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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Fair Haven, by Samuel Butler, Edited by
+R. A. Streatfeild
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Fair Haven
+
+
+Author: Samuel Butler
+
+Editor: R. A. Streatfeild
+
+Release Date: July 30, 2014  [eBook #6092]
+[This file was first posted on November 4, 2002]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAIR HAVEN***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                              The Fair Haven
+
+
+              _A Work in Defence of the Miraculous Element_
+          _in our Lord’s Ministry upon Earth_, _both as against_
+        _Rationalistic Impugners and certain Orthodox Defenders_,
+             _by the late John Pickard Owen_, _with a Memoir_
+               _of the Author by William Bickersteth Owen_.
+
+                                    By
+
+                              Samuel Butler
+
+                           Author of “Erewhon”
+
+                                  OP. 2
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+            _Now Reset_; _and Edited_, _with an Introduction_,
+                          _by R. A. Streatfeild_
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  London
+                  A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford’s Inn, E.C.
+                                   1913
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+            WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH
+
+                                 Contents
+
+             Introduction by R. A. Streatfeild                      ix
+             Butler’s Preface to the Second Edition                 xv
+             Memoir of the late John Pickard Owen                    1
+CHAPTER
+         I.  Introduction                                           61
+        II.  Strauss and the Hallucination Theory                   83
+       III.  The Character and Conversion of St. Paul              105
+        IV.  Paul’s Testimony considered                           120
+         V.  A Consideration of Certain Ill-judged Methods         134
+             of Defence
+        VI.  More Disingenuousness                                 153
+       VII.  Difficulties felt by our Opponents                    170
+      VIII.  The Preceding Chapter Continued                       194
+        IX.  The Christ-Ideal                                      230
+         X.  Conclusion                                            255
+             Appendix                                              273
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+By R. A. Streatfeild
+
+
+THE demand for a new edition of _The Fair Haven_ gives me an opportunity
+of saying a few words about the genesis of what, though not one of the
+most popular of Samuel Butler’s books, is certainly one of the most
+characteristic.  Few of his works, indeed, show more strikingly his
+brilliant powers as a controversialist and his implacable determination
+to get at the truth of whatever engaged his attention.
+
+To find the germ of _The Fair Haven_ we should probably have to go back
+to the year 1858, when Butler, after taking his degree at Cambridge, was
+preparing himself for holy orders by acting as a kind of lay curate in a
+London parish.  Butler never took things for granted, and he felt it to
+be his duty to examine independently a good many points of Christian
+dogma which most candidates for ordination accept as matters of course.
+The result of his investigations was that he eventually declined to take
+orders at all.  One of the stones upon which he then stumbled was the
+efficacy of infant baptism, and I have no doubt that another was the
+miraculous element of Christianity, which, it will be remembered, was the
+cause of grievous searchings of heart to Ernest Pontifex in Butler’s
+semi-autobiographical novel, _The Way of All Flesh_.  While Butler was in
+New Zealand (1859–64) he had leisure for prosecuting his Biblical
+studies, the result of which he published in 1865, after his return to
+England, in an anonymous pamphlet entitled “The Evidence for the
+Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists critically
+examined.”  This pamphlet passed unnoticed; probably only a few copies
+were printed and it is now extremely rare.  After the publication of
+_Erewhon_ in 1872, Butler returned once more to theology, and made his
+anonymous pamphlet the basis of the far more elaborate _Fair Haven_,
+which was originally published 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
+the fruit of a suggestion made by Miss Savage, an able and witty woman
+with whom Butler corresponded at the time.  Miss Savage was so much
+impressed by the narrative power displayed in _Erewhon_ that she urged
+Butler to write a novel, and we shall probably not be far wrong in
+regarding the biography of John Pickard Owen as Butler’s trial trip in
+the art of fiction—a prelude to _The Way of All Flesh_, which he began in
+1873.
+
+It has often been supposed that the elaborate paraphernalia of
+mystification which Butler used in _The Fair Haven_ was deliberately
+designed in order to hoax the public.  I do not believe that this was the
+case.  Butler, I feel convinced, provided an ironical framework for his
+arguments merely that he might render them more effective than they had
+been when plainly stated in the pamphlet of 1865.  He fully expected his
+readers to comprehend his irony, and he anticipated that some at any rate
+of them would keenly resent it.  Writing to Miss Savage in March, 1873
+(shortly before the publication of the book), he said: “I should hope
+that attacks on _The Fair Haven_ will give me an opportunity of excusing
+myself, and if so I shall endeavour that the excuse may be worse than the
+fault it is intended to excuse.”  A few days later he referred to the
+difficulties that he had encountered in getting the book accepted by a
+publisher: “— were frightened and even considered the scheme of the book
+unjustifiable.  — urged me, as politely as he could, not to do it, and
+evidently thinks I shall get myself into disgrace even among
+freethinkers.  It’s all nonsense.  I dare say I shall get into a row—at
+least I hope I shall.”  Evidently there is here no anticipation of _The
+Fair Haven_ being misunderstood.  Misunderstood, however, it was, not
+only by reviewers, some of whom greeted it solemnly as a defence of
+orthodoxy, but by divines of high standing, such as the late 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 a second edition
+bearing his name and accompanied by a preface in which the deceived elect
+were held up to ridicule.
+
+Butler used to maintain that _The Fair Haven_ did his reputation no harm.
+Writing in 1901, he said:
+
+“_The Fair Haven_ got me into no social disgrace that I have ever been
+able to discover.  I might attack Christianity as much as I chose and
+nobody cared one straw; but when I attacked Darwin it was a different
+matter.  For many years _Evolution_, _Old and New_, and _Unconscious
+Memory_ made a shipwreck of my literary prospects.  I am only now
+beginning to emerge from the literary and social injury which those two
+perfectly righteous books inflicted on me.  I dare say they abound with
+small faults of taste, but I rejoice in having written both 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 the literary
+world.  Reviewers fought shy of him for the rest of his life.  They had
+been taken in once, and they took very good care that they should not be
+taken in again.  The word went forth that Butler was not to be taken
+seriously, whatever he wrote, and the results of the decree were apparent
+in the conspiracy of silence that greeted not only his books on
+evolution, but his Homeric works, his writings on art, and his edition of
+Shakespeare’s sonnets.  Now that he has passed beyond controversies and
+mystifications, and now that his other works are appreciated at their
+true value, it is not too much to 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 it was forty years ago.  In the early
+seventies theological polemics were fashionable.  Books like Seeley’s
+_Ecce Homo_ and Matthew Arnold’s _Literature and Dogma_ were eagerly
+devoured by readers of all classes.  Nowadays we take but a languid
+interest in the problems that disturbed our grandfathers, and most of us
+have settled down into what Disraeli described as the religion of all
+sensible men, which no sensible man ever talks about.  There is, however,
+in _The Fair Haven_ a good deal more than theological controversy, and
+our Laodicean age will appreciate Butler’s humour and irony if it cares
+little for his polemics.  _The Fair Haven_ scandalised a good many people
+when it first appeared, but I am not afraid of its scandalising anybody
+now.  I should be sorry, nevertheless, if it gave any reader a false
+impression of Butler’s Christianity, and I think I cannot do better than
+conclude with a passage from one of his essays which represents his
+attitude to religion perhaps more faithfully than anything in _The Fair
+Haven_: “What, after all, is the essence of Christianity?  What is the
+kernel of the nut?  Surely common sense and cheerfulness, with
+unflinching opposition to the charlatanisms and Pharisaisms of a man’s
+own times.  The essence of Christianity lies neither in dogma, nor yet in
+abnormally holy life, but in faith in an unseen world, in doing one’s
+duty, in speaking the truth, in finding the true life rather in others
+than in oneself, and in the certain hope that he who loses his life on
+these behalfs finds more than he has lost.  What can Agnosticism do
+against such Christianity as this?  I should be shocked if anything I had
+ever written or shall ever write should seem 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 to thank
+the public and my critics for the favourable reception which has been
+accorded to the First Edition.  I had feared that the freedom with which
+I had exposed certain untenable positions taken by Defenders of
+Christianity might have given offence to some reviewers, but no complaint
+has reached me from any quarter on the score of my not having put the
+best possible case for the evidence in favour of the miraculous element
+in Christ’s teaching—nor can I believe that I should have failed to hear
+of it, if my book had been open to exception on this ground.
+
+An apology is perhaps due for the adoption of a pseudonym, and even more
+so for the creation of two such characters as JOHN PICKARD OWEN and his
+brother.  Why could I not, it may be asked, have said all that I had to
+say in my own proper person?
+
+Are there not real ills of life enough already?  Is there not a “lo
+here!” from this school with its gushing “earnestness,” it distinctions
+without differences, its gnat strainings and camel swallowings, its
+pretence of grappling with a question while resolutely bent upon shirking
+it, its dust throwing and mystification, its concealment of its own
+ineffable insincerity under an air of ineffable candour?  Is there not a
+“lo there!” from that other school with its bituminous atmosphere of
+exclusiveness and self-laudatory dilettanteism?  Is there not enough
+actual exposition of boredom come over us from many quarters without
+drawing for new bores upon the imagination?  It is true I gave a single
+drop of comfort.  JOHN PICKARD OWEN was dead.  But his having ceased to
+exist (to use the impious phraseology of the present day) did not cancel
+the fact of his having once existed.  That he should have ever been born
+gave proof of potentialities in Nature which could not be regarded
+lightly.  What hybrids might not be in store for us next?  Moreover,
+though JOHN PICKARD was dead, WILLIAM BICKERSTETH was still living, and
+might at any moment rekindle his burning and shining lamp of persistent
+self-satisfaction.  Even though the OWENS had actually existed, should
+not their existence have been ignored as a disgrace to Nature?  Who then
+could be justified in creating them when they did not exist?
+
+I am afraid I must offer an apology rather than an excuse.  The fact is
+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 English Church and
+the Erewhonian Musical Banks.  It is inconceivable how they can have got
+hold of this idea; but I was given to understand that I should find it
+far from easy to dispossess them of the notion that something in the way
+of satire had been intended.  There were other parts of the book which
+had also been excepted to, and altogether I had reason to believe that if
+I defended Christianity in my own name I should not find _Erewhon_ any
+addition to the weight which my remarks might otherwise carry.  If I had
+been suspected of satire once, I might be suspected again with no greater
+reason.  Instead of calmly reviewing the arguments which I adduced, _The
+Rock_ might have raised a cry of _non tali auxilio_.  It must always be
+remembered that besides the legitimate investors in Christian stocks, if
+so homely a metaphor may be pardoned, there are unscrupulous persons
+whose profession it is to be bulls, bears, stags, and I know not what
+other creatures of the various Christian markets.  It is all nonsense
+about hawks not picking out each other’s eyes—there is nothing they like
+better.  I feared _The Guardian_, _The Record_, _The John Bull_, etc.,
+lest they should suggest that from a bear I now turned bull with a view
+to an eventual bishopric.  Such insinuations would have impaired the
+value of _The Fair Haven_ as an anchorage for well-meaning people.  I
+therefore resolved to obey the injunction of the Gentile Apostle and
+avoid all appearance of evil, by dissociating myself from the author of
+_Erewhon_ as completely as possible.  At the moment of my resolution JOHN
+PICKARD OWEN came to my assistance; I felt that he was the sort of man I
+wanted, but that he was hardly sufficient in himself.  I therefore
+summoned his brother.  The pair have served their purpose; a year
+nowadays produces great changes in men’s thoughts concerning
+Christianity, and the little matter of _Erewhon_ having quite blown over
+I feel that I may safely appear in my true colours as the champion of
+orthodoxy, discard the OWENS as other than mouthpieces, and relieve the
+public from uneasiness as to any further writings from the pen of the
+surviving brother.
+
+Nevertheless I am bound to own that, in spite of a generally favourable
+opinion, my critics have not been unanimous in their interpretation 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 our custom of reviewing with brevity
+works entrusted to us, and we shall in two consecutive numbers of _The
+Rock_ lay before its readers what appear to us to be the merits and
+demerits of this posthumous production.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“His exhibition of the certain proofs furnished of the Resurrection of
+our Lord is certainly masterly and convincing.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“To the sincerely inquiring doubter, the striking way in which the truth
+of the Resurrection is exhibited must be most beneficial, but such a
+character we are compelled to believe is rare among those of the schools
+of neology.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“Mr. OWEN’S exposition and refutation of the hallucination and mythical
+theories of Strauss and his followers is most admirable, and all should
+read it who desire to know exactly what excuses men make for their
+incredulity.  The work also contains many beautiful passages on the
+discomfort of unbelief, and the holy pleasure of a settled faith, which
+cannot fail to benefit the reader.”
+
+On the other hand, in spite of all my precautions, the same misfortune
+which overtook _Erewhon_ has also come upon _The Fair Haven_.  It has
+been suspected of a satirical purpose.  The author of a pamphlet entitled
+_Jesus versus Christianity_ says:—
+
+“_The Fair Haven_ is an ironical defence of orthodoxy at the expense of
+the whole mass of Church tenet and dogma, the character of Christ only
+excepted.  Such at least is our reading of it, though critics of the
+_Rock_ and _Record_ order have accepted the book as a serious defence of
+Christianity, and proclaimed it as a most valuable contribution in aid of
+the faith.  Affecting an orthodox standpoint it most bitterly reproaches
+all previous apologists for the lack of candour with which they have
+ignored or explained away insuperable difficulties and attached undue
+value to coincidences real or imagined.  One and all they have, the
+author declares, been at best, but zealous ‘liars for God,’ 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 to set forth the truth as he
+finds it in the New Testament; and in a masterly analysis of the account
+of the Resurrection, which he selects as the principal crucial miracle,
+involving all other miracles, he shows how slender is the foundation on
+which the whole fabric of supernatural theology has been reared.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“As told by our author the whole affords an exquisite example of the
+natural growth of a legend.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“If the reader can once fully grasp the intention of the style, and its
+affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy, and perceive also how
+utterly destructive are its ‘candid admissions’ to the whole fabric of
+supernaturalism, he will enjoy a rare treat.  It is not however for the
+purpose of recommending what we at least regard as a piece of exquisite
+humour, that we call attention to _The Fair Haven_, but &c. &c.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+This is very dreadful; but what can one do?
+
+Again, _The Scotsman_ speaks of the writer as being “throughout in
+downright almost pathetic earnestness.”  While _The National Reformer_
+seems to be in doubt whether the book is a covert attack upon
+Christianity or a serious defence of it, but declares that both orthodox
+and unorthodox will find matter requiring thought and answer.
+
+I am not responsible for the interpretations of my readers.  It is only
+natural that the same work should present a very different aspect
+according as it is approached from one side or the other.  There is only
+one way out of it—that the reader should kindly interpret according to
+his own fancies.  If he will do this the book is sure to please him.  I
+have done the best I can for all parties, and feel justified in appealing
+to the existence of the widely conflicting opinions which I have quoted,
+as a proof that the balance has been evenly held, and that I was
+justified in calling the book a defence—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 5th of
+February, 1832.  He was my elder brother by about eighteen months.  Our
+father and mother had once been rich, but through a succession of
+unavoidable misfortunes they were left with but a very moderate income
+when my brother and myself were about three and four years old.  My
+father died some five or six years afterwards, and we only recollected
+him as a singularly gentle and humorous playmate who doted upon us both
+and never spoke unkindly.  The charm of such a recollection can never be
+dispelled; both my brother and myself returned his love with interest,
+and cherished his memory with the most affectionate regret, from the day
+on which he left us till the time came that the one of us was again to
+see him face to face.  So sweet and winning was his nature that his
+slightest wish was our law—and whenever we pleased him, no matter how
+little, he never failed to thank us as though we had done him a service
+which we should have had a perfect right to withhold.  How proud were we
+upon any of these occasions, and how we courted the opportunity of being
+thanked!  He did indeed well know the art of becoming idolised by his
+children, and dearly did he prize the results of his own proficiency; yet
+truly there was no art about it; all arose spontaneously from the
+wellspring of a sympathetic nature which knew how to feel as others felt,
+whether old or young, rich or poor, wise or foolish.  On one point alone
+did he neglect us—I refer to our religious education.  On all other
+matters he was the kindest and most careful teacher in the world.  Love
+and gratitude be to his memory!
+
+My mother loved us no less ardently than my father, but she was of a
+quicker temper, and less adept at conciliating affection.  She must have
+been exceedingly handsome when she was young, and was still comely when
+we first remembered her; she was also highly accomplished, but she felt
+my father’s loss of fortune more keenly than my father himself, and it
+preyed upon her mind, though rather for our sake than for her own.  Had
+we not known my father we should have loved her better than any one in
+the world, but affection goes by comparison, and my father spoiled us for
+any one but himself; indeed, in after life, I remember my mother’s
+telling me, with many tears, how jealous she had often been of the love
+we bore him, and how mean she had thought it of him to entrust all
+scolding or repression to her, so that he might have more than his due
+share of our affection.  Not that I believe my father did this
+consciously; still, he so greatly hated scolding that I dare say we might
+often have got off scot free when we really deserved reproof had not my
+mother undertaken the _onus_ of scolding us herself.  We therefore
+naturally feared her more than my father, and fearing more we loved less.
+For as love casteth out fear, so fear love.
+
+This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew the way to
+bear it.  She tried to upbraid us, in little ways, into loving her as
+much as my father; the more she tried this, the less we could succeed in
+doing it; and so on and so on in a fashion which need not be detailed.
+Not but what we really loved her deeply, while her affection for us was
+unsurpassable still, we loved her less than we loved 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, and a
+thoroughly consistent member of the Church of England; but he conceived,
+and perhaps rightly, that it is the mother who should first teach her
+children to lift their hands in prayer, and impart to them a knowledge of
+the One in whom we live and move and have our being.  My mother accepted
+the task gladly, for in spite of a certain narrowness of view—the natural
+but deplorable result of her earlier surroundings—she was one of the most
+truly pious women whom I have ever known; unfortunately for herself and
+us she had been trained in the lowest school of Evangelical literalism—a
+school which in after life both my brother and myself came to regard as
+the main obstacle to the complete overthrow of unbelief; we therefore
+looked upon it with something stronger than aversion, and for my own part
+I still deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the cause of
+Christ has ever encountered.  But of this more hereafter.
+
+My mother, as I said, threw her whole soul into the work of our religious
+education.  Whatever she believed she believed literally, and, if I may
+say so, with a harshness of realisation which left very little scope for
+imagination or mystery.  Her plans of Heaven and solutions of life’s
+enigmas were direct and forcible, but they could only be reconciled with
+certain obvious facts—such as the omnipotence and all-goodness of God—by
+leaving many things absolutely out of sight.  And this my mother
+succeeded effectually in doing.  She never doubted that her opinions
+comprised the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; she
+therefore made haste to sow the good seed in our tender minds, and so far
+succeeded that when my brother was four years old he could repeat the
+Apostles’ Creed, the General Confession, and the Lord’s Prayer without a
+blunder.  My mother made herself believe that he delighted in them; but,
+alas! it was far otherwise; for, strange as it may appear concerning one
+whose later life was a continual prayer, in childhood he detested nothing
+so much as being made to pray and to learn his Catechism.  In this I am
+sorry to say we were both heartily of a mind.  As for Sunday, the less
+said the better.
+
+I have already hinted (but as a warning to other parents I had better,
+perhaps, express myself more plainly), that this aversion was probably
+the result of my mother’s undue eagerness to reap an artificial fruit of
+lip service, which could have little meaning to the heart of one so
+young.  I believe that the severe check which the natural growth of faith
+experienced in my brother’s case was due almost entirely to this cause,
+and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but,
+however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our
+prayers—morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid
+it, as indeed children generally will, by every artifice which we could
+employ.  Thus we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly
+before prayer time, and would gratefully hear my father tell my mother
+that it was a shame to wake us; whereon he would carry us up to bed in a
+state apparently of the profoundest slumber when we were really wide
+awake and in great fear of detection.  For we knew how to pretend to be
+asleep, but we did not know how we ought to wake again; there was nothing
+for it therefore when we were once committed, but to go on sleeping till
+we were fairly undressed and put to bed, and could wake up safely in the
+dark.  But deceit is never long successful, and we were at last
+ignominiously exposed.
+
+It happened one evening that my mother suspected my brother John, and
+tried to open his little hands which were lying clasped in front of him.
+Now my brother was as yet very crude and inconsistent in his theories
+concerning sleep, and had no conception of what a real sleeper would do
+under these circumstances.  Fear deprived him of his powers of
+reflection, and he thus unfortunately concluded that because sleepers, so
+far as he had observed them, were always motionless, therefore, they must
+be quite rigid and incapable of motion, and indeed that any movement,
+under any circumstances (for from his earliest childhood he liked to
+carry his theories to their legitimate conclusion), would be physically
+impossible for one who was really sleeping; forgetful, oh! unhappy one,
+of the flexibility of his own body on being carried upstairs, and, more
+unhappy still, ignorant of the art of waking.  He, therefore, clenched
+his fingers harder and harder as he felt my mother trying to unfold them
+while his head hung listless, and his eyes were closed I as though he
+were sleeping sweetly.  It is needless to detail the agony of shame that
+followed.  My mother begged my father to box his ears, which my father
+flatly refused to do.  Then she boxed them herself, and there followed a
+scene and a day or two of disgrace for both of us.
+
+Shortly after this there happened another misadventure.  A lady came to
+stay with my mother, and was to sleep in a bed that had been brought into
+our nursery, for my father’s fortunes had already failed, and we were
+living in a humble way.  We were still but four and five years old, so
+the arrangement was not unnatural, and it was assumed that we should be
+asleep before the lady went to bed, and be downstairs before she would
+get up in the morning.  But the arrival of this lady and her being put to
+sleep in the nursery were great events to us in those days, and being
+particularly wanted to go to sleep, we of course sat up in bed talking
+and keeping ourselves awake till she should come upstairs.  Perhaps we
+had fancied that she would give us something, but if so we were
+disappointed.  However, whether this was the case or not, we were wide
+awake when our visitor came to bed, and having no particular object to
+gain, we made no pretence of sleeping.  The lady kissed us both, told us
+to lie still and go to sleep like good children, and then began doing her
+hair.
+
+I remember that this was the occasion on which my brother discovered a
+good many things in connection with the fair sex which had hitherto been
+beyond his ken; more especially that the mass of petticoats and clothes
+which envelop the female form were not, as he expressed it to me, “all
+solid woman,” but that women were not in reality more substantially built
+than men, and had legs as much as he had, a fact which he had never yet
+realised.  On this he for a long time considered them as impostors, who
+had wronged him by leading him to suppose that they had far more “body in
+them” (so he said), than he now found they had.  This was a sort of thing
+which he regarded with stern moral reprobation.  If he had been old
+enough to have a solicitor I believe he would have put the matter into
+his hands, as well as certain other things which had lately troubled him.
+For but recently my mother had bought a fowl, and he had seen it plucked,
+and the inside taken out; his irritation had been extreme on discovering
+that fowls were not all solid flesh, but that their insides—and these
+formed, as it appeared to him, an enormous percentage of the bird—were
+perfectly useless.  He was now beginning to understand that sheep and
+cows were also hollow as far as good meat was concerned; the flesh they
+had was only a mouthful in comparison with what they ought to have
+considering their apparent bulk—insignificant, mere skin and bone
+covering a cavern.  What right had they, or anything else, to assert
+themselves as so big, and prove so empty?  And now this discovery of
+woman’s falsehood was quite too much for him.  The world itself was
+hollow, made up of shams and delusions, full of sound and fury signifying
+nothing.
+
+Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough.  Everything with him was to be
+exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it, and
+everything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doing hitherto.
+If a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid; if hollow, very hollow;
+nothing was to be half and half, and nothing was to change unless he had
+himself already become accustomed to its times and manners of changing;
+there were to be no exceptions and no contradictions; all things were to
+be perfectly consistent, and all premises to be carried with extremest
+rigour to their legitimate conclusions.  Heaven was to be very neat (for
+he was always tidy himself), and free from sudden shocks to the nervous
+system, such as those 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 sort of 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 such modifications as
+were forced upon him by enlarged perceptions, but every modification was
+an effort to him, in spite of a continual and successful resistance to
+what he recognised as his initial mental defect.
