of the Christian Church, the growth of the kingdom, the observance of Sunday and Easter, are all so many stones in the temple of truth. "The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner." "Yet, if Christ be not risen our preaching is vain and your faith is also vain." There is a very peculiar circumstance left unexplained by the upholders of the vision theory. These visions suddenly disappeared at the end of forty days. The record gives a good reason for this, namely, that Christ disappeared at the end of that period. How credulous is he, who believes that many persons, at various times and places, dreamed about one man in such a way as to reverse the natural expectations concerning Him and dreamed the same dream, with nothing worth mentioning to call it out. Mary and the other women, Peter and John, the two on the way to Emmaus, the ten without Thomas, the eleven a week later Thomas being present, seven apostles at the sea of Galilee, James, five hundred brethren at once, a great portion of whom were alive when Paul wrote the letter which the most severe critics agree to be from his own hand; all these are supposed to been so unanimously hypnotized by the same vision, that they were all fully convinced, in spite of all obstacles to the contrary, that Christ had risen when He had not. They all heard substantially the same messages and transformed society with the same dream. Fiction by this argument becomes more powerful than the truth. It is not contended that it is equally easy for all people, at all times, to appreciate the higher evidences of the risen Lord. But when so many things fall into a harmony finding climax in the Divine originality of a sinless life, shall it be counted a strange thing that God should raise the dead to perfect the type of humanity? When every great landing place in the ascent of nature, is a new phenomenon, which we are utterly unable to forecast, shall we deny or be slow to be believe all that nature as well as Scripture has told us, by demanding a uniformity which ignores not only God, spirit, character, destiny, but a larger thought of nature itself? The resurrection of Jesus Christ means the resurrection of humanity. He rose. We shall rise. Jesus has changed the dark river, the terror of the pagan, into a clear, sunlighted brook, crossed by a single step. Again a true science will have a larger place for the evidence of the heart. The heart may out-run the head, without forsaking the reason. After the testimony of Mary Magdalene is confirmed by many witnesses, by the conjunction of events which enables the resurrection to fall into its place as the keystone which binds the arch, we may well go back into the garden and ask whether the gardener could have feigned the accent of affection and whether the return of Mary's seven devils would wipe her tears away? The Lord's familiar use of her name, "Mary" awoke a line of evidence which the wise have too readily called; "The baseless fabric of a dream." 66 When some Romanes melts Mary's reply in the crucible of a true science, he will find another fact. Rabboni!" Master. Christian consciousness, in one like Mary, who had been rescued from desperate condi tions, finds her earliest at the tomb. Her physical vision is so blinded by tears that she can not tell one person from another, but both her bodily hearing and her soul's vision were never better. How often shall the heart out-run the head and come back to go over the same ground with slowfooted logic to the same goal, to remove that slowness "of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken?" There is a spiritual resurrection which even some who have partly realized it, have not learned to estimate at its true worth. Love conquers Thomas, when he sees that the Lord did not disdain the appeal to sense, but only gave it inferior place in a broader logic and a more thorough demonstration. Finally there is a transformation of society, so that the resurrection of the social body is the never failing refutation of those who see no Christ after the "last sigh" upon the cross. Christ rises again in every Christ-like deed. He comes again in every honest heart. He triumphs in the rising tide of every true reform. Silversmiths, craftsmen who gain their wealth by profit from some Diana, anyone who allows the financial question to turn the edge of his conscience, must wash his hands of greed, or find no Easter in his soul. Easter means resurrection for everything; for nature, for man, for society. History is one grand resurrection. Altruism overcomes competition. He who advances human brotherhood cries with the risen, present Christ to every needy soul beneath the sun, "All hail." |