+
+I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark in the
+preceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used to notice it as
+an almost invariable rule that children’s earliest ideas of God are
+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, the child having learned to
+look upon God as His Heavenly Father through the Lord’s Prayer and our
+Church Services, will feel towards God as he does towards his own father;
+this conception will stick to a man for years and years after he has
+attained manhood—probably it will never leave him.  For all children love
+their fathers and mothers, if these last will only let them; it is not a
+little unkindness that will kill so hardy a plant as the love of a child
+for its parents.  Nature has allowed ample margin for many blunders,
+provided there be a genuine desire on the parent’s part to make the child
+feel that he is loved, and that his natural feelings are respected.  This
+is all the religious education which a child should have.  As he grows
+older he will then turn naturally to the waters of life, and thirst after
+them of his own accord by reason of the spiritual refreshment which they,
+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 to drink
+against his will, and perhaps with harshness, when all the analogies with
+which he was acquainted pointed in the direction of their being
+unpleasant and unwholesome.  So soul-satisfying is family affection to a
+child, that he who has once enjoyed it cannot bear to be deprived of the
+hope that he is possessed in Heaven of a parent who is like his earthly
+father—of a friend and counsellor who will never, never fail him.  There
+is no such religious nor moral education as kindly genial treatment and a
+good example; all else may then be let alone till the child is old enough
+to feel the want of it.  It is true that the seed will thus be sown late,
+but in what a soil!  On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly
+father harsh and uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will
+be painful.  He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of
+his father.  He will therefore shrink from Him.  The rottenness of
+stillborn 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 say her
+prayers.  This was a cruel blow to both of us; we had always been under
+the impression that grownup people were not made to say their prayers,
+and the idea of any one saying them of his or her own accord had never
+occurred to us as possible.  Of course the lady would not say her prayers
+if she were not obliged; and yet she did say them; therefore she must be
+obliged to say them; therefore we should be obliged to say them, and this
+was a very great disappointment.  Awe-struck and open-mouthed we listened
+while the lady prayed in sonorous accents, for many things which I do not
+now remember, and finally for my 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 had confirmed our worst apprehensions; it was
+just what we had been taught 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 that there were
+many mysteries in connection with life and things which it was high time
+to unravel, and that an opportunity was now afforded us which might not
+readily occur again.  All we had to do was to be true to ourselves and
+equal to the occasion.  We laid our plans with great astuteness.  We
+would be fast asleep when the lady came up to bed, but our heads should
+be turned in the direction of her bed, and covered with clothes, all but
+a single peep-hole.  My brother, as the eldest, had clearly a right to be
+nearest the lady, but I could see very well, and could depend on his
+reporting faithfully whatever should escape me.
+
+There was no chance of her giving us anything—if she had meant to do so
+she would have done it sooner; she might, indeed, consider the moment of
+her departure as the most auspicious for this purpose, but then 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 not certain about it,
+and in the end regretfully concluded that as snoring 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 to
+sleep, and promised faithfully that we would do so; the tongue indeed
+swore, but the mind was unsworn.  It was agreed that we should keep
+pinching one another to prevent our going to sleep.  We did so at
+frequent intervals; at last our patience was rewarded with the heavy
+creak, as of a stout elderly lady labouring up the stairs, and presently
+our victim entered.
+
+To cut a long story short, the lady on satisfying herself that we were
+asleep, never said her prayers at all; during the remainder of her visit
+whenever she found us awake she always said them, but when she thought we
+were asleep, she never prayed.  It is needless to add that we had the
+matter out with her before she left, and that the consequences were
+unpleasant for all parties; they added to the troubles in which we were
+already involved as to our prayers, and were indirectly among the
+earliest causes which led my brother to look with scepticism upon
+religion.
+
+For a while, however, all went on as though nothing had happened.  An
+effect of distrust, indeed, remained after the cause had been forgotten,
+but my brother was still too young to oppose anything that my mother told
+him, and to all outward appearance he grew in grace no less rapidly than
+in stature.
+
+For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by the one great
+sorrow of our father’s death.  Shortly after this we were sent to a day
+school in Bloomsbury.  We were neither of us very happy there, but my
+brother, who always took kindly to his books, picked up a fair knowledge
+of Latin and Greek; he also learned to draw, and to exercise himself a
+little in English composition.  When I was about fourteen my mother
+capitalised a part of her income and started me off to America, where she
+had friends who could give me a helping hand; by their kindness I was
+enabled, after an absence of twenty years, to return with a handsome
+income, but not, alas, before the death of my mother.
+
+Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Bible with
+us and explain it.  She had become deeply impressed with the millenarian
+fervour which laid hold of so many some twenty-five or thirty years ago.
+The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in the Bible, and she was
+imbued with the fullest conviction that all the threatened horrors with
+which it teems were upon the eve of their accomplishment.  The year
+eighteen hundred and forty-eight was to be (as indeed it was) a time of
+general bloodshed and confusion, while in 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 Man with 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 them that were alive, would be caught up with
+other saints into the air, and would possibly receive while rising some
+distinguishing token of confidence and approbation which should fall with
+due impressiveness upon the surrounding multitude; then would come the
+consummation of all things, and she would be ever with the Lord.  She
+died peaceably in her bed before she could know that a commercial panic
+was the nearest approach to the fulfilment of prophecy which the year
+eighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth.
+
+These opinions of my mother’s were positively disastrous—injuring her
+naturally healthy and vigorous mind by leading her to indulge in all
+manner of dreamy and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, which any but
+the most narrow literalist would feel at once to be untenable.  Thus
+several times she expressed to us her conviction that my brother and
+myself were to be the two witnesses mentioned in the eleventh chapter of
+the Book of Revelation, and dilated upon the gratification she should
+experience upon finding that we had indeed been reserved for a position
+of such distinction.  We were as yet mere children, and naturally took
+all for granted that our mother told us; we therefore made a careful
+examination of the passage which threw light upon our future; but on
+finding that the prospect was gloomy and full of bloodshed we protested
+against the honours which were intended for us, more especially when we
+reflected that the mother of the two witnesses was not menaced in
+Scripture with any particular discomfort.  If we were to be martyrs, my
+mother ought to wish to be a martyr too, whereas nothing was farther from
+her intention.  Her notion clearly was that we were to be massacred
+somewhere in the streets of London, in consequence of the anti-Christian
+machinations of the Pope; that after lying about unburied for 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 our
+glorification, but was to survive us many years on earth, living in an
+odour of great sanctity and reflected splendour, as the central and most
+august figure in a select society.  She would perhaps be able indirectly,
+through her sons’ influence with the Almighty, to have a voice in most of
+the arrangements both of this world and of the next.  If all this were to
+come true (and things seemed very like it), those friends who had
+neglected us in our adversity would not find it too easy to be restored
+to favour, however greatly they might desire it—that is to say, they
+would not have found it too easy in the case of one less magnanimous and
+spiritually-minded than herself.  My mother said but little of the above
+directly, but the fragments which occasionally escaped her were pregnant,
+and on looking back it is easy to perceive that she must have been
+building one of the most stupendous aerial fabrics that have ever been
+reared.
+
+I have given the above in its more amusing aspect, and am half afraid
+that I may appear to be making a jest of weakness on the part of one of
+the most devotedly unselfish mothers who have ever existed.  But one can
+love while smiling, and the very wildness of my mother’s dream serves to
+show how entirely her whole soul was occupied with the things which are
+above.  To her, religion was all in all; the earth was but a place of
+pilgrimage—only so far important as it was a possible road to heaven.
+She impressed this upon both of us by every word and action—instant in
+season and out of season, so that she might fill us more deeply with a
+sense of God.  But the inevitable consequences happened; my mother had
+aimed too high and had overshot her mark.  The influence indeed of her
+guileless and unworldly nature remained impressed upon my brother even
+during the time of his extremest unbelief (perhaps his ultimate safety is
+in the main referable to this cause, and to the happy memories of my
+father, which had predisposed him to love God), but my mother had
+insisted on the most minute verbal accuracy of every part of the Bible;
+she had also dwelt upon the duty of independent research, and on the
+necessity of giving up everything rather than assent to things which our
+conscience did not assent to.  No one could have more effectually taught
+us to try _to think_ the truth, and we had taken her at her word because
+our hearts told us that she was right.  But she required three
+incompatible things.  When my brother grew older he came to feel that
+independent and unflinching examination, with a determination to abide by
+the results, would lead him to reject the point which to my mother was
+more important than any other—I mean the absolute accuracy of the Gospel
+records.  My mother was inexpressibly shocked at hearing my brother doubt
+the authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and then, as it appeared
+to him, she tried to make him violate the duties of examination and
+candour which he had learnt too thoroughly to unlearn.  Thereon came pain
+and an estrangement which was none the less profound for being mutually
+concealed.
+
+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 and clever.
+His manners were, like my father’s, singularly genial, and his appearance
+very prepossessing.  He had as yet no doubt concerning the soundness of
+any fundamental Christian doctrine, but his mind was too active to allow
+of his being contented with my mother’s child-like faith.  There were
+points on which he did not indeed doubt, but which it would none the less
+be interesting to consider; such for example as the perfectibility of the
+regenerate Christian, and the meaning of the mysterious central chapters
+of the Epistle to the Romans.  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 every
+Sunday afternoon, a task for which his patience and good temper well
+fitted him.  On one occasion, however, while he was explaining the effect
+of baptism to one of his favourite pupils, he discovered to his great
+surprise that the boy had never been baptised.  He pushed his inquiries
+further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in his class only five
+had been baptised, and, not only so, but that no difference in
+disposition or conduct could be discovered between the regenerate boys
+and the unregenerate.  The good and bad boys were distributed in
+proportions equal to the respective numbers of the baptised and
+unbaptised.  In spite of a certain impetuosity of natural character, he
+was also of a matter-of-fact and experimental turn of mind; he therefore
+went through the whole school, which numbered about a hundred boys, and
+found out who had been baptised and who had not.  The same results
+appeared.  The majority had not been baptised; yet the good and bad
+dispositions were so distributed as to preclude all possibility of
+maintaining that the baptised boys were better than the unbaptised.
+
+The reader may smile at the idea of any one’s faith being troubled by a
+fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but in truth my brother was
+seriously and painfully shocked.  The teacher to whom he applied for a
+solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real power, and reported
+my brother to the rector for having disturbed the school by his
+inquiries.  The rector was old and self-opinionated; the difficulty,
+indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to my brother, but
+instead of saying so at once, and referring to any recognised theological
+authority, he tried to put him off with words which seemed intended to
+silence him rather than to satisfy him; finally he lost his temper, and
+my brother fell under suspicion of unorthodoxy.
+
+This kind of treatment might answer with some people, but not with my
+brother.  He alludes to it resentfully in the introductory chapter of his
+book.  He became suspicious that a preconceived opinion was being
+defended at the expense of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven upon his
+own unaided investigation.  The result may be guessed: he began to go
+astray, and strayed further and further.  The children of God, he
+reasoned, the members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom of Heaven,
+were no more spiritually minded than the children of the world and the
+devil.  Was then the grace of God a gift which left no trace whatever
+upon those who were possessed of it—a thing the presence or absence of
+which might be ascertained by consulting the parish registry, but was not
+discernible in conduct?  The grace of man was more clearly perceptible
+than this.  Assuredly there must be a screw loose somewhere, which, for
+aught he knew, might be jeopardising the salvation of all Christendom.
+Where then was this loose screw to be found?
+
+He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief was caused
+by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism.  He therefore, to my
+mother’s inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists and was immersed in a
+pond near Dorking.  With the Baptists he remained quiet about three
+months, and then began to quarrel with his instructors as to their
+doctrine of predestination.  Shortly afterwards he came accidentally upon
+a fascinating stranger who was no less struck with my brother than my
+brother with him, and this gentleman, who turned out to be a Roman
+Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church of Rome, where he felt sure
+that he had now found rest for his soul.  But here, too, he was mistaken;
+after about two years he rebelled against the stifling of all free
+inquiry; on this rebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and
+he was soon battling with unbelief.  He then fell in with one who was a
+pure Deist, 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 am painfully
+struck with the manner in which they show that all these pitiable
+vagaries were to be traced to a single cause—a cause which still exists
+to the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, I fear, 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 regard Christianity as a
+thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirely in the strictest
+reading of the letter, or to be rejected as absolutely untrue.  The fact
+is, that all permanent truth is as one of those coal measures, a seam of
+which lies near the surface, and even crops up above the ground, but
+which is generally of an inferior quality and soon worked out; beneath it
+there comes a layer of sand and clay, and then at last the true seam of
+precious quality and in virtually inexhaustible supply.  The truth which
+is on the surface is rarely the whole truth.  It is seldom until this has
+been worked out and done with—as in the case of the apparent flatness of
+the earth—that unchangeable truth is discovered.  It is the glory of the
+Lord to conceal a matter: it is the glory of the king to find it out.  If
+my brother, from whom I have taken the above illustration, had had some
+judicious and wide-minded friend to correct and supplement the mainly
+admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, 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 as literal and
+unspiritual as the other—each impressed with one aspect of religious
+truth, and with one only.  In the end he became perhaps the widest-minded
+and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but no one from his early
+manhood could have augured this result; on the contrary, he shewed every
+sign of being likely to develop into one of those 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 mental vision.  In after life, he often met
+with mere lads who seemed to him to 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 laborious
+growth are generally more fruitful than those which are over-early
+luxuriant.  Drawing an illustration from the art of painting, with which
+he was well acquainted, my brother used to say that all the greatest
+painters had begun with a hard and precise manner from which they had
+only broken after several years of effort; and that in like manner all
+the early schools were founded upon definiteness of outline to the
+exclusion of truth of effect.  This may be true; but in my brother’s case
+there was something even more unpromising than this; there was a
+commonness, so to speak, of mental execution, from which no one could
+have foreseen his after-emancipation.  Yet in the course of time he was
+indeed emancipated to the very uttermost, while his bonds will, I firmly
+trust, be found to have been of inestimable service to the whole human
+race.
+
+For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see the
+Christian scheme _as a whole_, or even to conceive the idea that there
+was any whole at all, other than each one of the stages of opinion
+through which he was at the time passing; yet when the idea was at length
+presented to him by one whom I must not name, the discarded fragments of
+his faith assumed shape, and formed themselves into a consistently
+organised scheme.  Then became apparent the value of his knowledge of the
+details of so many different sides of Christian verity.  Buried in the
+details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that they were only the
+unessential developments of certain component parts.  Awakening to the
+perception of the whole after an intimate acquaintance with the details,
+he was able to realise the position and meaning of all that he had
+hitherto experienced in a way which has been vouchsafed to few, if any
+others.
+
+Thus he became truly a broad Churchman.  Not broad in the ordinary and
+ill-considered use of the term (for the broad Churchman is as little able
+to sympathise with Romanists, extreme High Churchmen and Dissenters, as
+these are with himself—he is only one of a sect which is called by the
+name broad, though it is no broader than its own base), but in the true
+sense of being able to believe in the naturalness, legitimacy, and truth
+_quâ_ Christianity even of those doctrines which seem to stand most
+widely and irreconcilably asunder.
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+
+BUT it was impossible that a mind of such activity should have gone over
+so much ground, and yet in the end returned to the same position as that
+from which it started.
+
+So far was this from being the case that the Christianity of his maturer
+life would be considered dangerously heterodox by those who belong to any
+of the more definite or precise schools of theological thought.  He was
+as one who has made the circuit of a mountain, and yet been ascending
+during the whole time of his doing so: such a person finds himself upon
+the same side as at first, but upon a greatly higher level.  The peaks
+which had seemed the most important when he was in the valley were now
+dwarfed to their true proportions by colossal cloud-capped masses whose
+very existence could not have been suspected from beneath: and again,
+other points which had seemed among the lowest turned out to be the very
+highest of all—as the Finster-Aarhorn, which hides itself away in the
+centre of the Bernese Alps, is never seen to be the greatest till one is
+high and far off.
+
+Thus he felt no sort of fear or repugnance in admitting that the New
+Testament writings, as we now have them, are not by any means accurate
+records of the events which they profess to chronicle.  This, which few
+English Churchmen would be prepared to admit, was to him so much of an
+axiom that he despaired of seeing any sound theological structure raised
+until it was universally recognised.
+
+And here he would probably meet with sympathy from the more advanced
+thinkers within the body of the Church, but so far as I know, he stood
+alone as recognising the wisdom of the Divine counsels in having ordained
+the wide and apparently irreconcilable divergencies of doctrine and
+character which we find assigned to Christ in the Gospels, and as finding
+his faith confirmed, not by the supposition that both the portraits drawn
+of Christ are objectively true, but _that both are objectively
+inaccurate_, _and that the Almighty intended they should be inaccurate_,
+inasmuch as the true spiritual conception in the mind of man could be
+indirectly more certainly engendered by a strife, a warring, a clashing,
+so to speak, of versions, all of them distorting slightly some one or
+other of the features of the original, than directly by the most
+absolutely correct impression which human language could convey.  Even
+the most perfect human speech, as has been often pointed out, is a very
+gross and imperfect vehicle of thought.  I remember once hearing him say
+that it was not till he was nearly thirty that he discovered “what thick
+and sticky fluids were air and water,” how crass and dull in comparison
+with other more subtle fluids; he added that speech had no less deceived
+him, 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 discrepancies and
+inconsistencies; with him Christianity, as distinguished from a bare
+belief in the objectively historical character of each part of the
+Gospels, was true because of these very discrepancies; as his conceptions
+of the Divine manner of working became wider, the very forces which had
+at one time shaken his faith to its foundations established it anew upon
+a firmer and broader base.  He was gradually led to feel that the ideal
+presented by the life and death of our Saviour could never have been
+accepted by Jews at all, if its whole purport had been made intelligible
+during the Redeemer’s life-time; that in order to insure its acceptance
+by a nucleus of followers it must have been endowed with a more local
+aspect than it was intended afterwards to wear; yet that, for the sake of
+its subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local complexion
+was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from _vivâ voce_
+communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the
+Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth which
+could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal
+was indefinitely enhanced, and _designedly enhanced_, alike by the waste
+of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain by a certain
+amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder to fill in the details
+according to his own spiritual needs, and that no ideal can be truly
+universal and permanents unless it have an elasticity which will allow of
+this process in the minds of those who contemplate it; that it cannot
+become thus elastic unless by the loss of no inconsiderable amount of
+detail, and that thus the half, as Dr. Arnold used to say, “becomes
+greater than the whole,” the sketch more preciously suggestive than the
+photograph.  Hence far from deploring the fragmentary, confused, and
+contradictory condition of the Gospel records, he saw in this condition
+the means whereby alone the human mind could have been enabled to
+conceive—not the precise nature of Christ—but _the highest ideal of which
+each individual Christian soul was capable_.  As soon as he had grasped
+these conceptions, which will be found more fully developed in one of the
+later chapters of his book, the spell of unbelief was broken.
+
+But, once broken, it was dissolved utterly and entirely; he could allow
+himself to contemplate fearlessly all sorts of issues from which one
+whose experiences had been less varied would have shrunk.  He was free of
+the enemy’s camp, and could go hither and thither whithersoever he would.
+The very points which to others were insuperable difficulties were to him
+foundation-stones of faith.  For example, to the objection that if in the
+present state of the records no clear conception of the nature of
+Christ’s life and teaching could be formed, we should be compelled to
+take one for our model of whom we knew little or nothing certain, I have
+heard him answer, “And so much the better for us all.  The truth, if read
+by the light of man’s imperfect understanding, would have been falser to
+him than any falsehood.  It would have been truth no longer.  _Better be
+led aright by an error which is so adjusted as to compensate for the
+errors in man’s powers of understanding_, _than be misled by a truth
+which can never be translated from objectivity to subjectivity_.  In such
+a case, 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 was impatient of
+the subterfuges with which untenable interpretations of Scripture were
+defended, and of the disingenuousness of certain harmonists; indeed, the
+mention of the word harmony was enough to kindle an outbreak of righteous
+anger, which would sometimes go to the 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 music in the hands of their successors.  Which
+of the great musicians has not enriched his art not only by the discovery
+of new harmonies, but by proving that sounds which are actually
+inharmonious are nevertheless essentially and eternally delightful?  What
+an outcry has there not always been against the ‘unwarrantable licence’
+with the rules of harmony whenever a Beethoven or a Mozart has broken
+through any of the trammels which have been regarded as the safeguards of
+the art, instead of in their true light of fetters, and how gratefully
+have succeeding musicians acquiesced in and adopted the innovation.”
+Then would follow a tirade with illustration upon illustration,
+comparison of this passage with that, and an exhaustive demonstration
+that one or other, or both, could have had no sort of possible foundation
+in fact; he could only see that the persons from whom he differed were
+defending something which was untrue and which they ought to have known
+to be untrue, but he could not see that people ought to know many things
+which they do not know.
+
+Had he himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see from his
+own standpoints?  Can any of us do so?  The force of early bias and
+education, the force of intellectual surroundings, the force of natural
+timidity, the force of dulness, were things which he could appreciate and
+make allowance for in any other age, and among any other people than his
+own; but as belonging to England and the Nineteenth Century they had no
+place in his theory of Nature; they were inconceivable, unnatural,
+unpardonable, whenever they came into contact with the subject of
+Christian evidences.  Deplorable, indeed, they are, but this was just the
+sort of word to which he could not confine himself.  The criticisms upon
+the late Dean Alford’s notes, which will be given in the sequel, display
+this sort of temper; they are not entirely his own, but he adopted them
+and endorsed them with a warmth which we cannot but feel to be
+unnecessary, not to say more.  Yet I am free to confess that whatever
+editorial licence I could venture 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 not unfrequently set the
+harmonists aside.  For example, in his notes upon the discrepancies
+between St. Luke’s and St. Matthew’s accounts of the early life of our
+Lord, the Dean openly avows that it is quite beyond his purpose to
+attempt to reconcile the two.  “This part of the Gospel history,” he
+writes, “is one where the harmonists, by their arbitrary reconcilement of
+the two accounts, have given great advantage to the enemies of the faith.
+_As the two accounts now stand_, it is wholly impossible to suggest any
+satisfactory method of _uniting them_, every one who has attempted it has
+in some part or other of his hypothesis violated probability and common
+sense,” but in spite of this, the Dean had no hesitation in accepting
+both the accounts.  With reference to this the author of _The Jesus of
+History_ (Williams and Norgate, 1866)—a work to which my brother admitted
+himself to be under very great obligations, and which he greatly admired,
+in spite of his utter dissent from the main conclusion arrived at, has
+the following note:—
+
+“Dean Alford, N.T. for English readers, admits that the narratives as
+they stand are contradictory, but he believes both.  He is even severe
+upon the harmonists who attempt to frame schemes of reconciliation
+between the two, on account of the triumph they thus furnish to the
+‘enemies of the faith,’ a phrase which seems to imply all who believe
+less than he does.  The Dean, however, forgets that the faith which can
+believe two (apparently) contradictory propositions in matters of fact is
+a very rare gift, and that for one who is so endowed there are thousands
+who can be satisfied with a plausible though demonstrably false
+explanation.  To the latter class the 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 expressed his
+concurrence with it as in the main just, my brother wrote: “You are wrong
+about the note in _The Jesus of History_, there is more of the
+Christianity of the future in Dean Alford’s indifference to the harmony
+between the discordant accounts of Luke and Matthew than there would have
+been _even in the most convincing and satisfactory_ explanation of the
+way in which they came to differ.  No such explanation is possible; both
+the Dean and the author of _The Jesus of History_ were very well aware of
+this, but the latter is unjust in assuming that his opponent was not
+alive to the absurdity of appearing to believe two contradictory
+propositions at one and the same time.  The Dean takes very good care
+that he shall not appear to do this, for it is perfectly plain to any
+careful reader that he must really believe that one or both narratives
+are inaccurate, inasmuch as the differences between them are too great to
+allow of reconciliation by a supposed suppression of detail.
+
+“This, though not said so clearly as it should have been, is yet
+virtually implied in the admission that no sort of fact which could by
+any possibility be admitted as reconciling them had ever occurred to
+human ingenuity; what, then, Dean Alford must have really felt was that
+the spiritual value of each account was no less precious for not being in
+strict accordance with the other; that the objective truth lies somewhere
+between them, and is of very little importance, being long dead and
+buried, and living in its results only, in comparison with the subjective
+truth conveyed by both the narratives, which lives in our hearts
+independently of precise knowledge concerning the actual facts.
+Moreover, that though both accounts may perhaps be inaccurate, yet that
+_a very little_ natural inaccuracy on the part of each writer would throw
+them apparently very wide asunder, that such inaccuracies are easily to
+be accounted for, and would, in fact, be inevitable in the sixty years of
+oral communication which elapsed between 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 that the details of the facts connected with the
+conception, birth, genealogy, and earliest history of our Saviour are
+irrecoverable—a general impression being alone possible, or indeed
+desirable.
+
+“It might perhaps have been more satisfactory if Dean Alford had
+expressed the above more plainly; but if he had done this, who would have
+read his book?  Where would have been that influence in the direction of
+truly liberal Christianity which has been so potent during the last
+twenty years?  As it was, the freedom with which the Dean wrote was the
+cause of no inconsiderable scandal.  Or, again, he may not have been
+fully conscious of his own position: few men are; he had taken the right
+one, but more perhaps by spiritual instinct than by conscious and
+deliberate exercise of his intellectual faculties.  Finally, compromise
+is not a matter of good policy only, it is a solemn duty in the interests
+of Christian peace, and this not in minor matters only—we can all do this
+much—but in those concerning which we feel most strongly, for here the
+sacrifice is greatest and most acceptable to God.  There are, of course,
+limits to this, and Dean Alford may have carried compromise too far in
+the present instance, but it is very transparent.  The narrowness which
+leads the author of _The Jesus of History_ to strain at such a gnat is
+the secret of his inability to accept the divinity and miracles of our
+Lord, and has marred the most exhaustively critical exegesis of the life
+and death of our Saviour with an impotent conclusion.”
+
+It is strange that one who could write thus should occasionally have
+shown himself so little able to apply his own principles.  He seems to
+have been alternately under the influence of two conflicting spirits—at
+one time writing as though there were nothing precious under the sun
+except logic, consistency, and precision, and breathing fire and smoke
+against even very trifling deviations from the path of exact criticism—at
+another, leading the reader almost to believe that he disregarded the
+value of any objective truth, and speaking of endeavour after accuracy in
+terms that are positively contemptuous.  Whenever he was in the one mood
+he seemed to forget the possibility of any other; so much so that I have
+sometimes thought that he did this deliberately and for the same reasons
+as those which led Adam Smith to exclude one set of premises in his
+_Theory of Moral Sentiments_ and another in his _Wealth of Nations_.  I
+believe, however, that the explanation lies in the fact that my brother
+was inclined to underrate the importance of belief in the objective truth
+of any other individual features in the life of our Lord than his
+Resurrection and Ascension.  All else seemed dwarfed by the side of these
+events.  His whole soul was so concentrated upon the centre of the circle
+that he forgot the circumference, or left it out of sight.  Nothing less
+than the strictest objective truth as to the main facts of the
+Resurrection and Ascension would content him; the other miracles and the
+life and teaching of our Lord might then be left open; whatever view was
+taken of them by each individual Christian was probably the one most
+desirable for the spiritual wellbeing of each.
+
+Even as regards the Resurrection and Ascension, he did not greatly value
+the detail.  Provided these facts were so established that they could
+never henceforth be controverted, he thought that the less detail the
+broader and more universally acceptable would be the effect.  Hence, when
+Dean Alford’s notes seemed to jeopardise the evidences for these things,
+he could brook no trifling; for unless Christ actually died and actually
+came to life again, he saw no escape from an utter denial of any but
+natural religion.  Christ would have been no more to him than Socrates or
+Shakespeare, except in so far as his teaching was more spiritual.  The
+triune nature of the Deity—the Resurrection from the dead—the hope of
+Heaven and salutary fear of Hell—all would go but for the Resurrection
+and Ascension of Jesus Christ; nothing would remain except a sense of the
+Divine as a substitute for God, and the current feeling of one’s peers as
+the chief moral check upon misconduct.  Indeed, we have seen this view
+openly advocated by a recent writer, and set forth in the very plainest
+terms.  My brother did not live to see it, but if he had, he would have
+recognised the fulfilment of his own prophecies as to what must be the
+inevitable sequel of a denial of our Lord’s Resurrection.
+
+It will be seen therefore that he was in no danger of being carried away
+by a “pet theory.”  Where light and definition were essential, he would
+sacrifice nothing of either; but he was jealous for his highest light,
+and felt “that the whole effect of the Christian scheme was indefinitely
+heightened by keeping all other lights subordinate”—this at least was the
+illustration which he often used concerning it.  But as there were limits
+to the value of light and “finding”—limits which had been far exceeded,
+with the result of an unnatural forcing of the lights, and an effect of
+garishness and unreality—so there were limits to the as yet unrecognised
+preciousness of “losing” and obscurity; these limits he placed at the
+objectivity of our Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension.  Let there be light
+enough to show these things, and the rest would gain by being in
+half-tone and shadow.
+
+His facility of illustration was simply marvellous.  From his
+conversation any one would have thought that he was acquainted with all
+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 practice in the art
+of painting, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the masterpieces of
+Raphael, Titian, Guido, Domenichino, and others; but he could never have
+been called a painter; for music he had considerable feeling; I think he
+must have known thorough-bass, but it was hard to say what he did or did
+not know.  Of science he was almost entirely ignorant, yet he had
+assimilated a quantity of stray facts, and whatever he assimilated seemed
+to agree with him and nourish his mental being.  But though his
+acquaintance with any one art or science must be allowed to have been
+superficial only, he had an astonishing perception of the relative
+bearings of facts which seemed at first sight to be quite beyond the
+range of one another, and of the relations between the sciences
+generally; it was this which gave him his felicity and fecundity of
+illustration—a gift which he never abused.  He delighted in its use for
+the purpose of carrying a clear impression of his meaning to the mind of
+another, but I never remember to have heard him mistake illustration for
+argument, nor endeavour to mislead an adversary by a fascinating but
+irrelevant simile.  The subtlety of his mind was a more serious source of
+danger to him, though I do not know that he greatly lost by it in
+comparison with what he gained; his sense, however, of distinctions was
+so fine that it would sometimes distract his attention from points of
+infinitely greater importance in connection with his subject than the
+particular distinction which he was trying to establish at the moment.
+
+The reader may be glad to know what my brother felt about retaining the
+unhistoric passages of Scripture.  Would he wish to see them sought for
+and sifted out?  Or, again, what would he propose concerning such of the
+parables as are acknowledged by every liberal Churchman to be immoral,
+as, for instance, the story of Dives and Lazarus and the Unjust
+Steward—parables which can never have been spoken by our Lord, at any
+rate not in their present shape?  And here we have a remarkable instance
+of his moderation and truly English good sense.  “Do not touch one word
+of them,” was his often-repeated exclamation.  “If not directly inspired
+by the mouth of God they have been indirectly inspired by the force of
+events, and the force of events is the power and manifestation of God;
+they could not have been allowed to come into their present position if
+they had not been recognised in the counsels of the Almighty as being of
+indirect service to mankind; there is a subjective truth conveyed even by
+these parables to the minds of many, that enables them to lay hold of
+other and objective truths which they could not else have grasped.
+
+“There can be no question that the communistic utterances of the third
+gospel, as distinguished from St. Matthew’s more spiritual and doubtless
+more historic rendering of the same teaching, have been of inestimable
+service to Christianity.  Christ is not for the whole only, but also for
+them that are sick, for the ill-instructed and what we are pleased to
+call ‘dangerous’ classes, as well as for the more 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 comfort which could never be given by the
+‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ of Matthew 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 shall inherit the earth.  Blessed are they which do
+hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.  Blessed
+are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.  Blessed are the pure in
+heart: for they shall see God.  Blessed are the peacemakers: for they
+shall be called the children of God.  Blessed are they which are
+persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for their’s is the kingdom of heaven.
+Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall
+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 Luke we read, ‘Blessed are
+ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.  Blessed are ye that weep
+now: for ye shall laugh. . . .  But woe unto you that are rich! for ye
+have received your consolation.  Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall
+hunger.  Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.  Woe
+unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did _their_
+fathers to the false prophets,’ where even the grammar of the last
+sentence, independently of the substance, is such as it is impossible to
+ascribe to our Lord himself.
+
+“The ‘upper’ classes naturally turn to the version of Matthew, but the
+‘lower,’ no less naturally to that of Luke, nor is it likely that the
+ideal of Christ would be one-tenth part so dear to them had not this
+provision for them been made, not by the direct teaching of the Saviour,
+but by the indirect inspiration of such events as were seen by the
+Almighty to be necessary for the full development of the highest ideal of
+which mankind was capable.  All that we have in the New Testament is the
+inspired word, directly or indirectly, of God, the unhistoric no less
+than the historic; it is for us to take spiritual sustenance from
+whatever meats we find prepared for us, not to order the removal of this
+or that dish; the coarser meats are for the coarser natures; as they grow
+in grace they will turn from these to the finer: let us ourselves partake
+of that which we find best suited to us, but do not let us grudge to
+others the provision that God has set before them.  There are many things
+which though not objectively true are nevertheless subjectively true to
+those who can receive them; and subjective truth is universally felt to
+be even higher than objective, as may be shown by the acknowledged duty
+of obeying our consciences (which is the right _to us_) rather than any
+dictate of man however much more objectively true.  It is that which is
+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 less to
+sympathise with teaching so utterly foreign to anything which I had heard
+elsewhere, I said to him, “Either our Lord did say the words assigned to
+him by St. Luke or he did not.  If he did, as they stand they are bad,
+and any one who heard them for the first time would say that they were
+bad; if he did not, then we ought not to allow them to remain in our
+Bibles to the misleading of people who will thus believe that God is
+telling them what he never did tell them—to the misleading of the poor,
+whom even in low self-interest we 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 show the
+clearness of his present perception, nevertheless I was anxious to get to
+the root of the matter, and said that if our Lord never uttered these
+words their being attributed to him must be due to fraud; to pious fraud,
+but still to fraud.
+
+“Not so,” he answered, “it is due to the weakness of man’s powers of
+memory and communication, and perhaps in some measure to unconscious
+inspiration.  Moreover, even though wrong of some sort may have had its
+share in the origin of certain of the sayings ascribed to our Saviour,
+yet their removal now that they have been consecrated by time would be a
+still greater wrong.  Would you defend the spoliation of the monasteries,
+or the confiscation of the abbey lands?  I take it no—still less would
+you restore the monasteries or take back the lands; a consecrated change
+becomes a new departure; accept it and turn it to the best advantage.
+These are things to which the theory of the Church concerning lay baptism
+is strictly applicable.  _Fieri non debet_, _factum valet_.  If in our
+narrow and unsympathetic strivings after precision we should remove the
+hallowed imperfections whereby time has set the glory of his seal upon
+the gospels as well as upon all other aged things, not for twenty
+generations will they resume that ineffable and inviolable aspect which
+our fussy meddlesomeness will have disturbed.  Let them alone.  It is as
+they stand that they have saved the world.
+
+“No change is good unless it is imperatively called for.  Not even the
+Reformation was good; it is good now; I acquiesce in it, as I do in
+anything which in itself not vital has received the sanction of many
+generations of my countrymen.  It is sanction which sanctifieth in
+matters of this kind.  I would no more undo the Reformation now than I
+would have helped it forward in the sixteenth century.  Leave the
+historic, the unhistoric, and the doubtful to grow together until the
+harvest: that which is not vital will perish and rot unnoticed when it
+has ceased to have vitality; it is living till it has done this.  Note
+how the very passages which you would condemn have died out of the regard
+of any but the poor.  Who quotes them?  Who appeals to them?  Who
+believes in them?  Who indeed except the poorest of the poor attaches the
+smallest weight to them whatever?  To us they are dead, and other
+passages will die to us in like manner, noiselessly and almost
+imperceptibly, as the services for the fifth of November died out of the
+Prayer Book.  One day the fruit will be hanging upon the tree, as it has
+hung for months, the next it will be lying upon the ground.  It is not
+ripe until it has fallen of itself, or with the gentlest shaking; use no
+violence towards it, confident that you cannot hurry the ripening, and
+that if shaken down unripe the fruit will be worthless.  Christianity
+must have contained the seeds of growth within itself, even to the
+shedding of many of its present dogmas.  If the dogmas fall quietly in
+their maturity, the precious seed of truth (which will be found in the
+heart of every dogma that has been able to take living hold upon the
+world’s imagination) will quicken and spring up in its own time: strike
+at the fruit too soon and 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 I have
+here recorded.  I have given it in my capacity of editor and in some sort
+biographer, but am far from being prepared to maintain that it is likely,
+or indeed ought, to meet with the approval of any considerable number of
+Christians.  But, surely, in these days of self-mystification it is
+refreshing to see the boldness with which my brother thought, and the
+freedom with which he contemplated all sorts of issues which are too
+generally avoided.  What temptation would have been felt by many to
+soften down the inconsistencies and contradictions of the Gospels.  How
+few are those who will venture to follow the lead of scientific
+criticism, and admit what every scholar must well know to be
+indisputable.  Yet if a man will not do this, he shows 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 early
+commonplace books filled with sketches for articles; some of these are
+more developed than others, but they are all of them fragmentary.  I do
+not think that the reader will fail to be interested with the insight
+into my brother’s spiritual and intellectual progress which a few
+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 are too exaggerated to be
+dangerous, being so obviously unfair as to carry their own antidote.  The
+reader will not fail to notice the growth not only in thought but also in
+literary style which is displayed by my brother’s later writings.
+
+In reference to the very subject of the parables above alluded to, he had
+written during his time of unbelief:—“Why are we to interpret so
+literally all passages about the guilt of unbelief, and insist upon the
+historical character of every miraculous account, while we are indignant
+if any one demands an equally literal rendering of the precepts
+concerning human conduct?  He that hath two coats is not to give to him
+that hath none: this would be ‘visionary,’ ‘utopian,’ ‘wholly
+unpractical,’ and so forth.  Or, again, he that is smitten on the one
+cheek is not to turn the other to the smiter, but to hand the offender
+over to the law; nor are the commands relative to indifference as to the
+morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence to be taken as they stand; nor
+yet the warnings against praying in public; nor can the parables, any one
+of them, be interpreted strictly with advantage to human welfare, except
+perhaps that of the Good Samaritan; nor the Sermon on the Mount, save in
+such passages as were already the common property of mankind before the
+coming of Christ.  The parables which every one praises are in reality
+very bad: the Unjust Steward, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Prodigal
+Son, Dives and Lazarus, the Sower and the Seed, the Wise and Foolish
+Virgins, the Marriage Garment, the Man who planted a Vineyard, are all
+either grossly immoral, or tend to engender a very low estimate of the
+character of God—an estimate far below the standard of the best earthly
+kings; where they are not immoral, or do not tend to degrade the
+character of God, they are the merest commonplaces imaginable, such as
+one is astonished to see people accept as having been first taught by
+Christ.  Such maxims as those which inculcate conciliation and a
+forgiveness of injuries (wherever practicable) are certainly 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 people
+forgive their enemies more freely now than the Romans did, we will say in
+the time of Augustus.  The value of generosity and magnanimity was
+perfectly well known among the ancients, nor do these qualities assume
+any nobler guise in the teaching of Christ than they did in that of the
+ancient heathen philosophers.  On the contrary, they have no direct
+equivalent in Christian thought or phraseology.  They are heathen words
+drawn from a heathen language, and instinct with the same heathen ideas
+of high spirit and good birth as belonged to them in the Latin language;
+they are no part or parcel of Christianity, and are not only independent
+of it, but savour distinctly of the flesh as opposed to the spirit, and
+are hence more or less antagonistic to it, until they have undergone a
+certain modification and transformation—until, that is to say, they have
+been mulcted of their more frank and genial elements.  The nearest
+approach to them in Christian phrase is ‘self-denial,’ but the sound of
+this word kindles no smile of pleasure like that kindled by the ideas of
+generosity and nobility of conduct.  At the thought of self-denial we
+feel good, but uncomfortable, and as though on the point of performing
+some disagreeable duty which we think we ought to pretend to like, but
+which we do not like.  At the thought of generosity, we feel as one who
+is going to share in a delightfully exhilarating but arduous pastime—full
+of the most pleasurable excitement.  On the mention of the word
+generosity we feel as if we were going out hunting; at the word
+‘self-denial,’ as if we were getting ready to go to church.  Generosity
+turns well-doing into a pleasure, self-denial into a duty, as of a
+servant under compulsion.
+
+“There are people who will deny this, but there are people who will deny
+anything.  There are some who will say that St. Paul would not have
+condemned the Falstaff plays, _Twelfth Night_, _The Tempest_, _A
+Midsummer Night’s Dream_, and almost everything that Shakspeare ever
+wrote; but there is no arguing against this.  ‘Every man,’ said Dr.
+Johnson, ‘has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has a right
+to knock him down for it.’  But even granting that generosity and high
+spirit have made some progress since the days of Christ, allowance must
+be made for the lapse of two thousand years, during which time it is only
+reasonable to suppose that an advance would have been made in
+civilisation—and hence in the direction of clemency and
+forbearance—whether Christianity had been preached or not, but no one can
+show that the modern English, if superior to the ancients in these
+respects, show any greater superiority than may be ascribed justly to
+centuries of established order and good government.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“Again, as to the ideal presented by the character of Christ, about which
+so much has been written; is it one which would meet with all this
+admiration if it were presented to us now for the first time?  Surely it
+offers but a peevish view of life and things in comparison with that
+offered by other highest ideals—the old Roman and Greek ideals, the
+Italian ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“As with the parables so with the Sermon on the Mount—where it is not
+commonplace it is immoral, and _vice versâ_; the admiration which is so
+freely lavished upon the teachings of Jesus Christ turns out to be but of
+the same kind as that bestowed upon certain modern writers, who have made
+great reputations by telling people what they perfectly well knew; and
+were in no particular danger of forgetting.  There is, however, this
+excuse for those who have been carried away with such musical but
+untruthful sentences as ‘Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be
+comforted,’ namely, that they have not come to the subject with unbiassed
+minds.  It is one thing to see no merit in a picture, and another to see
+no merit in a picture when one is told that it is by Raphael; we are few
+of us able to stand against the _prestige_ of a great name; our self-love
+is alarmed lest we should be deficient in taste, or, worse still, lest we
+should be considered to be so; as if it could matter to any right-minded
+person whether the world considered him to be of good taste or not, in
+comparison with the keeping of his own soul truthful to itself.
+
+“But if this holds good about things which are purely matters of taste,
+how much more does it do so concerning those who make a distinct claim
+upon us for moral approbation or the reverse?  Such a claim is most
+imperatively made by the teaching of Jesus Christ: are we then content to
+answer in the words of others—words to which we have no title of our
+own—or shall we strip ourselves of preconceived opinion, 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, the worst and most dangerous of
+liars.  He is as one who sits in an impregnable citadel and trembles in a
+time of peace—so great a coward as not even to feel safe when he is in
+his own keeping.  How loose of soul if he knows that his own keeping is
+worthless, how aspen-hearted if he fears lest others should find him out
+and hurt him for communing truthfully with himself!
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“That a man should lie to others if he hopes to gain something
+considerable—this is reckoned cheating, robbing, fraudulent dealing, or
+whatever it may be; but it is an intelligible offence in comparison with
+the allowing oneself to be deceived.  So in like manner with being bored.
+The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the
+bore.  He who puts up with shoddy pictures, shoddy music, shoddy
+morality, shoddy society, is more despicable than he who is the prime
+agent in any of these things.  He has less to gain, and probably deceives
+himself more; so that he commits the greater crime for the less reward.
+And I say emphatically that the morality which most men profess to hold
+as a Divine revelation was a shoddy morality, which would neither wash
+nor wear, 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 would but
+learn the sacredness of their own likes and dislikes, and exercise their
+moral discrimination, making it clear to themselves what it is that they
+really love and venerate.  There is no such enemy to mankind as moral
+cowardice.  A downright vulgar self-interested and unblushing liar is a
+higher being than the moral cur whose likes and dislikes are at the beck
+and call of bullies that stand between him and his own soul; such a
+creature gives up the most sacred of all his rights for something more
+unsubstantial than a mess of pottage—a mental serf too abject even to
+know that he is being wronged.  Wretched emasculator of his own reason,
+whose jejune timidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the
+most secret chambers of his heart!
+
+“We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided we feel that he
+was under strong temptation and well knew that he was deceiving.  He has
+done wrong—still we can understand it, and he may yet have some useful
+stuff about him—but what can we feel towards one who for a small motive
+tells lies even to himself, and does not know that he is lying?  What
+useless rotten fig-wood lumber must not such a thing be made of, and what
+lies will there not come out of it, falling in every direction upon all
+who come within its reach.  The common self-deceiver of modern society is
+a more dangerous and contemptible object than almost any ordinary felon,
+a matter upon which those who do not deceive themselves need no
+enlightenment.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“But why insist so strongly on the literal interpretation of one part of
+the sayings of Christ, and be so elastic about that of the passages which
+inculcate more than those ordinary precepts which all had 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 our own conventions; but
+we have not altered our conventions so as to bring them into harmony with
+Christianity.  We do not give to him that asketh; we take good care to
+avoid him; yet if the precept meant only that we should be liberal in
+assisting others—it wanted no enforcing: the probability is that it had
+been enforced too much rather than too little already; the more literally
+it has been followed the more terrible has the mischief been; the saying
+only becomes harmless when regarded as a mere convention.  So with most
+parts of Christ’s teaching.  It is only conventional Christianity which
+will stand a man in good stead to live by; true Christianity will 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 ever been mad enough to
+carry it out in such a manner as would have satisfied its founders.  So
+said Dean Swift in his _Argument against abolishing Christianity_.  ‘I
+hope,’ he writes, ‘no reader imagines me so weak as to stand up in
+defence of real Christianity, such as used in primitive times’ (if we may
+believe the authors of those ages) ‘to have an influence upon men’s
+beliefs and actions.  To offer at the restoring of that would be, indeed,
+a wild project; it would be to dig up foundations, to destroy at one blow
+all the wit and half the learning of the kingdom, to break the entire
+frame and constitution of things, to ruin trade, extinguish arts and
+sciences, with the professors of them; in short, to turn our courts of
+exchange and shops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the
+proposal of Horace 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 of cure for the corruption of their manners.
+
+“‘Therefore, I think this caution was in itself altogether unnecessary
+(which I have inserted only to prevent all possibility of cavilling),
+since every candid reader will easily understand my discourse to be
+intended only in defence of nominal Christianity, the other having been
+for some time wholly laid aside by general consent as utterly
+inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth and power.’
+
+“Yet but for these schemes of wealth and power the world would relapse
+into barbarianism; it is they and not Christianity which have created and
+preserved civilisation.  And what if some unhappy wretch, with a serious
+turn of mind and no sense of the ridiculous, takes all this talk about
+Christianity in sober earnest, and tries to act upon it?  Into what
+misery may he not easily fall, and with what life-long errors may he not
+embitter the lives of his children!
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“Again, we do not cut off our right hand nor pluck out our eyes if they
+offend us; we conventionalise our interpretations of these sayings at our
+will and pleasure; we do take heed for the morrow, and should be
+inconceivably wicked and foolish were we not to do so; we do gather up
+riches, and indeed we do most things which the experience of mankind has
+taught us to be to our advantage, quite irrespectively of any precept of
+Christianity for or against.  But why say that it is Christianity which
+is our chief guide, when the words of Christ point in such a very
+different direction from that which we have seen fit to take?  Perhaps it
+is in order to compensate for our laxity of interpretation upon these
+points that we are so rigid in stickling for accuracy upon those which
+make no demand upon our comfort or convenience?  Thus, though we
+conventionalise practice, we never conventionalise dogma.  Here, indeed,
+we stickle for the letter most inflexibly; yet one would have thought
+that we might 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 to its import—why give it so much importance?  Teaching by
+exaggeration is not a satisfactory method, nor one worthy of a being
+higher than man; it might have been well once, and in the East, but it is
+not well now.  It induces more and more of that jarring and straining of
+our moral faculties, of which much is unavoidable in the existing complex
+condition of affairs, but of which the less the better.  At present the
+tug of professed principles in one direction, and of necessary practice
+in the other, causes the same sort of wear and tear in our moral gear as
+is caused to a steam-engine by continually reversing it when it is going
+it at full speed.  No mechanism can stand 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.  His mind was
+indeed in darkness!  Who could have hoped that so brilliant a day should
+have succeeded to the gloom of such mistrust?  Yet as upon a winter’s
+morning in November when the sun rises red through the smoke, and
+presently the fog spreads its curtain of thick darkness over the city,
+and then there comes a single breath of wind from some more generous
+quarter, whereupon the blessed sun shines again, and the gloom is gone;
+or, again, as when the warm south-west wind comes up breathing kindness
+from the sea, unheralded, suspected, when the earth is in her saddest
+frost, and on the instant all the lands are thawed and opened to the
+genial influences of a sweet springful whisper—so thawed his heart, and
+the seed which had lain dormant in its fertile soil sprang up, grew,
+ripened, and brought forth an abundant harvest.
+
+Indeed now that the result has been made plain we can perhaps feel that
+his scepticism was precisely of that nature which should have given the
+greatest ground for hope.  He was a genuine lover of truth in so far as
+he could see it.
+
+His lights were dim, but such as they were he walked according to them,
+and hence they burnt ever more and more clearly, till in later life they
+served to show him what is vouchsafed to such men and to such only—the
+enormity of his own mistakes.  Better that a man should feel the
+divergence between Christian theory and Christian practice, that he
+should be shocked at it—even to the breaking away utterly from the theory
+until he has arrived at a wider comprehension of its scope—than that he
+should be indifferent to the divergence and make no effort to bring his
+principles and practice into harmony with one another.  A true lover of
+consistency, it was intolerable to him to say one thing with his lips and
+another with his actions.  As long as this is true concerning any man,
+his friends may feel sure that the hand of the Lord is with him, though
+the signs thereof be hidden 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 utterly unable to
+realise the importance even of such a self-evident fact as that our Lord
+addressing an Eastern people would speak in such a way as Eastern people
+would best understand; it took him years to appreciate this.  He could
+not see that modes of thought are as much part of a language as the
+grammar and words which compose it, and that before a passage can be said
+to be translated from one language into another it is often not the words
+only which must be rendered, but the thought itself which must be
+transformed; to a people habituated to exaggeration a saying which was
+not exaggerated would have been pointless—so weak as to arrest the
+attention of no one; in order to translate it into such words as should
+carry precisely the same meaning to colder and more temperate minds, the
+words would often have to be left out of sight altogether, and a new
+sentence or perhaps even simile or metaphor substituted; this is plainly
+out of the question, and therefore the best course is that which has been
+taken, _i.e._, to render the words as accurately as possible, and leave
+the reader to modify the meaning.  But it was years before my brother
+could be got to feel this, nor did he ever do so fully, simple and
+obvious though it must appear to most people, until he had learned to
+recognise the value of a certain amount of inaccuracy and inconsistency
+in everything which is not comprehended in mechanics or the exact
+sciences.  “It is this,” he used to say, “which gives artistic 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 regarding things as
+rigidly and immutably fixed which are not yet fully understood, and
+perhaps may never be so while we are in our present state of probation.
+Life is not one of the exact sciences, living is essentially an art and
+not a science.  Every thing addressed to human minds at all must be more
+or less of a compromise; thus, to take a very old illustration, even the
+definitions of a point and a line—the fundamental things in the most
+exact of the sciences—are mere compromises.  A point is supposed to have
+neither length, breadth, nor thickness—this in theory, but in practice
+unless a point have a little of all these things there is nothing there.
+So with a line; a line is supposed to have length, but no breadth, yet in
+practice we never saw a line which had not breadth.  What inconsistency
+is there here, in requiring us to conceive something which we cannot
+conceive, and which can have no existence, before we go on to the
+investigation of the laws whereby the earth can alone be measured and the
+orbits of the planets determined.  I do not think that this illustration
+was presented to my brother’s mind while he was young, but I am sure that
+if it had been it would have made him miserable.  He would have had no
+confidence in mathematics, and would very likely have made a furious
+attack upon Newton and Galileo, and been firmly convinced that he was
+discomfiting them.  Indeed I cannot forget a certain look of bewilderment
+which came over his face when the idea was put before him, I imagine, for
+the first time.  Fortunately he had so grown that the right inference was
+now in no danger of being missed.  He did not conclude that because the
+evidences for mathematics were founded upon compromises and definitions
+which are inaccurate—therefore that mathematics were false, or that there
+were no mathematics, but he learnt to feel that there might be other
+things which were no less indisputable than mathematics, and which might
+also be founded on facts for which the evidences were not wholly free
+from inconsistencies and inaccuracies.
+
+To some he might appear to be approaching too nearly to the “Sed tu vera
+puta” argument of Juvenal.  I greatly fear that an attempt may be made to
+misrepresent him as taking this line; that is to say, as accepting
+Christianity on the ground of the excellence of its moral teaching, and
+looking upon it as, indeed, a superstition, but salutary for women and
+young people.  Hardly anything would have shocked him more profoundly.
+This doctrine with its plausible show of morality appeared to him to be,
+perhaps, the most gross of all immoralities, inasmuch as it cuts the
+ground from under the feet of truth, luring the world farther and farther
+from the only true salvation—the careful study of facts and of the safest
+inferences that 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
+being the expression of Divine will.  It was through facts that he saw
+God; to tamper with facts was, in his view, to deface the countenance of
+the Almighty.  To say that such and such was so and so, when the speaker
+did not believe it, was to lead people to worship a false God instead of
+a true one; an ειδωλον; setting them, to quote the words of the Psalmist,
+“a-whoring after their own imaginations.”  He saw the Divine presence in
+everything—the evil as well as the good; the evil being the expression of
+the Divine will that such and such courses should not go unpunished, but
+bring pain and misery which should deter others from following them, and
+the good being his sign of approbation.  There was nothing good for man
+to know which could not be deduced from facts.  This was the only sound
+basis of knowledge, and to found things upon fiction which could be made
+to stand upon facts was to try and build upon a quicksand.
+
+He, therefore, loathed the reasoning of Juvenal with all the intensity of
+his nature.  It was because he believed that the Resurrection and
+Ascension of our Lord were just as much matters of actual history as the
+assassination of Julius Cæsar, and that they happened precisely in the
+same way as every daily event happens at present—that he accepted the
+Christian scheme in its essentials.  Then came the details.  Were these
+also objectively true?  He answered, “Certainly not in every case.”  He
+would not for the world have had any one believe that he so considered
+them; but having made it perfectly clear that he was not going to deceive
+himself, he set himself to derive whatever spiritual comfort he could
+from them, just as he would from any noble fiction or work of art, which,
+while not professing to be historical, was instinct with the soul of
+genius.  That there were unhistorical passages in the New Testament was
+to him a fact; therefore it was to be studied as an expression of the
+Divine will.  What could be the meaning of it?  That we should consider
+them as true?  Assuredly not this.  Then what else?  This—that we should
+accept as subjectively true whatever we found spiritually precious, and
+be at liberty to leave all the rest alone—the unhistoric element having
+been introduced purposely for the sake of giving greater scope and
+latitude to the value of the ideal.
+
+Of course one who was so firmly persuaded of the objective truth of the
+Resurrection and Ascension could be in no sort of danger of relapsing
+into infidelity as long as his reason remained.  During the years of his
+illness his mind was clearly impaired, and no longer under his own
+control; but while his senses were his own it was absolutely impossible
+that he could be shaken by discrepancies and inconsistencies in the
+gospels.  What small and trifling things are such discrepancies by the
+side of the great central miracle of the Resurrection!  Nevertheless
+their existence was indisputable, and was no less indisputably a cause of
+stumbling to many, as it had been to himself.  His experience of his own
+sufferings as an unbeliever gave him a keener sympathy with those who
+were in that distressing condition than could be felt by any one who had
+not so suffered, and fitted him, perhaps, more than any one who has yet
+lived to be the interpreter of Christianity to the Rationalist, and of
+Rationalism to the Christian.  This, accordingly, was the task to which
+he set himself, having been singularly adapted for it by Nature, and as
+singularly disciplined by events.
+
+It seemed to him that the first thing was to make the two parties
+understand one another—a thing which had never yet been done, but which
+was not at all impossible.  For Protestantism is raised essentially upon
+a Rationalistic base.  When we come to a definition of Rationalism
+nothing can be plainer than that it demands no scepticism from any one
+which an English Protestant would not approve of.  It is another matter
+with the Church of Rome.  That Church openly declares it as an axiom that
+religion and reason have nothing to do with one another, and that
+religion, though in flat contradiction to reason, should yet be accepted
+from the hands of a certain order as an act of unquestioning faith.  The
+line of separation therefore between the Romanist and the Rationalist is
+clear, and definitely bars any possibility of arrangement between the
+two.  Not so with the Protestant, who as heartily as the Rationalist
+admits that nothing is required to be believed by man except such things
+as can be reasonably proved—i.e., proved to the satisfaction of the
+reason.  No Protestant would say that the Christian scheme ought to be
+accepted in spite of its being contrary to reason; we say that
+Christianity is to be believed because it can be shewn to follow as the
+necessary consequence of using our reason rightly.  We should be shocked
+at being supposed to maintain otherwise.  Yet this is pure Rationalism.
+The Rationalist would require nothing more; he demurs to Christianity
+because he maintains that if we bring our reason to bear upon the
+evidences which are brought forward in support of it, we are compelled to
+reject it; but he would accept it without hesitation if he believed that
+it could be sustained by arguments which ought to carry conviction to the
+reason.  Thus both are agreed in principle that if the evidences of
+Christianity satisfy human reason, then Christianity should be received,
+but that on any other supposition it should be rejected.
+
+Here then, he said, we have a common starting-point and the main
+principle of Rationalism turns out to be nothing but what we all readily
+admit, and with which we and our fathers have been as familiar for
+centuries as with the air we breathe.  Every Protestant is a Rationalist,
+or else he ought to be ashamed of himself.  Does he want to be called an
+“Irrationalist”?  Hardly—yet if he is not a Rationalist what else can he
+be?  No: the difference between us is one of detail, not of principle.
+This is a great step gained.
+
+The next thing therefore was to make each party understand the view which
+the other took concerning the position which they had agreed to hold in
+common.  There was no work, so far as he knew, which would be accepted
+both by Christians and unbelievers as containing a fair statement of the
+arguments of the two contending parties: every book which he had yet seen
+upon either side seemed written with the view of maintaining that its own
+side could hold no wrong, and the other no right: neither party seemed to
+think that they had anything to learn from the other, and neither that
+any considerable addition to their knowledge of the truth was either
+possible or desirable.  Each was in possession of truth already, and all
+who did not see and feel this must be either wilfully blinded, or
+intensely stupid, or hypocrites.
+
+So long as people carried on a discussion thus, what agreement was
+possible between them?  Yet where, upon the Christian side, was the
+attempt to grapple with the real difficulties now felt by unbelievers?
+Simply nowhere.  All that had been done hitherto was antiquated.  Modern
+Christianity seemed to shrink from grappling with modern Rationalism, and
+displayed a timidity which could not be accounted for except by the
+supposition of secret misgiving that certain things were being defended
+which could not be defended fairly.  This was quite intolerable; a
+misgiving was a warning voice from God, which should be attended to as a
+man valued his soul.  On the other hand, the conviction reasonably
+entertained by unbelievers that they were right on many not
+inconsiderable details of the dispute, and that so-called orthodox
+Christians in their hearts knew it but would not own it—or that if they
+did not know it, they were only in ignorance because it suited their
+purpose to be so—this conviction gave an overweening self-confidence to
+infidels, as though they must be right in the whole because they were so
+in part; they therefore blinded themselves to all the more fundamental
+arguments in support of Christianity, because certain shallow ones had
+been put forward in the front rank, and been far too obstinately
+defended.  They thus regarded the question too superficially, and had
+erred even more through pride of intellect and conceit than their
+opponents through timidity.
+
+What then was to be done?  Surely this; to explain the two contending
+parties to one another; to show to Rationalists that Christians are right
+upon Rationalistic principles in all the more important of their
+allegations; that is to say, to establish the Resurrection and Ascension
+of the Redeemer upon a basis which should satisfy the most imperious
+demands of modern criticism.  This would form the first and most
+important part of the task.  Then should follow a no less convincing
+proof that Rationalists are right in demurring to the historical accuracy
+of much which has been too obstinately defended by so-called orthodox
+writers.  This would be the second part.  Was there not reason to hope
+that when this was done the two parties might understand one another, and
+meet in a common Christianity?  He believed that there was, and that the
+ground had been already cleared for such mutual compromise as might be
+accepted by both sides, not from policy but conviction.  Therefore he
+began writing the book which it has devolved upon myself to edit, and
+which must now speak for itself.  For him it was to suffer and to labour;
+almost on the very instant of his having done enough to express his
+meaning he was removed from all further power of usefulness.
+
+The happy change from unbelief to faith had already taken place some
+three or four years before my return from America.  With it had also come
+that sudden development of intellectual and spiritual power which so
+greatly astonished even those who had known him best.  The whole man
+seemed changed—to have become possessed of an unusually capacious mind,
+instead of one which was acute, but acute only.  On looking over the
+earlier letters which I received from him when I was in America, I can
+hardly believe that they should have been written by the same person as
+the one to whom, in spite of not a few great mental defects, I afterwards
+owed more spiritual enrichment than I have owed to any other person.  Yet
+so it was.  It came upon me imperceptibly that I had been very stupid in
+not discovering that my brother was a genius; but hardly had I made the
+discovery, and hardly had the fragment which follows this memoir received
+its present shape, when his overworked brain gave way and he fell into a
+state little better than idiocy.  His originally cheerful spirits left
+him, and were succeeded by a religious melancholy which nothing could
+disturb.  He became incapable either of mental or physical exertion, and
+was pronounced by the best physicians to be suffering from some obscure
+disease of the brain brought on by excitement and undue mental tension:
+in this state he continued for about four years, and died peacefully, but
+still as one in the profoundest melancholy, on the 15th of March, 1872,
+aged 40.
+
+Always hopeful that his health would one day be restored, I never
+ventured to propose that I should edit his book during his own life-time.
+On his death I found his papers in the most deplorable confusion.  The
+following chapters had alone received anything like a presentable
+shape—and these providentially are the most essential.
+
+A dream is a dream only, yet sometimes there follows a fulfilment which
+bears a strange resemblance to the thing dreamt of.  No one now believes
+that the Book of Revelation is to be taken as foretelling events which
+will happen in the same way as the massacre, for instance, of St.
+Bartholomew, indeed it is doubtful how far the whole is not to be
+interpreted as an allegory, descriptive of spiritual revolutions; yet
+surely my mother’s dream as to the future of one, at least, of her sons
+has been strangely verified, and it is believed that the reader when he
+lays down this volume will feel that there have been few more potent
+witnesses to the truth of Christ than John Pickard Owen.
+
+
+
+
+The Fair Haven
+
+
+Chapter I
+Introduction
+
+
+IT is to be feared that there is no work upon the evidences of our faith,
+which is as satisfactory in its completeness and convincing power as we
+have a right to expect when we consider the paramount importance of the
+subject and the activity of our enemies.  Otherwise why should there be
+no sign of yielding on the part of so many sincere and eminent men who
+have heard all that has been said upon the Christian side and are yet not
+convinced by it?  We cannot think that the many philosophers who make no
+secret of their opposition to the Christian religion are unacquainted
+with the works of Butler and Paley—of Mansel and Liddon.  This cannot be:
+they must be acquainted with them, and find them fail.
+
+Now, granting readily that in some minds there is a certain wilful and
+prejudiced self-blindness which no reasoning can overcome, and granting
+also that men very much preoccupied with any one pursuit (more especially
+a scientific one) will be apt to give but scant and divided attention to
+arguments upon other subjects such as religion or politics, nevertheless
+we have so many opponents who profess to have made a serious study of
+Christian evidences, and against whose opinion no exception can be fairly
+taken, that it seems as though we were bound either to admit that our
+demonstrations require rearrangement and reconsideration, or to take the
+Roman position, and maintain that revelation is no fit subject for
+evidence but is to be accepted upon authority.  This last position will
+be rejected at once by nine-tenths of Englishmen.  But upon rejecting it
+we look in vain for a work which shall appear to have any such success in
+arresting infidelity as attended the works of Butler and Paley in the
+last century.  In their own day these two great men stemmed the current
+of infidelity: but no modern writers have succeeded in doing so, and it
+will scarcely be said that either Butler or Paley set at rest the many
+serious and inevitable questions in connection with Christianity which
+have arisen during the last fifty years.  We could hardly expect one of
+the more intelligent students at Oxford or Cambridge to find his mind set
+once and for ever free from all rising doubt either by the _Analogy_ or
+the _Evidences_.  Suppose, for example, that he has been misled by the
+German writers of the Tübingen school, how will either of the above-named
+writers help him?  On the contrary, they will do him harm, for they will
+not meet the requirements of the case, and the inference is too readily
+drawn that nothing else can do so.  It need hardly be insisted upon that
+this inference is a most unfair one, but surely the blame of its being
+drawn rests in some measure at the door of those whose want of
+thoroughness has left people under the impression that no more can be
+said than what has been said already.
+
+It is the object, therefore, of this book to contribute towards
+establishing Christian evidences upon a more secure and self-evident base
+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 of Christian
+evidence can tend towards so great a consummation.  In spite of the
+narrow limits within which I have resolved to keep my treatment of the
+subject, I trust that I may be able to produce such an effect upon the
+minds of those who are in doubt concerning the evidences for the hope
+that is in them, that henceforward they shall never doubt again.  I am
+not sanguine enough to suppose that I shall be able to induce certain
+eminent naturalists and philosophers to reopen a question which they have
+probably long laid aside as settled; unfortunately it is not in any but
+the very noblest Christian natures to do this, nevertheless, could they
+be persuaded to read these pages I believe that they would find so much
+which would be new to them, that their prejudices would be greatly
+shaken.  To the younger band of scientific investigators I appeal more
+hopefully.
+
+It may be asked why not have undertaken the whole subject and devoted a
+life-time to writing an exhaustive work?  The answer suggests itself that
+the believer is in no want of such a book, while the unbeliever would be
+repelled by its size.  Assuredly there can be no doubt as to the value of
+a great work which should meet objections derived from certain recent
+scientific theories, and confute opponents who have arisen since the
+death of our two great apologists, but as a preliminary to this a smaller
+and more elementary book seems called for, which shall give the main
+outlines of our position with such boldness and effectiveness as to
+arrest the attention of any unbeliever into whose hands it may fall, and
+induce him to look further into what else may be urged upon the Christian
+side.  We are bound to adapt our means to our ends, and shall have a
+better chance of gaining the ear of our adversaries if we can offer them
+a short and pregnant book than if we come to them with a long one from
+which whole chapters might be pruned.  We have to bring the Christian
+religion to men who will look at no book which cannot be read in a
+railway train or in an arm-chair; it is most deplorable that 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 in bringing about a better state
+of things.  And let me add that never yet was there a time when it so
+much behoved all who are impressed with the vital power of religion to
+bestir themselves; for the symptoms of a general indifference, not to say
+hostility, must be admitted to be widely diffused, in spite of an
+imposing array of facts which can be brought forward to the contrary; and
+not only this, but the stream of infidelity seems making more havoc
+yearly, as it might naturally be expected to do, when met by no new works
+of any real strength or permanence.
+
+Bearing in mind, therefore, the necessity for prompt action, it seemed
+best to take the most overwhelming of all miracles—the Resurrection of
+our Lord Jesus Christ, and show that it can be so substantiated that no
+reasonable man should doubt it.  This I have therefore attempted, and I
+humbly trust that the reader will feel that I have not only attempted it,
+but done it, once and for all so clearly and satisfactorily and with such
+an unflinching examination of the most advanced arguments of unbelievers,
+that the question can never be raised hereafter by any candid mind, or at
+any rate not until science has been made to rest on different grounds
+from those on which she rests at present.
+
+But the truth of our Lord’s resurrection having been once established,
+what need to encumber this book with further evidences of the miraculous
+element in his ministry?  The other miracles can be no insuperable
+difficulty to one who accepts the Resurrection.  It is true that as
+Christians we cannot dwell too minutely upon every act and incident in
+the life of the Redeemer, but unhappily we have to deal with those who
+are not Christians, and must consider rather what we can get them to take
+than what we should like to give them: “Be ye wise as serpents and
+harmless as doves,” saith the Saviour.  A single miracle is as good as
+twenty, provided that it be well established, and can be shewn to be so:
+it is here that even the ablest of our apologists have too often failed;
+they have professed to substantiate the historical accuracy of all the
+recorded miracles and sayings of our Lord, with a result which is in some
+instances feeble and conventional, and occasionally even unfair (oh! what
+suicidal folly is there in even the remotest semblance of unfairness),
+instead of devoting themselves to throwing a flood of brilliancy upon the
+most important features and leaving the others to shine out in the light
+reflected from these.  Even granting that some of the miracles recorded
+of our Lord are apocryphal, what of that?  We do not rest upon them: we
+have enough and more than enough without them, and can afford to take the
+line of saying to the unbeliever, “Disbelieve this miracle or that if you
+find that you cannot accept it, but believe in the Resurrection, of which
+we will put forward such ample proofs that no healthy reason can
+withstand them, and, having accepted the Resurrection, admit it as the
+manifestation of supernatural power, the existence of which can thus no
+longer be denied.”
+
+Does not the reader feel that there is a ring of truth and candour about
+this which must carry more weight with an opponent than any strained
+defence of such a doubtful miracle as the healing of the impotent man at
+the pool of Bethesda?  We weight ourselves as against our opponents by
+trying to defend too much; no matter how sound and able the defence of
+one part of the Christian scheme may have been, its effect is often
+marred by contiguity with argument which the writer himself must have
+suspected, or even known, to be ingenious rather than sound: the moment
+that this is felt in any book its value with an opponent is at an end,
+for he must be continually in doubt whether the spirit which he has
+detected here or there may not be existing and at work in a hundred other
+places where he has not detected it.  What carries weight with an
+antagonist is the feeling that his position has been mastered and his
+difficulties grasped with thoroughness and candour.
+
+On this point I am qualified to speak from long and bitter experience.  I
+say that want of candour and the failure to grasp the position occupied,
+however untenably, by unbelievers is the chief cause of the continuance
+of unbelief.  When this cause has been removed unbelief will die a
+natural death.  For years I was myself a believer in nothing beyond the
+personality and providence of God: yet I feel (not without a certain
+sense of bitterness, which I know that I should not feel but cannot
+utterly subdue) that if my first doubts had been met with patient
+endeavour to understand their nature and if I had felt that the one in
+whom I confided had been ready to go to the root of the matter, and even
+to yield up the convictions of a life-time could it be shewn that they
+were unsafely founded, my doubts would have been resolved in an hour or
+two’s quiet conversation, and would at once have had the effect, which
+they have only had after long suffering and unrest, of confirming me in
+my allegiance to Christ.  But I was met with anger and impatience.  There
+was an instinct which told me that my opponent had never heard a syllable
+against his own convictions, and was determined not to hear one: on this
+I assumed rashly that he must have good reason for his resolution; and
+doubt ripened into unbelief.  Oh! what years of heart-burning and utter
+drifting followed.  Yet when I was at last brought within the influence
+of one who not only believed all that my first opponent did, but who also
+knew that the more light was thrown upon it the more clearly would its
+truth be made apparent—a man who talked with me as though he was anxious
+that I should convince him if he were in error, not as though bent on
+making me believe whatever habit and circumstances had imposed as a
+formula upon himself—my heart softened at once, and the dry places of my
+soul were watered.
+
+The above may seem too purely personal to warrant its introduction here,
+yet the experience is one which should not be without its value to
+others.  Its effect upon myself has been to give me an unutterable
+longing to save others from sufferings like my own; I know so well where
+it is that, to use a homely metaphor, the shoe pinches.  And it is
+chiefly here—in the fact that the unbeliever does not feel as though we
+really wanted to understand him.  This feeling is in many cases
+lamentably well founded.  No one likes hearing doubt thrown upon 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 intellectual effort; others are pained by coming
+into contact with anything which derogates from the glory due to the
+great sacrifice of Christ, or to his Divine nature, and lastly not a few
+are withheld by moral cowardice from daring to bestow the pains upon the
+unbeliever which his condition requires.  But from whichever of these
+sources the disinclination to understand him comes, its effect is equally
+disastrous to the unbeliever.  People do not mind a difference of
+opinion, if they feel that the one who differs from them has got a firm
+grasp of their position; or again, if they feel that he is trying to
+understand them but fails from some defect either of intellect or
+education, even in this case they are not pained by opposition.  What
+injures their moral nature and hardens their hearts is the conviction
+that another could understand them if he chose, but does not choose, and
+yet none the less condemns them.  On this they become imbued with that
+bitterness against Christianity which is noticeable in so many
+free-thinkers.
+
+Can we greatly wonder?  For, sad though the admission be, it is only
+justice to admit that we Christians have been too often contented to
+accept our faith without knowing its grounds, in which case it is more by
+luck than by cunning that we are Christians at all, and our faith will be
+in continual danger.  The greater number even of those who have
+undertaken to defend the Christian faith have been sadly inclined to
+avoid a difficulty rather than to face it, unless it is so easy as to be
+no real difficulty at all.  I do not say that this is unnatural, for the
+Christian writer must be deeply impressed with the sinfulness of
+unbelief, and will therefore be anxious to avoid raising doubts which
+will probably never yet have occurred to his reader, and might possibly
+never do so; nor does there at first sight appear to be much advantage in
+raising difficulties for the sole purpose of removing them; nevertheless
+I cannot think that if either Butler or Paley could have foreseen the
+continuance of unbelief, and the ruin of so many souls whom Christ died
+to save, they would have been contented to act so almost entirely upon
+the defensive.
+
+Yet it is impossible not to feel that we in their place should have done
+as they did.  Infidelity was still in its infancy: the nature of the
+disease was hardly yet understood; and there seemed reason to fear lest
+it might be aggravated by the very means taken to cure it; it seemed
+safer therefore in the first instance to confine attention to the matter
+actually in debate, and leave it to time to suggest a more active
+treatment should the course first tried prove unsatisfactory.  Who can be
+surprised that the earlier apologists should have felt thus in the
+presence of an enemy whose novelty made him appear more portentous than
+he can ever seem to ourselves?  They were bound to venture nothing
+rashly; what they did they did, for their own age, thoroughly; we owe it
+to their cautious pioneering that we so know the weakness of our
+opponents and our own strength as to be able to do fearlessly what may
+well have seemed perilous to our forefathers: nevertheless it is easy to
+be wise after the event, and to regret that a bolder course was not taken
+at the outset.  If Butler and Paley had fought as men eager for the fray,
+as men who smelt the battle from afar, it is impossible to believe that
+infidelity could have lasted as long as it has.  What can be done now
+could have been done just as effectively then, and though we cannot be
+surprised at the caution shewn at first, we are bound to deplore it as
+short-sighted.
+
+The question, however, for ourselves is not what dead men might have done
+better long ago, but what living men and women can do most wisely now;
+and in answer to it I would say that there is no policy so unwise as fear
+in a good cause: the bold course is also the wise one; it consists in
+being on the lookout for objections, in finding the very best that can be
+found and stating them in their most intelligible form, in shewing what
+are the logical consequences of unbelief, and thus carrying the war into
+the enemy’s country; in fighting with the most chivalrous generosity and
+a determination to take no advantage which is not according to the rules
+of war most strictly interpreted against ourselves, but within such an
+interpretation showing no quarter.  This is the bold course and the true
+course: it will beget a confidence which can never be felt in the
+wariness, however well-intentioned, of the old defenders.
+
+Let me, therefore, beg the reader to follow me patiently while I do my
+best to put before him the main difficulties felt by unbelievers.  When
+he is once acquainted with these he will run in no danger of confirming
+doubt through his fear in turning away from it in the first instance.
+How many die hardened unbelievers through the treatment which they have
+received from those to whom their Christianity has been a matter of
+circumstances and habit only?  Hell is no fiction.  Who, without bitter
+sorrow, can reflect upon the agonies even of a single soul as being due
+to the selfishness or cowardice of others?  Awful thought!  Yet it is one
+which is daily realised in the case of thousands.
+
+In the commonest justice to brethren, however sinful, each one of us who
+tries to lead them to the Saviour is bound not only to shew them the
+whole strength of our own arguments, but to make them see that we
+understand the whole strength of theirs; for men will not seriously
+listen to those whom they believe to know one side of a question only.
+It is this which makes the educated infidel so hard to deal with; he
+knows very well that an intelligent apprehension of the position held by
+an opponent is indispensable for profitable discussion; but he very
+rarely meets with this in the case of those Christians who try to argue
+with him; he therefore soon acquires a habit of avoiding the subject of
+religion, and can seldom be induced to 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 who would
+convert an infidel must know what it is that he is to be converted from,
+as well as what he is to be led to; nothing can be laid hold of unless
+its whereabouts is known.  It is deplorable that such commonplaces should
+be wanted; but, alas! it is impossible to do without them.  People have
+taken a panic on the subject of infidelity as though it were so
+infectious that the very nurses and doctors should run away from those
+afflicted with it; but such conduct is no less absurd than cruel and
+disgraceful.  _Infidelity is only infectious when it is not understood_.
+The smallest reflection should suffice to remind us that a faith which
+has satisfied the most brilliant and profound of human intellects for
+nearly two thousand years must have had very sure foundations, and that
+any digging about them for the purpose of demonstrating their depth and
+solidity, will result, not in their disturbance, but in its being made
+clear to every eye that they are laid upon a rock which nothing can
+shake—that they do indeed satisfy every demand of human reason, which
+suffers violence not from those who accept the scheme of the Christian
+redemption, but from those who reject it.
+
+This being the case, and that it is so will, I believe, appear with great
+clearness in the following pages, what need to shrink from the just and
+charitable course of understanding the nature of what is urged by those
+who differ from us?  How can we hope to bring them to be of one mind in
+Christ Jesus with ourselves, unless we can resolve their difficulties and
+explain them?  And how can we resolve their difficulties until we know
+what they are?  Infidelity is as a reeking fever den, which none can
+enter safely without due precautions, but the taking these precautions is
+within our own power; we can all rely upon the blessed promises of the
+Saviour that he will not desert us in our hour of need if we will only
+truly seek him; there is more infidelity in this shrinking and fear of
+investigation than in almost any open denial of Christ; the one who
+refuses to examine the doubts felt by another, and is prevented from
+making any effort to remove them through fear lest he should come to
+share them, shews either that he has no faith in the power of
+Christianity to stand examination, or that he has no faith in the
+promises of God to guide him into all truth.  In either case he is hardly
+less an unbeliever than those whom he condemns.
+
+Let the reader therefore understand that he will here find no attempt to
+conceal the full strength of the arguments relied on by unbelievers.
+This manner of substantiating the truth of Christianity has unhappily
+been tried already; it has been tried and has failed as it was bound to
+fail.  Infidelity lives upon concealment.  Shew it in broad daylight,
+hold it up before the world and make its hideousness manifest to
+all—then, and not till then, will the hours of unbelief be numbered.
+_We_ have been the mainstay of unbelief through our timidity.  Far be it
+from me, therefore, that I should help any unbeliever by concealing his
+case for him.  This were the most cruel kindness.  On the contrary, I
+shall insist upon all his arguments and state them, if I may say so
+without presumption, more clearly than they have ever been stated within
+the same limits.  No one knows what they are better than I do.  No one
+was at one time more firmly persuaded that they were sound.  May it be
+found that no one has so well known how also to refute them.
+
+The reader must not therefore expect to find fictitious difficulties in
+the way of accepting Christianity set up with one hand in order to be
+knocked down again with the other: he will find the most powerful
+arguments against all that he holds most sacred insisted on with the same
+clearness as those on his own side; it is only by placing the two
+contending opinions side by side in their utmost development that the
+strength of our own can be made apparent.  Those who wish to cry peace,
+peace, when there is no peace, those who would take their faith by
+fashion as the take their clothes, those who doubt the strength of their
+own cause and do not in their heart of heart believe that Christianity
+will stand investigation, those, again, who care not who may go to Hell
+provided they are comfortably sure of going to Heaven themselves, such
+persons may complain of the line which I am about to take.  They on the
+other hand whose faith is such that it knows no fear of criticism, and
+they whose love for Christ leads them to regard the bringing of lost
+souls into his flock as the highest earthly happiness—such will admit
+gladly that I have been right in tearing aside the veil from infidelity
+and displaying it uncloaked by the side of faith itself.
+
+At the same time I am bound to confess that I never should have been able
+to see the expediency, not to say the absolute necessity for such a
+course, unless I had been myself for many years an unbeliever.  It is
+this experience, so bitterly painful, that has made me feel so strongly
+as to the only manner in which others can be brought from darkness into
+light.  The wisdom of the Almighty recognised that if man was to be saved
+it must be done by the assumption of man’s nature on the part of the
+Deity.  God must make himself man, or man could never learn the nature
+and attributes of God.  Let us then follow the sublime example of the
+incarnation, and make ourselves as unbelievers that we may teach
+unbelievers to believe.  If Paley and Butler had only been _real
+infidels_ for a single year, instead of taking the thoughts and
+reasonings of their opponents at second-hand, what a difference should we
+not have seen in the nature of their work.  Alas! their clear and
+powerful intellects had been trained early in the severest exercises;
+they could not be misled by any of the sophistries of their opponents;
+but, on the other hand, never having been misled they knew not the thread
+of the labyrinth as one who has been shut up therein.
+
+I should also warn the reader of another matter.  He must not expect to
+find that I can maintain everything which he could perhaps desire to see
+maintained.  I can prove, to such a high degree of presumption as shall
+amount virtually to demonstration, that our Lord died upon the cross,
+rose again from the dead upon the third day, and ascended into Heaven:
+but I cannot prove that none of the accounts of these events which have
+come down to us have suffered from the hand of time: on the contrary, I
+must own that the reasons which led me to conclude that there must be
+confusion in some of the accounts of the Resurrection continue in full
+force with me even now.  I see no way of escaping from this conclusion:
+but it seems equally strange that the Christian should have such an
+indomitable repugnance to accept it, and that the unbeliever should
+conceive that it inflicts any damage whatever upon the Christian
+evidences.  Perhaps the error of each confirms that of the other, as will
+appear hereafter.
+
+I have spoken hitherto as though I were writing only for men, but the
+help of good women can never be so precious as in the salvation of human
+souls; if there is one work for which women are better fitted than
+another, it is that of arresting the progress of unbelief.  Can there be
+a nobler one?  Their superior tact and quickness give them a great
+advantage over men; men will listen to them when they would turn away
+from one of their own sex; and though I am well aware that courtesy is no
+argument, yet the natural politeness shewn by a man to a woman will
+compel attention to what falls from her lips, and will thus perhaps be
+the means of bringing him into contact with Divine truths which would
+never otherwise have reached him.  Yet this is a work from which too many
+women recoil in horror—they know that they can do nothing unless they are
+intimately acquainted with the opinions of those from whom they differ,
+and from such an intimacy they believe that they are right in shrinking.
+
+Oh, my sisters, my sisters, ye who go into the foulest dens of disease
+and vice, fearless of the pestilence and of man’s brutality, ye whose
+whole lives bear witness to the cross of Christ and the efficacy of the
+Divine love, did one of you ever fear being corrupted by the vice with
+which you came in contact?  Is there one of you who fears to examine why
+it is that even the most specious form of vice is vicious?  You fear not
+infection here, for you know that you are on sure ground, and that there
+is no form of vice of which the viciousness is not clearly provable; but
+can you doubt that the foundation of your faith is sure also, and can you
+not see that your cowardice in not daring to examine the foul and
+soul-destroying den of infidelity is a stumbling-block to those who have
+not yet known their Saviour?  Your fear is as the fear of children who
+dare not go in 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,
+and that you dare not search lest you should find that which would make
+against you.  Hideous blasphemy against the Lord!  But is not the sin to
+be laid partly at the door of those whose cowardice has given occasion
+for it?
+
+Is there none of you who knows that as to the pure all things are pure,
+so to the true and loyal heart all things will confirm its faith?  You
+shrink from this last trial of your allegiance, partly from the pain of
+even seeing the wounds of your Redeemer laid open—of even hearing the
+words of those enemies who have traduced him and crucified him afresh—but
+you lose the last and highest of the prizes, for great as is your faith
+now, be very sure that from this crowning proof of your devotion you
+would emerge with greater still.
+
+Has none of you seen a savage dog barking and tearing at the end of his
+chain as though he were longing to devour you, and yet if you have gone
+bravely up to him and bade him be still, he is cowed and never barks
+again?  Such is the genius of infidelity; it loves to threaten those who
+retreat, yet it shrinks daunted back from those who meet it boldly; it is
+the lack of boldness on the part of the Christian which gives it all its
+power; when Christians are strong in the strength of their own cause
+infidels will know their impotence, but as long as there are cowards
+there will be those who prey upon cowardice, and as long as those who
+should defend the cross of Christ hide themselves behind battlements, so
+long will the enemy come up to the very walls of the defence and trouble
+them that are within.  The above words must have sounded harsh and will I
+fear have given pain to many a tender heart which is conscious of the
+depth of its own love for the Redeemer, and would be shocked at the
+thought that anything had been neglected in his service, but has not the
+voice of such a heart returned answer to itself that what I have written
+is just?
+
+Again, I have been told by some that they have been aware of the
+necessity of doing their best towards putting a stop to infidelity, and
+that they have been unceasing in their prayers for friends or husbands or
+relations who know not Christ, but that with prayers their efforts have
+ended.  Now, there can be no one in the whole world who has had more
+signal proofs of the efficacy of prayer than the writer of these pages,
+but he would lie if he were to say that prayer was ever answered when it
+was only another name for idleness, a cloak for the avoidance of obvious
+duty.  God is no helper of the indolent 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 the women who have prayed, and prayed only, the
+answer is ready at hand, that work without prayer is bad, but prayer
+without work worse.  Let them do their own utmost in the way of sowing,
+planting, and watering, and then let them pray to God that he will
+vouchsafe them the increase; but they can no more expect the increase to
+be of God’s free gift without the toil of sowing than did the blessed
+Apostle St. Paul.  If God did not convert the heathen for Paul and
+Apollos in answer to their prayers alone, how can we expect that he will
+convert the infidel for ourselves, unless we have first followed in the
+footsteps of the Apostles?  The sin of infidelity will rest upon us and
+our children until we have done our best to shake it off; and this not
+timidly and disingenuously as those who fear for the result, but with the
+certainty that it is the infidel and not the Christian who need fear
+investigation, if the investigation only goes deep enough.  Herein has
+lain our error, we have feared to allow the unbeliever to put forth all
+his strength lest it should prove stronger than we thought it was, when
+in truth the world would only have known the sooner of its weakness; and
+this shall now at last be abundantly shewn, for, as I said above, I will
+help no infidel by concealing his case; it shall appear in full, and as
+nearly in his own words as the limits at my disposal will allow.  Out of
+his own mouth shall he be condemned, and yet, I trust, not condemned
+alone; but converted as I myself, and by the same irresistible chain of
+purest reason; one thing only is wanted on the part of the reader, it is
+this, the desire to attain truth regardless of past prejudices.
+
+If an unbeliever has made up his mind that we must be wrong, without
+having heard our side, and if he presumes to neglect the most ordinary
+precaution against error—that of understanding the position of an
+opponent—I can do nothing with him or for him.  No man can make another
+see, if the other persists in shutting his eyes and bandaging them: if it
+is a victory to be able to say that they cannot see the truth under these
+circumstances, the victory is with our opponents; but for those who can
+lay their hands upon their heart and say truly before God and man that
+they care nothing for the maintenance of their own opinions, but only
+that they may come to know the truth, for such I can do much.  I can put
+the matter before them in so clear a light that they shall never doubt
+hereafter.
+
+Never was there a time when such an exposition was wanted so much as now.
+The specious plausibilities of a pseudo-science have led hundreds of
+thousands into error; the misapplication of geology has ensnared a host
+of victims, and a still greater misapplication of natural history seems
+likely to devour those whom the perversion of geology has spared.  Not
+that I have a word to say against _true_ science: true science can never
+be an enemy of the Bible, which is the text-book of the science of the
+salvation of human souls as written by the great Creator and Redeemer of
+the soul itself, but the Enemy of Mankind is never idle, and no sooner
+does God vouchsafe to us any clearer illumination of his purposes and
+manner of working, than the Evil One sets himself to consider how he can
+turn the blessing into a curse; and by the all-wise dispensation of
+Providence he is allowed so much triumph as that he shall sift the wise
+from the foolish, the faithful from the traitors.  God knoweth his own.
+Still there is no surer mark that one is among the number of those whom
+he hath chosen than the desire to bring all to share in the gracious
+promises which he has vouchsafed to those that will take advantage of
+them; and there are few more certain signs of reprobation than
+indifference as to the existence of unbelief, and faint-heartedness in
+trying to remove it.  It is the duty of all those who love Christ to lead
+their brethren to love him also; but how can they hope to succeed in this
+until they understand the grounds on which he is rejected?
+
+For there _are_ grounds, insufficient ones, untenable ones, grounds which
+a little loving patience and, if I may be allowed the word, ingenuity,
+will shew to be utterly rotten; but as long as their rottenness is only
+to be asserted and not proved, so long will deluded people build upon
+them in fancied security.  As yet the proof has never been made
+sufficiently clear.  If displayed sufficiently for 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 fallacies have reappeared in another shape.
+It is not too much to say that it has never yet been so clearly proved
+that Christ rose again from the dead, that a jury of educated Englishmen
+should be compelled to assent to it, even though they had never before
+heard of Christianity.  This therefore it is my object to do once and for
+ever now.
+
+It is not for me to pry into the motives of the Almighty, nor to inquire
+why it is that for nearly two thousand years the perfection of proof
+should never have been duly produced, but if I dare hazard an opinion I
+should say that such proof was never necessary until now, but that it has
+lain ready to be produced at a moment’s notice on the arrival of the
+fitting time.  In the early stages of the Church the _vivâ voce_
+testimony of the Apostles was still so near that its force was in no way
+spent; from those times until recently the universality of belief was
+such that proof was hardly needed; it is only for a hundred years or so
+(which in the sight of God are but as yesterday) that infidelity has made
+real progress.  Then God raised his hand in wrath; revolution taught men
+to see the nature of unbelief and the world shrank back in horror; the
+time of fear passed by; unbelief has again raised itself; whereon we can
+see that other and even more fearful revolutions {82} are daily
+threatening.  What country is safe?  In what part of the world do not men
+feel an uneasy foreboding of the wrath which will surely come if they do
+not repent and turn unto the Lord their God?  Go where we will we are
+conscious of that heaviness and oppression which is the precursor of the
+hurricane and the earthquake; none escape it: an all-pervading sense of
+rottenness and fearful waiting upon judgment is upon the hearts of all
+men.  May it not be that this awe and silence have been ordained in order
+that the still small voice of the Lord may be the more clearly heard and
+welcomed as salvation?  Is it not possible that the infinite mercy of God
+is determined to give mankind one last chance, before the day of that
+coming which no creature may abide?  I dare not answer: yet I know well
+that the fire burneth within me, and that night and day I take no rest
+but am consumed until the work committed to me is done, that I may be
+clear from the blood of all men.
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+Strauss and the Hallucination Theory
+
+
+IT has been well established by Paley, and indeed has seldom been denied,
+that within a very few years of Christ’s crucifixion a large number of
+people believed that he had risen from the dead.  They believed that
+after having suffered actual death he rose to actual life, as a man who
+could eat and drink and talk, who could be seen and handled.  Some who
+held this were near relations of Christ, some had known him intimately
+for a considerable time before his crucifixion, many must have known him
+well by sight, but all were unanimous in their assertion that they had
+seen him alive after he had been dead, and in consequence of this belief
+they adopted a new mode of life, abandoning in many cases every other
+earthly consideration save that of bearing witness to what they had known
+and seen.  I have not thought it worth while to waste time and space by
+introducing actual proof of the above.  This will be found in Paley’s
+opening chapters, to which the reader is referred.
+
+How then did this intensity of conviction come about?  Differ as they
+might and did upon many of the questions arising out of the main fact
+which they taught, as to the fact itself they differed not in the least
+degree.  In their own life-time and in that of those who could confute
+them their story gained the adherence of a very large and ever increasing
+number.  If it could be shewn that the belief in Christ’s reappearance
+did not arise until after the death of those who were said to have seen
+him, when actions and teachings might have been imputed to them which
+were not theirs, the case would then be different; but this cannot be
+done; there is nothing in history better established than that the men
+who said that they had seen Christ alive after he had been dead, were
+themselves the first to lay aside all else in order to maintain their
+assertion.  If it could be maintained that they taught what they did in
+order to sanction laxity of morals, the case would again be changed.  But
+this too is impossible.  They taught what they did because of the
+intensity of their own conviction and from no other motive whatsoever.
+
+What then can that thing have been which made these men so beyond all
+measure and one-mindedly certain?  Were they thus before the Crucifixion?
+Far otherwise.  Yet the men who fled in the hour of their master’s peril
+betrayed no signs of flinching when their own was no less imminent.  How
+came it that the cowardice and fretfulness of the Gospels should be
+transformed into the lion-hearted steadfastness of the Acts?
+
+The Crucifixion had intervened.  Yes, but surely something more than the
+Crucifixion.  Can we believe that if their experience of Christ had ended
+with the Cross, the Apostles would have been in that state of mind which
+should compel them to leave all else for the sake of preaching what he
+had taught them?  It is a hard thing for a man to change the scheme of
+his life; yet this is not a case of one man but of many, who became
+changed as if struck with an enchanter’s wand, and who, though many, were
+as one in the vehemence with which they protested that their master had
+reappeared to them alive.  Their converse with Christ did not probably
+last above a year or two, and was interrupted by frequent absence.  If
+Christ had died once and for all upon the Cross, Christianity must have
+died with him; but it did not die; nay, it did not begin to live with
+full energy until after its founder had been crucified.  We must ask
+again, what could that thing have been which turned these querulous and
+faint-hearted followers into the most earnest and successful body of
+propagandists which the world has ever seen, if it was not that which
+they said it was—namely, that Christ had reappeared to them alive after
+they had themselves known him to be dead?  This would account for the
+change in them, but is there anything else that will?
+
+They had such ample opportunities of knowing the truth that the
+supposition of mistake is fraught with the greatest difficulties; they
+gave such guarantees of sincerity as that none have given greater; their
+unanimity is perfect; there is not the faintest trace of any difference
+of opinion amongst them as to the main fact of the Resurrection.  These
+are things which never have been and never can be denied, but if they do
+not form strong _primâ facie_ ground for believing in the truth and
+actuality of Christ’s Resurrection, what is there which will amount to a
+_primâ facie_ case for anything whatever?
+
+Nevertheless the matter does not rest here.  While there exists the
+faintest possibility of mistake we may be sure that we shall deal most
+wisely by examining its character and value.  Let us inquire therefore
+whether there are any circumstances which seem to indicate that the early
+Christians might have been mistaken, and been firmly persuaded that they
+had seen Christ alive, although in point of fact they had not really seen
+him?  Men have been very positive and very sincere about things wherein
+we should have conceived mistake impossible, and yet they have been
+utterly mistaken.  A strong predisposition, a rare coincidence, an
+unwonted natural phenomenon, a hundred other causes, may turn sound
+judgments awry, and we dare not assume forthwith that the first disciples
+of Christ were superior to influences which have misled many who have had
+better chances of withstanding them.  Visions and hallucinations are not
+uncommon even now.  How easily belief in a supernatural occurrence
+obtains among the peasantry of Italy, Ireland, Belgium, France, and
+Spain; and how much more easily would it do so among Jews in the days of
+Christ, when belief in supernatural interferences with this world’s
+economy was, so to speak, omnipresent.  Means of communication, that is
+to say of verification, were few, and the tone of men’s minds as regards
+accuracy 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; few could read
+and fewer write, so that a story could seldom be confined to its original
+limits; error, therefore, had much chance and truth little as compared
+with our own times.  What more is needed to make us feel how possible it
+was for the purest and most honest of men to become parents of all
+fallacy?
+
+Strauss believes this to have been the case.  He supposes that the
+earliest Christians were under hallucination when they thought that they
+had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion; in other words, that they
+never saw him at all, but only thought that they had done so.  He does
+not imagine that they conceived this idea at once, but that it grew up
+gradually in the course of a few years, and that those who came under its
+influence antedated it unconsciously afterwards.  He appears to believe
+that within a few months of the Crucifixion, and in consequence of some
+unexplained combination of internal and external causes, some one of the
+Apostles came to be impressed with the notion that he had seen Christ
+alive; the impression, however made, was exceedingly strong, and was
+communicated as soon as might be to some other or others of the Apostles:
+the idea was welcome—as giving life to a hope which had been fondly
+cherished; each inflamed the imagination of the other, until the original
+basis of the conception slipped unconsciously from recollection, while
+the intensity of the conviction itself became stronger and stronger the
+more often the story was repeated.  Strauss supposes that on seeing the
+firm conviction of two or three who had hitherto been leaders among them,
+the other Apostles took heart, and that thus the body grew together again
+perhaps within a twelve-month of the Crucifixion.  According to him, the
+idea of the Resurrection having been once started, and having once taken
+root, the soil was so congenial that it grew apace; the rest of the
+Apostles, perhaps assembled together in a high state of mental enthusiasm
+and excitement, conceived that they saw Christ enter the room in which
+they were sitting and afford some manifest proof of life and identity; or
+some one else may have enlarged a less extraordinary story to these
+dimensions, so that in a short time it passed current everywhere (there
+have been instances of delusions quite as extraordinary gaining a
+foothold among men whose sincerity is not to be disputed), and finally
+they conceived that these appearances of their master had commenced a few
+months—and what is a few months?—earlier than they actually had, so that
+the first appearance was soon looked upon as having been vouchsafed
+within three days of the Crucifixion.
+
+The above is not in Strauss’s words, but it is a careful _résumé_ of what
+I gather to be his conception of the origin of the belief in the
+Resurrection of Christ.  The belief, and the intensity of the belief,
+need explanation; the supernatural explanation, as we should ourselves
+readily admit, cannot be accepted unless all others are found wanting; he
+therefore, if I understand him rightly, puts forward the above as being a
+reasonable and natural solution of the difficulty—the only solution which
+does not fail upon examination, and therefore the one which should be
+accepted.  It is founded upon the affection which the Apostles had borne
+towards their master, and their 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 would
+readily welcome its renewal; it was easy in the then intellectual
+condition of Palestine for hallucination to originate, and still easier
+for it to spread; the story touched the hearts of men too nearly to
+render its propagation difficult.  Men and women like believing in the
+marvellous, for it brings the chance of good fortune nearer to their own
+doors; but how much more so when they are themselves closely connected
+with the central figure of the marvel, and when it appears to give a clue
+to the solution of that mystery which all would pry into if they
+could—our future after death?  There can be no great cause for wonder
+that an hallucination which arose under such conditions as these should
+have gained ground and conquered all opposition, even though its origin
+may be traced to the brain 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, we collect
+most certainly from the Gospel records that the Apostles were _not_ a
+compact and devoted body of adherents at the time of the Crucifixion; yet
+it is hard to see how Strauss’s hallucination theory can be accepted,
+unless this was the case.  If Strauss believed the earliest followers of
+Christ to have been already immovably fixed in their belief that he was
+the Son of God—the promised Messiah, of whom they were themselves the
+especially chosen ministers—if he considered that they believed in their
+master as the worker of innumerable miracles which they had themselves
+witnessed; as one whom they had seen raise others from death to life, and
+whom, therefore, death could not be expected to control—if he held the
+followers of Christ to have been in this frame of mind at the time of the
+Crucifixion, it might be intelligible that he should suppose the strength
+of their faith to have engendered an imaginary reappearance in order to
+save them from the conclusion that their hopes had been without
+foundation; that, in point of fact, they should have accepted a new
+delusion in order to prop up an old one; but we know very well that
+Strauss does not accept this position.  He denies that the Apostles had
+seen any miracles; independently therefore of the many and unmistakable
+traces of their having been but partial and wavering adherents, which
+have made it a matter of common belief among those who have studied the
+New Testament that the faith of the Apostles was unsteadfast before the
+Crucifixion, he must have other and stronger reasons for thinking that
+this was so, inasmuch as he does not look upon 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 power over
+the insane, and temporary alleviations of sickness, due perhaps to mental
+excitement, may have taken place in their presence and passed for
+miracles; he would doubt how far they had even seen this much, for he
+would insist on many passages in the Gospels which would point in the
+direction of our Lord’s never having professed to work a single miracle;
+but even though he granted that they had seen certain extraordinary cases
+of healing, there is no amount of testimony which would for a moment
+satisfy him of their having seen more.  _We_ see the Apostles as men who
+before the Crucifixion had seen Lazarus raised from death to life after
+the corruption of the grave had begun its work, and who had seen sight
+given to one that had been born sightless; as men who had seen miracle
+after miracle, with every loophole for escape from a belief in the
+miraculous carefully excluded; who had seen their master walking upon the
+sea, and bidding the winds be still; our difficulty therefore is to
+understand the incredulity of the Apostles as displayed abundantly in the
+Gospels; but Strauss can have none such; for he must see them as men over
+whom the influence of their master had been purely personal, and due to
+nothing more than to a strength and beauty of character which his
+followers very imperfectly understood.  _He_ does not believe that
+Lazarus was raised at all, or that the man who had been born blind ever
+existed; he considers the fourth gospel, which alone records these
+events, to be the work of a later age, and not to be depended on for
+facts, save here and there; certainly not where the facts recorded are
+miraculous.  He must therefore be even more ready than we are to admit
+that the faith of the Apostles was weak before the Crucifixion; but
+whether he is or not, we have it on the highest authority that their
+faith was not strong enough to maintain them at the very first approach
+of danger, nor to have given them any hope whatever that our Lord should
+rise again; whereas for Strauss’s theory to hold good, it must already
+have been in a white heat of enthusiasm.
+
+But even granting that this was so—in the face of all the evidence we can
+reach—men so honest and sincere as the Apostles proved themselves to be,
+would have taken other ground than the assertion that their master had
+reappeared to them alive, unless some very extraordinary occurrences had
+led them to believe that they had indeed seen him.  If their faith was
+glowing and intense at the time of the Crucifixion—so intense that they
+believed in Christ as much, or nearly as much, after the Crucifixion as
+before it (and unless this were so the hallucinations could never have
+arisen at all, or at any rate could never have been so unanimously
+accepted)—it would have been so intense as to stand in no need of a
+reappearance.  In this case, if they had found that their master did not
+return to them, the Apostles would probably have accepted the position
+that he had, contrary to their expectation, been put to a violent death;
+they would, perhaps, have come sooner or later to the conclusion that he
+was immediately on death received into Heaven, and was sitting on the
+right hand of God; while some extraordinary dream might have been
+construed into a revelation of the fact with the manner of its
+occurrence, and been soon generally believed; but the idea of our Lord’s
+return to earth in a gross material body whereon the wounds were still
+unhealed, was perhaps the last thing that would have suggested itself to
+them by way of hallucination.  If their faith had been great enough, and
+their spirits high enough to have allowed hallucination to originate at
+all, their imagination would have presented them at once with a glorious
+throne, and the splendours of the highest Heaven as appearing through the
+opened firmament; it would not surely have rested satisfied with a man
+whose hands and side were wounded, and who could eat of a piece of
+broiled fish and of an honeycomb.  A fabric so utterly baseless as the
+reappearances of our Lord (on the supposition of their being unhistoric)
+would have been built of gaudier materials.  To repeat, it seems
+impossible that the Apostles should have attempted to connect their
+hallucinations circumstantially and historically with the events which
+had immediately preceded them.  Hallucination would have been conscious
+of a hiatus and not have tried to bridge it over.  It would not have
+developed the idea of our Lord’s return to this grovelling and unworthy
+earth prior to his assumption into glory, unless those who were under its
+influence had either seen other resurrections from the dead—in which case
+there is no difficulty attaching to the Resurrection of our Lord
+himself—or been forced into believing it by the evidence of their own
+senses; this, on the supposition that the devotion of the first disciples
+was intense before the Crucifixion; but if, on the other hand, they were
+at that time anything but steadfast, as both _a priori_ and _a
+posteriori_ evidence would seem to indicate, if they were few and
+wavering, and if what little faith they had was shaken to its foundations
+and apparently at an end for ever with the death of Christ, it becomes
+indeed difficult to see how the idea of his return to earth alive could
+have ever struck even a single one of them, much less that hallucinations
+which could have had no origin but in the disordered brain of some one
+member of the Apostolic body, should in a short time have been accepted
+by all as by one man without a shadow of dissension, and been strong
+enough to convert them, as was said above, into the most earnest and
+successful body of propagandists that the world has ever seen.
+
+Truly this is not too much to say of them; and yet we are asked to
+believe that this faith, so intensely energetic, grew out of one which
+can hardly be called a faith at all, in consequence of day-dreams whose
+existence presupposes a faith hardly if any less intense than that which
+it is supposed to have engendered.  Are we not warranted in asserting
+that a movement which is confined to a few wavering followers, and which
+receives any very decisive check, which scatters and demoralises the few
+who have already joined it, will be absolutely sure to die a speedy
+natural death unless something utterly strange and new occurs to give it
+a fresh impetus?  Such a resuscitating influence would have been given to
+the Christian religion by the reappearance of Christ alive.  This would
+meet the requirements of the case, for we can all feel that if we had
+already half believed in some gifted friend as a messenger from God, and
+if we had seen that friend put to death before our eyes, and yet found
+that the grave had no power over him, but that he could burst its bonds
+and show himself to us again unmistakably alive, we should from that
+moment yield ourselves absolutely his; but our faith would die with him
+unless it had been utter before his death.
+
+The devotion of the Apostles is explained by their belief in the
+Resurrection, but their belief in the Resurrection is not explained by a
+supposed hallucination; for their minds were not in that state in which
+alone such a delusion could establish itself firmly, and unless it were
+established firmly by the most apparently irrefragable evidence of many
+persons, it would have had no living energy.  How an hallucination could
+occur in the requisite strength to the requisite number of people is
+neither explained nor explicable, except upon the supposition that the
+Apostles were in a very different frame of mind at the time of Christ’s
+Crucifixion from that which all the evidence we can get would seem to
+indicate.  If Strauss had first made this point clear we could follow
+him.  But he has not done so.
+
+Strauss says, the conception that Christ’s body had been reawakened and
+changed, “a double miracle, exceeding far what had occurred in the case
+of Enoch and Elijah, could only be credible to one who saw in him a
+prophet far superior to them”—_i.e._, to one who notwithstanding his
+death was persuaded that he was the Messiah: “this conviction” (that a
+double miracle had been performed) “was the first to which the Apostles
+had to attain in the days of their humiliation after the Crucifixion.”
+Yes—but how were they to attain to it, being now utterly broken down and
+disillusioned?  Strauss admits that before they could have come to hold
+what he supposes them to have held, they must have seen in Christ even
+after his Crucifixion a prophet far greater than either Moses or Elias;
+whereas in point of fact it is very doubtful whether they ever believed
+this much of their master even before the Crucifixion, and hardly
+questionable that after it they disbelieved in him almost entirely, until
+he shewed himself to them alive.  Is it possible that from the dead
+embers of so weak a faith, so vast a conflagration should have been
+kindled?
+
+I submit, therefore, that independently of any direct evidence as to the
+when and where of Christ’s reappearances, the fact that the Apostles
+before the Crucifixion were irresolute, and after it unspeakably
+resolute, affords strong ground for believing that they must have seen
+something, or come to know something, which to their minds was utterly
+overwhelming in its convincing power: when we find the earliest and most
+trustworthy records unanimously asserting that that something was the
+reappearance of Christ alive, we feel that such a reappearance was an
+adequate cause for the result actually produced; and when we think over
+the condition of mind which both probability and evidence assign to the
+Apostles, we also feel that no other circumstance would have been
+adequate, nor even this unless the proof had been such as none could
+reasonably escape from.
+
+Again, Strauss’s supposition that the Apostles antedated their
+hallucinations suggests no less difficulty.  Suppose that, after all,
+Strauss is right, and that there was no actual reappearance; whatever it
+was that led the Apostles to believe in such reappearance must have been,
+judging by its effect, intense and memorable: it must have been as a
+shock obliterating everything save the memory of itself and the things
+connected with it: the time and manner of such a shock could never have
+been forgotten, nor misplaced without deliberate intention to deceive,
+and no one will impute any such intention to the Apostles.
+
+It may be said that if they were capable of believing in the reality of
+their visions they would be also capable of antedating them; this is
+true; but the double supposition of self-delusion, first in seeing the
+visions at all, and then in unconsciously antedating them, reduces the
+Apostles to such an exceedingly low level of intelligence and
+trustworthiness, that no good and permanent work could come from such
+persons; the men who could be weak enough, and crazed enough, if the
+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 in the perils which
+awaited it upon every side; they would have become victims of their own
+fancies and desires, with little or no other grounds than these for any
+opinions they might hold or teach: from such 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 at once,
+it is inconceivable that they should have happened at all.  Strauss
+believes that the disciples fled in their first terror to their homes:
+that when there, “outside the range to which the power of the enemies and
+murderers of their master extended, the spell of terror and consternation
+which had been laid upon their minds gave way,” and that under the
+circumstances a reaction up to the point at which they might have visions
+of Christ is capable of explanation.  The answer to this is that it is
+indeed likely that the spell of terror would give way when they found
+themselves safe at home, but that it is not at all likely that any
+reaction would take place in favour of one to whom their allegiance had
+never been thorough, and whom they supposed to have met with a violent
+and accursed end.  It might be easy to imagine such a reaction if we did
+not also attempt to imagine the circumstances that must have preceded it;
+the moment we try to do this, we find it to be an impossibility.  If once
+the Apostles had been dispersed, and had returned home to their former
+avocations without having seen or heard anything of their master’s return
+to earth, all their expectations would have been ended; they would 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, and
+bereaved of that master mind which had kept them from falling out with
+one another, would have remained a united and enthusiastic body?  Strauss
+admits that their enthusiasm was for the time ended.  Is it then likely
+that they would have remained in any sense united, or is it not much more
+likely that they would have shunned each other and disliked allusions to
+the past?  What but Christ’s actual reappearance could rekindle this dead
+enthusiasm, and fan it to such a burning heat?  Suppose that one or two
+disciples recovered faith and courage, the majority would never do so.
+If Christ himself with the magic of his presence could not weld them into
+a devoted and harmonious company, would the rumour arising at a later
+time that some one had seen him after death, be acceptable enough to make
+the others believe that they too had actually seen and handled him?
+Perhaps—if the rumour was believed.  But _would_ it have been believed?
+Or at any rate have been believed so utterly?
+
+We cannot think it.  For the belief and assertion are absolutely without
+trace of dissent within the Christian body, and that body was in the
+first instance composed entirely of the very persons who had known and
+followed Christ before the Crucifixion.  If some of the original twelve
+had remained aloof and disputed the reappearances of Christ, is it
+possible that no trace of such dissension should appear in the Epistles
+of St. Paul?  Paul differed widely enough from those who were Apostles
+before him, and his language concerning them is occasionally that of
+ill-concealed contempt and hatred rather than of affection; but is there
+a word or hint which would seem to indicate that a single one of those
+who had the best means of knowing doubted the Resurrection?  There is
+nothing of the kind; on the contrary, whatever we find is such as to make
+us feel perfectly sure that none of them _did_ doubt it.  Is it then
+possible that this unanimity should have sprung from the original
+hallucinations of a small minority?  True—it is plain from the Epistle to
+the Corinthians that there were some of Paul’s contemporaries who denied
+the Resurrection.  But who were they?  We should expect that many among
+the more educated Gentile converts would throw doubt upon so stupendous a
+miracle, but is there anything which would point in the direction of
+these doubts having been held within the original body of those who said
+that they had seen Christ alive?  By the eleven, or by the five hundred
+who saw him at once?  There is not one single syllable.  Those who heard
+the story second-hand would doubtless some of them attempt to explain
+away its miraculous character, but if it had been founded on
+hallucination it is not from these alone that the doubts would have come.
+
+Something is imperatively demanded in order to account for the intensity
+of conviction manifested by the earliest Christians shortly after the
+Crucifixion; for until that time they were far from being firmly
+convinced, and the Crucifixion was the very last thing to have convinced
+them.  Given (to speak of our Lord as he must probably appear to Strauss)
+an unusually gifted teacher of a noble and beautiful character: given
+also, a small body of adherents who were inclined to adopt him as their
+master and to regard him as the coming liberator, but who were
+nevertheless far from settled in their conviction: given such a man and
+such followers: the teacher is put to a shameful death about two years
+after they had first known him, and the followers forsake him instantly:
+surely without his reappearing in some way upon the scene they would have
+concluded that their doubts had been right and their hopes without
+foundation: but if he reappeared, their faith would, for the first time,
+become intense, all-absorbing.  Surely also they might be trusted to know
+whether they had really seen their master return to them or not, and not
+to sacrifice themselves in every way, and spend their whole lives in
+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 objective character of
+Christ’s Resurrection as derivable from the conversion and testimony of
+St. Paul.  It is this.  Strauss and those who agree with him will perhaps
+maintain that the Apostles were in truth wholly devoted to Christ before
+the Crucifixion, but that the Evangelists have represented them as being
+only half-hearted, in order to heighten the effect of their subsequent
+intense devotion.  But this looks like falling into the very error which
+Rationalists condemn most loudly when it comes from so-called orthodox
+writers.  They complain, and with too much justice, that our apologists
+have made “anything out of anything.”  Yet if the Apostles were not
+unsteadfast, and did not desert their master in his hour of peril, and if
+all the accounts of Christ’s reappearances are the creations of
+disordered fancy, we may as well at once declare the Evangelists to be
+worthless as historians, and had better give up all attempt at the
+construction of history with their assistance.  We cannot take whatever
+we wish, and leave whatever we wish, and alter whatever we wish.  If we
+admit that upon the whole the Gospel writings or at any rate the first
+three Gospels, contain a considerable amount of historic matter, we
+should also arrive at some general principles by which we will
+consistently abide in separating the historic from the unhistoric.  We
+cannot deal with them arbitrarily, accepting whatever fits in with our
+fancies, and rejecting whatever is at variance with them.
+
+Now can it be maintained that the Evangelists would be so likely to
+overrate the half-heartedness of the Apostles, that we should look with
+suspicion upon the many and very plain indications of their having been
+only half-hearted?  Certainly not.  If there was any likelihood of a
+tendency one way or the other it would be in the direction of overrating
+their faith.  Would not the unbelief of the Apostles in the face of all
+the recorded miracles be a most damaging thing in the eyes of the
+unconverted?  Would not the Apostles themselves, after they were once
+firmly convinced, be inclined to think that they had from the first
+believed more firmly than they really had done?  This at least would be
+in accordance with the natural promptings of human instinct: we are all
+of us apt to be wise after the event, and are far more prone to dwell
+upon things which seem to give some colour to a pretence of prescience,
+than upon those which force from us a confession of our own stupidity.
+It might seem a damaging thing that the Apostles should have doubted as
+much as long as they clearly did; would then the Evangelists go out of
+their way to introduce more signs of hesitation?  Would any one suggest
+that the signs of doubt and wavering had been overrated, unless there
+were some theory or other to be supported, in order to account for which
+this overrating was necessary?  Would the opinion that the want of faith
+had been exaggerated arise prior to the formation 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 to
+believe that, before the Resurrection, the Apostles were less convinced
+than is generally supposed, but it would be dangerous to depart either to
+the right hand or to the left of that which we find actually recorded,
+namely, that in the main the Apostles were prepared to accept Christ
+before the Crucifixion, but that they were by no means resolute and
+devoted followers.  I submit that this is a fair rendering of the spirit
+of what we find in the Gospels.  It is just because Strauss has chosen to
+depart from it that he has found himself involved in the maze of
+self-contradiction through which we have been trying to follow him.
+There is no position so absurd that it cannot be easily made to look
+plausible, if the strictly scientific method of investigation is once
+departed from.
+
+But if I had been in Strauss’s place, and had wished to make out a case
+against Christianity without much heed of facts, I should not have done
+it by a theory of hallucinations.  A much prettier, more novel and more
+sensational opening for such an attempt is afforded by an attack upon the
+Crucifixion itself.  A very neat theory might be made, that there may
+have been some disturbance at one of the Jewish passovers, during which
+some persons were crucified as an example by the 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 he had been absent during the tumult,
+little by little worked themselves up into the belief that on his
+reappearance they had seen wounds upon him, and that the details of the
+Crucifixion were afterwards revealed in a vision to some favoured
+believer, until in the course of a few years the narrative assumed its
+present shape: that then the reappearance of Christ was denied among the
+Jews, while the Crucifixion as attaching disgrace to him was not
+disputed, and that it thus became so generally accepted as to find its
+way into Pliny and Josephus.  This tissue of absurdity may serve as an
+example of what the unlicensed indulgence of theory might lead to; but
+truly it would be found quite as easy of belief as that the early
+Christian faith in the Resurrection was due to hallucination only.
+
+Considering, then, that Christianity was not crushed but overran the most
+civilised portions of the world; that St. Paul was undoubtedly early
+told, in such a manner as for him to be thoroughly convinced of the fact,
+that on some few but sufficient occasions Christ was seen alive after he
+had been crucified; that the general belief in the reappearance of our
+Lord was so strong that those who had the best means of judging gave up
+all else to preach it, with a unanimity and singleness of purpose which
+is irreconcilable with hallucination; that all our records most
+definitely insist upon this belief and that there is no trace of its ever
+having been disputed among the Jewish Christians, it seems hard to see
+how we can escape from admitting that Jesus Christ was crucified, dead,
+and buried, and yet that he was verily and indeed seen alive again by
+those who expected nothing less, but who, being once convinced, turned
+the whole world after them.
+
+It is now incumbent upon us to examine the testimony of St. Paul, to
+which 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 as given
+in the Acts of the Apostles—for I am bound to admit that there are
+circumstances in connection with that account which throw doubt upon its
+historical accuracy—and looking at the broad facts only, we are struck at
+once with the following obvious reflection, namely, that Paul was an able
+man, a cultivated man, and a bitter opponent of Christianity; but that in
+spite of the strength of his original prejudices, he came to see what he
+thought convincing reasons for going over to the camp of his enemies.  He
+went over, and with the result we are all familiar.
+
+Now even supposing that the miraculous account of Paul’s conversion is
+entirely devoid of foundation, or again, as I believe myself, that the
+story given in the Acts is not correctly placed, but refers to the vision
+alluded to by Paul himself (I. Cor. xv.), and to events which happened,
+not coincidently with his conversion, but some years after it—does not
+the importance of the conversion itself rather gain than lose in
+consequence?  A charge of unimportant inaccuracy may be thus sustained
+against one who wrote in a most inaccurate age; but what is this in
+comparison with the testimony borne to the strength of the Christian
+evidences by the supposition that _of their own weight alone_, _and
+without miraculous assistance_, _they succeeded in convincing the most
+bitter_, _and at the same time the ablest_, _of their opponents_?  This
+is very pregnant.  No man likes to abandon the side which he has once
+taken.  The spectacle of a man committing himself deeply to his original
+party, changing without rhyme or reason, and then remaining for the rest
+of his life the most devoted and courageous adherent of all that he had
+opposed, without a single human inducement to make him do so, is one
+which has never been witnessed since man was man.  When men who have been
+committed deeply and spontaneously to one cause, leave it for another,
+they do so either because facts have come to their knowledge which are
+new to them and which they cannot resist, or because their temporal
+interests urge them, or from caprice: but if they change from caprice in
+important matters and after many pledges given, they will change from
+caprice again: they will not remain for twenty-five or thirty years
+without changing a jot of their capriciously formed opinions.  We are
+therefore warranted in assuming that St. Paul’s conversion to
+Christianity was not dictated by caprice: it was not dictated by
+self-interest: it must therefore have sprung from the weight of certain
+new facts which overbore all the resistance which he could make to them.
+
+What then could these facts have been?
+
+Paul’s conduct as a Jew was logical and consistent: he did what any
+seriously-minded man who had been strictly brought up would have done in
+his situation.  Instead of half believing what he had been taught, he
+believed it wholly.  Christianity was cutting at the root of what was in
+his day accepted as fundamental: it was therefore perfectly natural that
+he should set himself to attack it.  There is nothing against him in this
+beyond the fact of his having done it, as far as we can see, with much
+cruelty.  Yet though cruel, he was cruel from the best of motives—the
+stamping out of an error which was harmful to the service of God; and
+cruelty was not then what it is now: the age was not sensitive and the
+lot of all was harder.  From the first he proved himself to be a man of
+great strength of character, and like many such, deeply convinced of the
+soundness of his opinions, and deeply impressed with the belief that
+nothing could be good which did not also commend itself as good to him.
+He tested the truth of his earlier convictions not by external standards,
+but by the internal standard of their own strength and purity—a fearful
+error which but for God’s mercy towards him would have made him no less
+wicked than well-intentioned.
+
+Even after having been convinced by a weight of evidence which no
+prejudice could resist, and after thus attaining to a higher conception
+of right and truth and goodness than was possible to him as a Jew, there
+remained not a few traces of the old character.  Opposition beyond
+certain limits was a thing which to the end of his life he could not
+brook.  It is not too much to say that he regarded the other Apostles—and
+was regarded by them—with suspicion and dislike; even if an angel from
+Heaven had preached any other doctrine than what Paul preached, the angel
+was to be accursed (Gal. i., 8), and it is not probable that he regarded
+his fellow Apostles as teaching the same doctrine as himself, or that he
+would have allowed them greater licence than an angel.  It is plain from
+his undoubted Epistles to the Corinthians and Galatians that the other
+Apostles, no less than his converts, exceedingly well knew that he was
+not a man to be trifled with.  If the arm of the law had been as much on
+his side after his conversion as before it, it would have gone hardly
+with dissenters; they would have been treated with politic tenderness the
+moment that they yielded, but woe betide them if they presumed on having
+any very decided opinions of their own.
+
+On the other hand, his sagacity is beyond dispute; it is certain that his
+perception of what the Gentile converts could and could not bear was the
+main proximate cause of the spread of Christianity.  He prevented it from
+becoming a mere Jewish sect, and it has been well said that but for him
+the Jews would now be Christians, and the Gentiles unbelievers.  Who can
+doubt his tact and forbearance, where matters not essential were
+concerned?  His strength in not yielding a fraction upon vital points was
+matched only by his suppleness and conciliatory bearing upon all others.
+To use his own words, he did indeed become “all things to all men” if by
+any means he could gain some, and the probability is that he pushed this
+principle to its extreme (see Acts xxi., 20–26).
+
+Now when we see a man so strong and yet so yielding—the writer moreover
+of letters which shew an intellect at once very vigorous and very subtle
+(not to say more of them), and when we know that there was no amount of
+hardship, pain, and indignity, which he did not bear and count as gain in
+the service of Jesus Christ; when we also remember that he continued thus
+for all the known years of his life after his conversion, can we think
+that that conversion could have been the result of anything even
+approaching to caprice?  Or again, is it likely that it could have been
+due to contact with the hallucinations of his despised and hated enemies?
+Paul the Christian appears to be the same sort of man in most respects as
+Paul the Jew, yet can we imagine Paul the Christian as being converted
+from Christianity to some other creed, by the infection of
+hallucinations?  On the contrary, no man would more quickly have come to
+the bottom of them, and assigned them to diabolical agency.  What then
+can that thing have been, which wrenched the strong and able man from all
+that had the greatest hold upon him, and fixed him for the rest of his
+life as the most self-sacrificing champion of Christianity?  In answer to
+this question we might say, that it is of no great importance how the
+change was made, inasmuch as the fact of its having been made at all is
+sufficiently pregnant.  Nevertheless it will be interesting to follow
+Strauss in his remarks upon the account given in the Acts, and I am bound
+to add that I think he has made out his case.  Strange! that he should
+have failed to see that the evidences in support of the Resurrection are
+incalculably strengthened by his having done so.  How short-sighted is
+mere ingenuity!  And how weak and cowardly are they who shut their eyes
+to facts because they happen to come from an opponent!
+
+Strauss, however, writes as follows:—“That we are not bound to the
+individual features of the account in the Acts is shewn by comparing it
+with the substance of the statement twice repeated in the language of
+Paul himself: for there we find that the author’s own account is not
+accurate, and that he attributed no importance to a few variations more
+or less.  Not only is it said on one occasion that the attendants stood
+dumb-foundered: on another that they fell with Paul to the ground; on one
+occasion that they heard the voice but saw no one; on another that they
+saw the light but did not hear the voice of him who spoke with Paul: but
+also the speech of Jesus himself, in the third repetition, gets the well
+known addition about “kicking against the pricks,” to say nothing of the
+fact that the appointment to the Apostleship of the Gentiles, which
+according to the two earlier accounts was made partly by Ananias, partly
+on the occasion of a subsequent vision in the Temple at Jerusalem, is in
+this last account incorporated in the speech of Jesus.  There is no
+occasion to derive the three accounts of this occurrence in the Acts from
+different sources, and even in this case one must suppose that the author
+of the Acts must have remarked and reconciled the discrepancies; that he
+did not do so, or rather that without following his own earlier narrative
+he repeated it in an arbitrary form, proves to us how careless the New
+Testament writers are about details of this kind, important as they are
+to one who strives after strict 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 the
+history from the narrative of an eye witness.  Even if we consider the
+person who in different places comprehends himself and the Apostle Paul
+under the word ‘we’ or ‘us’ to have been the composer of the whole work,
+that person was not on the occasion of the occurrence before Damascus as
+yet in the company of the Apostle.  Into this he did not enter until much
+later, in the Troad, on the Apostle’s second missionary journey (Acts
+xvi., 10).  But that hypothesis with regard to the author of the Acts of
+the Apostles is, moreover, as we have seen above, erroneous.  He only
+worked up into different passages of his composition the memoranda of a
+temporary companion of the Apostle about the journeys performed in his
+company, and we are therefore not justified in considering the narrator
+to have been an eye witness in those passages and sections in which the
+‘we’ is wanting.  Now among these is found the very section in which
+appear the two accounts of his conversion which Paul gives, first, to the
+Jewish people in Jerusalem, secondly, to Agrippa and Festus in Cæsarea.
+The last occasion on which the ‘we’ was found was xxi., 18, that of the
+visit of Paul to James, and it does not appear again until xxvii., 1,
+when the subject is the Apostle’s embarkation for Italy.  Nothing
+therefore compels us to assume that we have in the reports of these
+speeches the account of any one who had been a party to the hearing of
+them, and, in them, Paul’s own narrative of the occurrences that took
+place on his conversion.”
+
+The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures having been long
+given up by all who have considered the awful consequences which it
+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 in with the
+feelings and customs of their own times, and must accordingly be allowed
+to have been occasionally guilty of what would in our own age be called
+inaccuracies.  There is no dependence to be placed on the verbal, or
+indeed the substantial, accuracy of any ancient speeches, except those
+which we know to have been reported _verbatim_, they were (as with the
+Herodotean and Thucydidean speeches) in most cases the invention of the
+historian himself, as being what seemed most appropriate to be said by
+one in the position of the speaker.  Reporting was a rare art among the
+ancients, and was confined to a few great centres of intellectual
+activity; accuracy, moreover, was not held to be of the same importance
+as at the present day.  Yet without accurate reporting a speech perishes
+as soon as it is uttered, except in so far as it lives in the actions of
+those who hear it.  Even a hundred years ago the invention of speeches
+was considered a matter of course, as in the well-known case of Dr.
+Johnson, than whom none could be more conscientious, and—according to his
+lights—accurate.  I may perhaps be pardoned for quoting the passage in
+full from Boswell, who gives it on the authority of Mr. John Nichols; the
+italics are mine.  “He said that the Parliamentary debates were the only
+part of his writings which then gave him any compunction: _but that at
+the time he wrote them he had no conception that he was imposing upon the
+world_, _though they were frequently written from very slender
+materials_, _and often from none at all—the mere coinage of his own
+imagination_.  He never wrote any part of his works with equal velocity.”
+(Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, chap. lxxxii.)
+
+This is an extreme case, yet there can be no question about its truth.
+It is only one among the very many examples which could be adduced in
+order to shew that the appreciation of the value of accuracy is a thing
+of modern date only—a thing which we owe mainly to the chemical and
+mechanical sciences, wherein the inestimable difference between precision
+and inaccuracy became most speedily apparent.  If the reader will pardon
+an apparent digression, I would remark that that sort of care is wanted
+on behalf of Christianity with 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 enough before he allowed it to leave his hands.  This
+caution would have saved the wasting of many lives, and the breaking of
+many hearts.
+
+We, on the other hand, however reckless we may be ourselves, are in the
+habit of assuming that any historian whom we may have occasion to
+consult, and on whose testimony we would fain rely, must have himself
+weighed and re-weighed his words as the cashier his money; an error which
+arises from want of that sympathy which should make us bear constantly in
+mind what lights men had, under what influences they wrote, and what we
+should ourselves have done had we been so placed as they.  But if any
+will maintain that though the general run of ancient speeches were, as
+those supposed to have been reported by Johnson, pure invention, yet that
+it is not likely that one reporting the words of Almighty God should have
+failed to feel the awful responsibility of his position, we can only
+answer that the writer of the Acts did most indisputably so fail, as is
+shewn by the various reports of those words which he has himself given:
+if he could in the innocency of his heart do this, and at one time report
+the Almighty as saying this, and at another that, as though, more or
+less, this or that were a matter of no moment, what certainty can we have
+concerning such a man that inaccuracy shall not elsewhere be found in
+him?  None.  He is a warped mirror which will distort every object that
+it reflects.
+
+It follows, then, that from the Acts of the Apostles we have no data for
+arriving at any conclusion as to the manner of Paul’s change of faith,
+nor the circumstances connected with it.  To us the accounts there given
+should be simply non-existent; but this is not easy, for we have heard
+them too often and from too early an age to be able to escape their
+influence; yet we must assuredly ignore them if we are anxious to arrive
+at truth.  We cannot let the story told in the Acts enter into any
+judgement which we may form concerning Paul’s character.  The desire to
+represent him as having been converted by miracle was very natural.  He
+himself tells us that he saw visions, and received his apostleship by
+revelation—not necessarily at the time of, or immediately after, his
+conversion, but still at some period or other in his life; it would be
+the most natural thing in the world for the writer of the Acts to connect
+some version of one of these visions with the conversion itself: the
+dramatic effect would be heightened by making the change, while the
+change itself would be utterly unimportant in the eyes of such a writer;
+be this however as it may, we are only now concerned with the fact that
+we know nothing about Paul’s conversion from the Acts of the Apostles,
+which should make us believe that that conversion was wrought in him by
+any other means, than by such an irresistible pressure of evidence as no
+sane person could withstand.
+
+From the Apostle’s own writings we can glean nothing about his conversion
+which would point in the direction of its having been sudden or
+miraculous.  It is true that in the Epistle to the Galatians he says,
+“After it had pleased God to reveal his Son in me,” but this expression
+does not preclude the supposition that his conversion may have been led
+up to by a gradual process, the culmination of which (if that) he alone
+regarded as miraculous.  Thus we are forced to admit that we know nothing
+from any source concerning the manner and circumstances of St. Paul’s
+change from Judaism to Christianity, and we can only conclude therefore
+that he changed because he found the weight of the evidence to be greater
+than he could resist.  And this, as we have seen, is an exceedingly
+telling fact.  The probability is, that coming much into contact with
+Christians through his persecution of them, and submitting them to the
+severest questioning, he found that they were in all respects sober
+plainspoken men, that their conviction was intense, their story coherent,
+and the doctrines which they had received simple and ennobling; that
+these results of many inquisitions were so unvarying that he found
+conviction stealing gradually upon him against his will; common honesty
+compelled him to inquire further; the answers pointed invariably in one
+direction only; until at length he found himself utterly unable to resist
+the weight of evidence which he had collected, and resolved, perhaps at
+the last suddenly, to yield himself a convert to Christianity.
+
+Strauss says that, “in the presence of the believers in Jesus,” the
+conviction that he was a false teacher—an impostor—“must have become
+every day more doubtful to him.  They considered it not only publicly
+honourable to be as convinced of his Resurrection as they were of their
+own life—but they shewed also a state of mind, a quiet peace, a tranquil
+cheerfulness, even under suffering, which put to shame the restless and
+joyless zeal of their persecutor.  Could _he_ have been a false teacher
+who had adherents such as these?  Could that have been a false pretence
+which gave such rest and security? on the one hand, he saw the new sect,
+in spite of all persecutions, nay, in consequence of them, extending
+their influence wider and wider round them; on the other, as their
+persecutor, he felt that inward tranquillity growing less and less which
+he could observe in so many ways in the persecuted.  We cannot therefore
+be surprised if in hours of inward despondency and unhappiness he put to
+himself the question, ‘Who after all is right, thou, or the crucified
+Galilean about whom these men are so enthusiastic?’  And when he had got
+as far as this, the result, with his bodily and mental characteristics,
+naturally followed in an ecstasy in which the very same Christ whom up to
+this time he had so passionately persecuted, appeared to him in all the
+glory of which his adherents spoke so much, shewed him the perversity and
+folly of his conduct, and called him to come over to his service.”
+
+The above comes simply to this, that Paul in his constant contact with
+Christians found that they had more to say for themselves than he could
+answer, and should, one would have thought, have suggested to Strauss
+what he supposes to have occurred to Paul, namely, that it was not likely
+that these men had made a mistake in thinking that they had seen Christ
+alive after his Crucifixion.  There can be no doubt about Strauss’s being
+right as to the Christian intensity of conviction, strenuousness of
+assertion, and readiness to suffer for the sake of their faith in Christ;
+and these are the main points with which we are concerned.  We arrive
+therefore at the conclusion that the first Christians were sufficiently
+unanimous, coherent and undaunted to convince the foremost of their
+enemies.  They were not so _before_ the Crucifixion; they could not
+certainly have been made so by the Crucifixion alone; something beyond
+the Crucifixion must have occurred to give them such a moral ascendancy
+as should suffice to generate a revulsion of feeling in the mind of the
+persecuting Saul.  Strauss asks us to believe that this missing something
+is to be found in the hallucinations of two or three men whose names have
+not been recorded and who have left no mark of their own.  Is there any
+occasion for answer?
+
+It is inconceivable that he who could write the Epistle to the Romans
+should not also have been as able as any man who ever lived to question
+the early believers as to their converse with Christ, and to report
+faithfully the substance of what they told him.  That he knew the other
+Apostles, that he went up to Jerusalem to hold conferences with 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 ιστορησαι is a
+very suggestive one.  It is so easy to make too much out of anything that
+I hardly dare to say how strongly the use of the verb ιστορειν suggests
+to me “getting at the facts of the case,” “questioning as to how things
+happened,” yet such would be the most obvious meaning of the word from
+which our own “history” and “story” are derived.  Fifteen days was time
+enough to give Paul the means of coming to an understanding with Peter as
+to what the value of Peter’s story was, nor can we believe that Paul
+should not both receive and transmit perfectly all that he was then told.
+In fact, without supposing these men to be so utterly visionary that
+nothing durable could come out of them, there is no escape from holding
+that Peter was justified in firmly believing that he had seen Christ
+alive within a very few days of the Crucifixion, that he succeeded also
+in satisfying Paul that this belief was well-founded, and that in the
+account of Christ’s reappearances, as given I. Cor. xv., we have a
+virtually _verbatim_ report of what Paul heard from Peter and the other
+Apostles.  Of course the possibility remains that Paul may have been too
+easily satisfied, and not have cross-examined Peter as closely as he
+might have done.  But then Paul was converted _before_ this interview;
+and this implies that he had already found a general consent among the
+Christians whom he had met with, that the story which he afterwards heard
+from Peter (or one to the same effect) was true.  Whence then the
+unanimity of this belief?  Strauss answers as before—from the
+hallucinations of an originally small minority.  We can only again reply
+that for the reasons already given we find it quite 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 brother intended to make a
+fresh translation from the original passages, but he never carried out
+his intention, and in his MS. the page of the English translation with
+the first and last words of each passage are alone given.  I could hardly
+venture to undertake the responsibility of making a fresh translation
+myself, and have therefore adhered almost word for word to the published
+English translation—here and there, however, a trifling alteration was
+really irresistible on the scores 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 the view
+of St. Paul’s conversion taken above—that is to say, to make him regard
+the conversion as mainly, if not entirely, due to the weight of evidence
+afforded by the courage and consistency of the early Christians.
+
+But, the change in Paul’s mind being thus referred to causes which
+preclude all possibility of hallucination or ecstasy on his own part, it
+becomes unnecessary to discuss the attempts which have been made to
+explain away the miraculous character of the account given in the Acts.
+I believe that this account is founded upon fact, and that it is derived
+from some description furnished by St. Paul himself of the vision
+mentioned, I. Cor. xv., which again is very possibly the same as that of
+II. Cor. xii.  For the purposes of the present investigation, however,
+the whole story must be set aside.  At the same time it should be borne
+in mind, that any detraction from the historical accuracy of the writer
+of the Acts, is more than compensated for, by the additional weight given
+to the conversion of St. Paul, whom we are now able to regard as having
+been converted by evidence which was in itself overpowering, and which
+did not stand in need of any miraculous interference in order to confirm
+it.
+
+It is important to observe that the testimony of Paul should carry more
+weight with those who are bent upon close critical investigation than
+that even of the Evangelists.  St. Paul is one whom we know, and know
+well.  No syllable of suspicion has ever been breathed, even in Germany,
+against the first four of the Epistles which have been generally assigned
+to him; friends and foes of Christianity are alike agreed to accept them
+as the genuine work of the Apostle.  Few figures, therefore, in ancient
+history stand out more clearly revealed to us than that of St. Paul,
+whereas a thick veil of darkness 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
+highest authority), and how far it has been modified in translation, are
+things 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 more hotly contested
+than those of the other three, and all that can be affirmed with
+certainty concerning it is, that no trace of its existence 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’s Epistles to have been a pillar of
+Judaism.
+
+With St. Paul all is changed: we not only know him better than we know
+nine-tenths of our own most eminent countrymen of the last century, but
+we feel a confidence in him which grows greater and greater the more we
+study his character.  He combines to perfection the qualities that make a
+good witness—capacity and integrity: add to this that his conclusions
+were forced upon him.  We therefore feel that, whereas from a scientific
+point of view, the Gospel narratives can only be considered as the
+testimony of early and sincere writers of whom we know little or nothing,
+yet that in the evidence of St. Paul we find the missing link which
+connects us securely with actual eye-witnesses and gives us a confidence
+in the general accuracy of the Gospels which they could never of
+themselves alone have imparted.  We could indeed ill spare either the
+testimony of the Evangelists or that of St. Paul, but if we were obliged
+to content ourselves with one 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 preached unto
+you, which also ye have received and wherein ye stand.  By which also 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 of all that which I
+also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the
+Scriptures: and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day
+according to the Scriptures; and that He was seen of Cephas, then of the
+twelve: after that He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of
+whom the greater portion remain unto this present, but some are fallen
+asleep.  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 due time.”
+
+In the first place we must notice Paul’s assertion that the Gospel which
+he was then writing was identical with that which he had originally
+preached.  We may assume that each of the appearances of Christ here
+mentioned had in Paul’s mind a definite time and place, derived from the
+account which he had received and which probably led to his conversion;
+the words “that which I also received” surely imply “that which I also
+received _in the first instance_”: now we know from his own mouth (Gal.
+i., 16, 17) that _after_ his conversion he “conferred not with flesh and
+blood”—“neither,” he continues, “went I up to Jerusalem to them which
+were Apostles before me, but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto
+Damascus: then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see
+(ιστορησαι) Peter, and abode with him fifteen days, but others of the
+Apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother.”  Since, then, he
+must have heard _some_ story concerning Christ’s reappearances before his
+conversion and subsequent sojourn in Arabia, and since he had heard
+nothing from eye-witnesses until the time of his going up to Jerusalem
+three years later, it is probable that the account quoted above is the
+substance of what he found persisted in by the Christians whom he was
+persecuting at Damascus, and was at length compelled to believe.  But
+this is very unimportant: it is more to the point to insist upon the fact
+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 it was
+subsequently confirmed to him by Peter, and probably by James and John,
+during his stay of fifteen days in Peter’s house.
+
+This account can have been nothing new even then, for it is plain that at
+the time of Paul’s conversion the Christian Church had spread far: Paul
+speaks of _returning_ to Damascus, as though the writer of the Acts was
+right as regards the place of his conversion; but the fact of there
+having been a church in Damascus of sufficient importance for Paul to go
+thither to persecute it, involves the lapse of considerable time since
+the original promulgation of our Lord’s Resurrection, and throws back the
+origin of the belief in that event to a time closely consequent upon the
+Crucifixion itself.
+
+Now Paul informs us that he was told (we may assume by Peter and James)
+that Christ first reappeared _within three days of the Crucifixion_.
+There is no sufficient reason for doubting this; and one fact of weekly
+recurrence even to this day, affords it striking confirmation—I refer to
+the institution of Sunday as the Lord’s day.  We know that the observance
+of this day in commemoration of the Resurrection was a very early
+practice, nor is there anything which would seem to throw doubt upon the
+fact of the first “Sunday” having been also the Sunday of the
+Resurrection.  Another confirmation of the early date assigned to the
+Resurrection by St. Paul, is to be found in the fact that every instinct
+would warn the Apostles _against_ the third day as being dangerously
+early, and as opening a door for the denial of the completeness of the
+death.  The fortieth day would far more naturally have been chosen.
+
+Turning now from the question of the date of the first reappearance to
+what is told us of the reappearances themselves, we find that the
+earliest was vouchsafed to St. Peter, which is at first sight opposed to
+the Evangelistic records; but this is a discrepancy upon which no stress
+should be laid; St. Paul might well be aware that Mary Magdalene was the
+first to look upon her risen Lord, and yet have preferred to dwell upon
+the more widely known names of Peter and his fellow Apostles.  The facts
+are probably these, that our Lord first shewed Himself to the women, but
+that Peter was the first of the Apostolic body to see Him; it was natural
+that if our Lord did not choose to show Himself to the Apostles without
+preparation, Peter should have been chosen as the one best fitted to
+prepare them: Peter probably collected the other Apostles, and then the
+Redeemer shewed Himself alive to all together.  This is what we should
+gather from St. Paul’s narrative; a narrative which it would seem
+arbitrary to set aside in the face of St. Paul’s character, opportunities
+and antecedent prejudices against Christianity—in the face also of the
+unanimity of all the records we have, as well as of the fact that the
+Christian religion triumphed, and of the endless difficulties attendant
+on the hallucination theory.
+
+We conclude therefore that Paul was satisfied by sufficient evidence that
+our Lord had appeared to Peter on the third day after the Crucifixion,
+nor can any reasonable doubt be thrown upon the other appearances of
+which he tells us.  It is true that on the occasion of his visit to Peter
+he saw none other of the Apostles save James—but there is nothing to lead
+us to suppose that there was any want of unanimity among them: no trace
+of this has come down to us, and would surely have done so if it had
+existed.  If any dependence at all is to be placed on the writers of the
+New Testament it did not exist.  Stronger evidence than this unanimity it
+would be hard to find.
+
+Another most noticeable feature is the fewness of the recorded
+appearances of Christ.  They commenced according to Paul (and this is
+virtually according to Peter and James) immediately after the
+Crucifixion.  Paul mentions only five appearances: this does not preclude
+the supposition that he knew of more, nor that the women who came to the
+sepulchre had also seen Him, but it does seem to imply that the
+reappearances were few in number, and that they continued only for a very
+short time.  They were sufficient for their purpose: one of preparation
+to Peter—another to the Apostles—another to the outside world, and then
+one or two more—but still not more than enough to establish the fact
+beyond all possibility of dispute.  The writer of the Acts tells us that
+Christ was seen for a space of forty days—presumably not every day, but
+from time to time.  Now forty days is a mystical period, and one which
+may mean either more or less, within a week or two, than the precise time
+stated; it seems upon the whole most reasonable to conclude that the
+reappearances recorded by Paul, and some few others not recorded,
+extended over a period of one or two months after the Crucifixion, and
+that they then came to an end; for there can be no doubt that St. Paul
+conceived them as having ended with the appearance to the assembled
+Apostles mentioned I. Cor. xv., 7, and, though he does not say so
+expressly, there is that in the context which suggests their having been
+confined to a short space of time.
+
+It is perfectly clear that St. Paul did not believe that any one had seen
+Christ in the interval between the last recorded appearance to the
+eleven, and the vision granted to himself.  The words “and last of all he
+was seen also of me _as of one born out of due time_” point strongly in
+the direction of a lapse of some years between the second appearance to
+the eleven and his own vision.  This confirms and is confirmed by the
+writer of the Acts.  St. Paul never could have used the words quoted
+above, if he had held that the appearances which he records had been
+spread over a space of years intervening between the Crucifixion and his
+own vision.  Where would be the force of “born out of due time” unless
+the time of the previous appearances had long passed by?  But if, at the
+time of St. Paul’s conversion, it was already many years since the last
+occasion upon which Christ had been seen by his disciples, we find
+ourselves driven back to a time closely consequent upon the Crucifixion
+as the only possible date of the reappearances.  But this is in itself
+sufficient condemnation of Strauss’s theory: that theory requires
+considerable time for the development of a perfectly unanimous and
+harmonious belief in the hallucinations, while every particle of evidence
+which we can get points in the direction of the belief in the
+Resurrection having followed 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 end so soon.
+When once the mind has begun to run riot in hallucination, it is prodigal
+of its own inventions.  Favoured believers would have been constantly
+seeing Christ even up to the time of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,
+and the Apostle would have written that even then Christ was still
+occasionally seen of those who trusted in him, and served him faithfully.
+But we meet with nothing of the sort: we are told that Christ was seen a
+few times shortly after the Crucifixion, then _after a lapse of several
+years_ (I am surely warranted in saying this) Paul himself saw Him—but no
+one in the interval, and no one afterwards.  This is not the manner of
+the hallucinations of uneducated people.  It is altogether too sober: the
+state of mind from which alone so baseless a delusion could spring, is
+one which never could have been contented with the results which were
+evidently all, or nearly all, that Paul knew of.  St. Paul’s words cannot
+be set aside without more cause than Strauss has shewn: instead of
+betraying a tendency towards exaggeration, they contain nothing whatever,
+with the exception of his own vision, that is not imperatively demanded
+in order to account for the rise and spread of Christianity.
+
+Concerning that vision Strauss writes as follows:
+
+“With regard to the appearance he (Paul) witnessed—he uses the same word
+(ωφθη) as with regard to the others: he places it in the same category
+with them only in the last place, as he names himself the last of the
+Apostles, but in exactly the same rank with the others.  Thus much,
+therefore, Paul knew—or supposed—that the appearances which the elder
+disciples had seen soon after the Resurrection of Jesus 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 not
+objective—that Paul thought he saw Christ, although he never really saw
+him.  But, says Strauss, he uses the same word for his own vision and for
+the appearances to the earlier Apostles: it is plain therefore that he
+did not suppose the earlier Apostles to have seen Christ in the same sort
+of way in which they saw themselves and other people, but to have seen
+him as Paul himself did, _i.e._, by supernatural revelation.
+
+But would it not be more fair to say that Paul’s using the same word for
+all the appearances—his own vision included—implies that he considered
+this last to have been no less real than those vouchsafed earlier, though
+he may have been perfectly well aware that it was different in kind?  The
+use of the same word for all the appearances is quite compatible with a
+belief in Paul’s mind that the manner in which he saw Christ was
+different from that in which the Apostles had seen him: indeed, so long
+as he believed that he had seen Christ no less really than the others,
+one cannot see why he should have used any other word for his own vision
+than that which he had applied to the others: we should even expect that
+he would do so, and should be surprised at his having done otherwise.
+That Paul did believe in the reality of his own vision is indisputable,
+and his use of the word ωφθη was probably dictated by a desire to assert
+this belief in the strongest possible way, and to place his own vision in
+the same category with others, which were so universally known among
+Christians to have been material and objective, that there was no
+occasion to say so.  Nevertheless there is that in Paul’s words on which
+Strauss does not dwell, but which cannot be passed over without notice.
+Paul does not simply say, “and last of all he was seen also of me”—but he
+adds the words “as of one born out of due time.”
+
+It is impossible to say decisively that this addition implies that Paul
+recognised a difference in kind between the appearances, inasmuch as the
+words added may only refer to time—still they would explain the possible
+use of [ωφθη] in a somewhat different sense, and I cannot but think that
+they will suggest this possibility to the reader.  They will make him
+feel, if he does not feel it without them, how strained a proceeding it
+is to bind Paul down to a rigorously identical meaning on every occasion
+on which the same word came from his pen, and to maintain that because he
+once uses it on the occasion of an appearance which he held to be
+vouchsafed by revelation, therefore, wherever else he uses it, he must
+have intended to refer to something seen by revelation: the words “as of
+one born out of due time” imply the utterly unlooked for and transcendent
+nature of the favour, and suggest, even though they do not compel, the
+inference that while the other Apostles had seen Christ in the common
+course of nature, as a visible tangible being before their waking eyes,
+he had himself seen Him not less truly, but still only by special and
+unlooked for revelation.  If such thoughts were in his mind he would not
+probably have expressed them farther than by the touching words which he
+has added concerning his own vision.  So much for the objection that the
+evidence of Paul concerning the earlier appearances is impaired by his
+having used the same word for them, and for the appearance to himself.
+It only remains therefore to review in brief the general bearings of
+Paul’s testimony as given I. Cor. xv., 1–8.
+
+Firstly, there is the early commencement of the reappearances: this is
+incompatible with hallucination, for the hallucination must be supposed
+to have occurred when most easy to refute, and when the spell of shame
+and fear was laid most heavily upon the Apostles.  Strauss maintains that
+the appearances were unconsciously antedated by Peter; we can only say
+that the circumstances of the case, as entered into more fully above,
+render this very improbable; that if Peter told Paul that he saw Christ
+on the third day after the Crucifixion, he probably firmly believed that
+he did see Him; and that if he believed this, he was also probably right
+in so believing.
+
+Secondly, there is the fact that the reappearances were few, and extended
+over a short time only.  Had they been due to hallucination there would
+have been no limit either to their number or duration.  Paul seems to
+have had no idea that there ever had been, or ever would be, successors
+to the five hundred brethren who saw Christ at one time.  Some were
+fallen asleep—the rest would in time follow them.  It is incredible that
+men should have so lost all count of fact, so debauched their perception
+of external objects, so steeped themselves in belief in dreams which had
+no foundation but in their own disordered brains, as to have turned the
+whole world after them by the sheer force of their conviction of the
+truth of their delusions, and yet that suddenly, within a few weeks from
+the commencement of this intoxication, they should have come to a dead
+stop and given no further sign of like extravagance.  The hallucinations
+must have been so baseless, and would argue such an utter subordination
+of judgement to imagination, that instead of ceasing they must infallibly
+have ended in riot and disorganisation; the fact that they did cease
+(which cannot be denied) and that they were followed by no disorder, but
+by a solemn sober steadfastness of purpose, as of reasonable men in
+deadly earnest about a matter which had come to their knowledge, and
+which they held it vital for all to know—this fact alone would be
+sufficient to overthrow the hallucination theory.  Such intemperance
+could never have begotten such temperance: from such a frame of mind as
+Strauss assigns to the Apostles no religion could have come which should
+satisfy the highest spiritual needs of the most civilised nations of the
+earth for nearly two thousand years.
+
+When, therefore, we look at the want of faith of the Apostles before the
+Crucifixion, and to their subsequent intense devotion; at their unanimity
+at their general sobriety; at the fact that they succeeded in convincing
+the ablest of their enemies and ultimately the whole of Europe; at the
+undeviating consent of all the records we have; at the early date at
+which the reappearances commenced,—at their small number and short
+duration—things so foreign to the nature of hallucination; at the
+excellent opportunities which Paul had for knowing 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 its truth; at the impossibility of
+accounting for the rise of Christianity without the reappearance of its
+Founder after His Crucifixion; when we look at all these things we shall
+admit that it is impossible to avoid the belief that after having died,
+Christ _did_ reappear to his disciples, and that in this fact we have the
+only intelligible 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 the historic
+character of the Resurrection by the ablest of its impugners.  I know of
+nothing in any of Strauss’s works which can be considered as doing better
+justice to his opinions than the passages which I have quoted and, I
+trust, refuted.  I have quoted fully, and have kept nothing in the
+background.  If I had known of anything stronger against the Resurrection
+from any other source, I should certainly have produced it.  I have
+answered in outline only, but I do not believe that I have passed any
+difficulty on one side.
+
+What then does the reader think?  Was the attack so dangerous, or the
+defence so far to seek?  I believe he will agree with me that the combat
+was one of no great danger when it was once fairly entered upon.  But the
+wonder, and, let me add, the disgrace, to English divines, is that the
+battle should have been shirked so long.  What is it that has made the
+name of Strauss so terrible to the ears of English Churchmen?  Surely
+nothing but the ominous silence which has been maintained concerning him
+in almost all quarters of our Church.  For what can he say or do against
+the other miracles if he be powerless against the Resurrection?  He can
+make sentences which sound plausible, but that is no great feat.  Can he
+show that there is any _a priori_ improbability whatever, in the fact of
+miracles having been wrought by one who died and rose from the dead?  If
+a man did this it is a small thing that he should also walk upon the
+waves and command the winds.  But if there is no _a priori_ difficulty
+with regard to these miracles, there is certainly none other.
+
+Let this, however, for the present pass, only let me beg of the reader to
+have patience while I follow out the plan which I have pursued up to the
+present point, and proceed to examine certain difficulties of another
+character.  I propose to do so with the same unflinching examination as
+heretofore, concealing nothing that has been said, or that can be said;
+going out of my way to find arguments for opponents, if I do not think
+that they have put forward all that from their own point of view they
+might have done, and careless how many difficulties I may bring before
+the reader which may never yet have occurred to him, provided I feel that
+I can also shew him how little occasion there is to fear them.
+
+I must, however, maintain two propositions, which may perhaps be
+unfamiliar to some of those who have not as yet given more than a
+conventional and superficial attention to the Scriptural records, but
+which will meet with ready assent from all whose studies have been
+deeper.  Fain would I avoid paining even a single reader, but I am
+convinced that the arresting of infidelity depends mainly upon the
+general recognition of two broad facts.  The first is this—that the
+Apostles, even after they had received the gift of the Holy Spirit were
+still fallible though holy men; the second—that there are certain
+passages in each of the Gospels as we now have them, which were not
+originally to be found therein, and others which, though genuine, are
+still not historic.  This much of concession we must be prepared to make,
+and we shall find (as in the case of the conversion of St. Paul) that our
+position is indefinitely strengthened by doing so.
+
+When shall we Christians learn that the truest ground is also the
+strongest?  We may be sure that until we have done so we shall find a
+host of enemies who will say that truth is not ours.  It is we who have
+created infidelity, and who are responsible for it.  _We_ are the true
+infidels, for we have not sufficient faith in our own creed to believe
+that it will bear the removal of the incrustations of time and
+superstition.  When men see our cowardice, what can they think but that
+we must know that we have cause to be afraid?  We drive men into unbelief
+in spite of themselves, by our tenacious adherence to opinions which
+every unprejudiced person must see at a glance that we cannot rightfully
+defend, and then we pride ourselves upon our love for Christ and our
+hatred of His enemies.  If Christ accepts this kind 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 zeal against His
+enemies.  If those to whom the unfamiliarity of an opinion or its
+inconvenience to themselves is a test of its hatefulness to Christ, had
+been born Jews, they would have crucified Him whom they imagine that they
+are now serving: if Turks, they would have massacred both Jew and
+Christian; if Papists at the time of the Reformation they would have
+persecuted Protestants: if Protestants, under Elizabeth, Papists.  Truth
+is to them an accident of birth and training, and the Christian faith is
+in their eyes true because these accidents, as far as they are concerned,
+have decided in its favour.  But such persons are not Christians.  It is
+they who crucify Christ, who drive men from coming to Him whose every
+instinct would lead them to love and worship Him, but who are warned off
+by observing the crowd of sycophants and time-servers who presume to call
+Him Lord.
+
+But to look at the matter from another point of view; when there is a
+long sustained contest between two bodies of capable and seriously
+disposed people, (and none can deny that many of our adversaries have
+been both one and the other), and when this contest shews no sign of
+healing, but rather widens from generation to generation, and each party
+accuses the other of disingenuousness, obstinacy and other like serious
+defects of mind—it may be certainly assumed that the truth lies wholly
+with neither side, but that each should make some concessions to the
+other.  A third party sees this at a glance, and is amazed because
+neither of the disputants can perceive that his opponent must be
+possessed of some truths, in spite of his trying to defend other
+positions which are indefensible.  Strange! that a thing which it seems
+so easy to avoid, should so seldom be avoided!  Homer said 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.  We agree
+to this readily in the abstract, but we seldom do so when any given
+concession is in question.  We are all for concession in the general, but
+for none in the particular, as people who say that they will retrench
+when they are living beyond their income, but will not consent to any
+proposed retrenchment.  Thus many shake their heads and say that it is
+impossible to live in the present age and not be aware of many
+difficulties in connection with the Christian religion; they have studied
+the question more deeply than perhaps the unbeliever imagines; and having
+said this much they give themselves credit for being wide-minded, liberal
+and above vulgar prejudices: but when pressed as to this or that
+particular difficulty, and asked to own that such and such an objection
+of the infidel’s needs explanation, they will have none of it, and will
+in nine cases out of ten betray by their answers that they neither know
+nor want to know what the infidel means, but on the contrary that they
+are resolute to remain in ignorance.  I know this kind of liberality
+exceedingly well, and have ever found it to harbour more selfishness,
+idleness, cowardice and stupidity than does open bigotry.  The bigot is
+generally better than his expressed opinions, these people are invariably
+worse than theirs.
+
+The above principle has been largely applied in the writings of so-called
+orthodox commentators, not unfrequently even by men who might have been
+assumed to be above condescending to such trickery.  A great preface
+concerning candour, with a flourish of trumpets in the praise of truth,
+seems to have exhausted every atom of truth and candour from the work
+that follows it.
+
+It will be said that I ought not to make use of language such as this
+without bringing forward examples.  I shall therefore adduce them.
+
+One of the most serious difficulties to the unbeliever is the
+inextricable confusion in which the accounts of the Resurrection have
+reached us: no one can reconcile these accounts with one another, not
+only in minute particulars, but in matters on which it is of the highest
+importance to come to a clear understanding.  Thus, to omit all notice of
+many other discrepancies, the accounts of Mark, Luke, and John concur in
+stating that when the women came to the tomb of Jesus 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.  There is nothing in any of these three
+accounts to preclude the possibility of the stone’s having been removed
+within an hour or two of the body’s having been laid in the tomb.
+
+But when we turn to Matthew we find all changed: we are told that the
+stone was gone _not_ when the women came, but that on their arrival there
+was a great earthquake, and that an angel came down from Heaven, and
+rolled away the stone, _and sat upon it_, and that the guard who had been
+set over the tomb (of whom we hear nothing from any of the other
+evangelists) became as dead men while the angel addressed the women.
+
+Now this is not one of those cases in which the supposition can be
+tolerated that all would be clear if the whole facts of the case were
+known to us.  No additional facts can make it come about that the tomb
+should have been sealed and guarded, and yet _not_ sealed and guarded;
+that the same women, at the same time and place, should have witnessed an
+earthquake, and yet _not_ witnessed one; have found a stone already gone
+from a tomb, and yet _not_ found it gone; have seen it rolled away, and
+_not_ seen it, and so on; those who say that we should find no difficulty
+if we knew _all_ the facts are still careful to abstain from any example
+(so far as I know) of the sort of additional facts which would serve
+their purpose.  They cannot give one; any mind which is truly
+candid—white—not scrawled and scribbled over till no character is
+decipherable—will feel at once that the only question to be raised is,
+which is the more correct account of the Resurrection—Matthew’s or those
+given by the other three Evangelists?  How far is Matthew’s account true,
+and how far is it exaggerated?  For there must be either exaggeration or
+invention somewhere.  It is inconceivable that the other writers should
+have known the story told by Matthew, and yet not only made no allusion
+to it, but introduced matter which flatly contradicts it, and it is also
+inconceivable that the story should be true, and yet that the other
+writers should not have known it.
+
+This is how the difficulty stands—a difficulty which vanishes in a moment
+if it be rightly dealt with, but which, when treated after our unskilful
+English method, becomes capable of doing inconceivable mischief to the
+Christian religion.  Let us see then what Dean Alford—a writer whose
+professions of candour and talk about the duty of unflinching examination
+leave nothing to be desired—has to say upon this point.  I will first
+quote the passage in full from Matthew, and then give the Dean’s note.  I
+have drawn the greater part of the comments that will follow it from an
+anonymous pamphlet {141} upon the Resurrection, dated 1865, but without a
+publisher’s name, so that I presume it must have been printed for private
+circulation only.
+
+St. Matthew’s account runs:—
+
+    “Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation, the
+    chief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate, saying, ‘Sir,
+    we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, “After
+    three days I will rise again.”  Command therefore that the sepulchre
+    be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night
+    and steal him away and say unto the people, “He is risen from the
+    dead:” so the last error shall be worse than the first.’  Pilate said
+    unto them, ‘Ye have 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.  In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn
+    towards the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other
+    Mary to see the sepulchre.  And, behold, there was a great
+    earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came
+    and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.  His
+    countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: And
+    for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men.  And
+    the angel answered and said unto the women, ‘Fear not ye: for I know
+    that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.  He is not here: for he is
+    risen, as he said.  Come, see the place where the Lord lay.  And go
+    quickly, 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 sepulchre with
+    fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples word.  And as
+    they went to tell his disciples, Jesus met them, saying, ‘All hail.’
+    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 they see
+    me.’  Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into
+    the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were
+    done.  And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken
+    counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, ‘Say ye,
+    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 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.”
+
+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, he
+tells us that the narrative following (_i.e._, the account of the guard
+and the earthquake) “has been much impugned and its historical accuracy
+very generally given up even by the best of the German commentators
+(Olshausen, Meyer; also De Wette, Hase, and others).  The chief
+difficulties found in it seem to be: (1) How should the chief priests,
+&c., _know of His having said_ ‘in three days I will rise 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 said_ could be no secret.
+Not to lay any stress on John ii., 19 (Jesus answered and said unto them,
+‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will 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 heart of the earth): besides this there would be a
+rumour current, through the intercourse of the Apostles with others, that
+He had been in the habit of so saying.  (From what source can Dean Alford
+know that our Lord _was_ in the habit of so saying?  What particle of
+authority is there for this alleged habit of our Lord?)  As to the
+_understanding_ of the words we must remember that _hatred is keener
+sighted than love_: that the _raising of Lazarus_ would shew _what sort
+of a thing rising from the dead was to be_; and the fulfilment of the
+Lord’s announcement of his _crucifixion_ would naturally lead them to
+look further to _what more_ he had announced. (2) How should the women
+who were solicitous about the _removal_ of the stone not have been still
+more so about its being sealed and a guard set?  The answer to this last
+has been given above—_they were not aware of the circumstance because the
+guard was not set till the evening before_.  There would be no need of
+the application before the _approach of the third day_—it is only made
+for a watch, εως της τρίτης ημέρας (ver. 64), and it is not probable that
+the circumstance would transpire that night—certainly it 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) had really happened, he
+need not have expressed himself doubtfully (Acts v., 39), but would have
+been certain that this was from God.  But, first, it does not necessarily
+follow that _every member_ of the Sanhedrim was present, and applied to
+Pilate, or even had they done so, that all bore a part in the act of
+xxviii., 12” (the bribing of the guard to silence).  “One who like Joseph
+had not consented to the deed before—and we may safely say that there
+were others such—would naturally withdraw himself from further
+proceedings against the person of Jesus. (4) Had this been so the three
+other Evangelists would not have passed over so important a testimony to
+the Resurrection.  But surely we cannot argue in this way—for thus every
+important fact narrated by _one Evangelist alone_ must be rejected, e.g.
+(which stands in much the same relation), _the satisfaction of
+Thomas—another such narrations_.  _Till we know more about the
+circumstances under which_, _and the scope with which_, _each Gospel was
+compiled_, _all a priori arguments of this kind are good for nothing_.”
+
+(The italics in the above, and throughout the notes quoted, are the
+Dean’s, unless it is expressly stated otherwise.)
+
+I will now proceed to consider this defence of Matthew’s accuracy against
+the objections of the German commentators.
+
+I.  The German commentators maintain that the chief priests are not
+likely to have known of any prophecy of Christ’s Resurrection when His
+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 not reveal to the
+understanding of the Apostles.  True, according to Matthew, Christ had
+said that as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly,
+so the Son of Man should be three days and three nights in the heart of
+the earth; but it would be only hatred which would suggest the
+interpretation of so obscure a prophecy: love would not be sufficiently
+keen-sighted to understand it.
+
+But in the first place I would urge that if the Apostles had ever heard
+any words capable of suggesting the idea that Christ should rise, after
+they had already seen the raising of Lazarus, on whom corruption had
+begun its work, they _must_ have expected the Resurrection.  After having
+seen so stupendous a miracle, any one would expect anything which was
+even suggested by the One who had performed it.  And, secondly, hatred is
+not keener sighted than love.
+
+2.  Dean Alford says that the raising of Lazarus would shew the chief
+priests what sort of a thing the Resurrection from the dead was to be,
+and that the fulfilment of Christ’s prophecy concerning his Crucifixion
+would naturally lead them to look further to what else he had announced.
+
+But, if the raising of Lazarus would shew the chief priests what sort of
+thing the Resurrection was to be, it would shew the Apostles also; and
+again if the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Crucifixion would lead the
+chief priests to look further to the fulfilment of the prophecy of the
+Resurrection, so would it lead the Apostles; this supposition of one set
+of men who can see everything, and of another with precisely the same
+opportunities and no less interest, who can see nothing, is vastly
+convenient upon the stage, but it is not supported by a reference to
+Nature; self-interest would have opened the eyes of the Apostles.
+
+II.  The German commentators ask how was it possible that the women who
+were solicitous about the removal of the stone, should not be still more
+so about “its being sealed and a guard set?”  If the German commentators
+have asked their question in this shape, they have asked it badly, and
+Dean Alford’s answer is sufficient: they might have asked, how the other
+three writers could all tell us that the stone was already gone when the
+women got there, and yet Matthew’s story be true? and how Matthew’s story
+could be true without the other writers having known it? and how the
+other writers could have introduced matter contradictory to it, if they
+had known it to be true?
+
+III.  The German commentators say that in the Acts of the Apostles we
+find Gamaliel expressing himself as doubtful whether or no Christianity
+was of God, whereas had he known the facts related by Matthew he could
+have had no doubt at all.  He must have _known_ that Christianity was of
+God.
+
+Dean Alford answers that perhaps Gamaliel was not there.  To which I
+would rejoin that though Gamaliel might have had no hand in the bribery,
+supposing it to have taken place, it is inconceivable that such a story
+should have not reached him; the matter could never have been kept so
+quiet but that it must have leaked out.  Men are not so utterly bad or so
+utterly foolish as Dean Alford seems to imply; and whether Gamaliel was
+or was not present when the guard were bribed, he must have been equally
+aware of the fact before making the speech which is assigned to him in
+the Acts.
+
+IV.  The German commentators argue from the silence of the other
+Evangelists: Dean Alford replies by denying that this silence is any
+argument: but I would answer, that on a matter which the other three
+writers must have known to have been of such intense interest, their
+silence is a conclusive proof either of their ignorance or their
+indolence as historians.  Dean Alford has well substantiated the
+independence of the four narratives, he has well proved that the writer
+of the fourth Gospel could never have seen the other Gospels, and yet he
+supposes that that writer either did not know the facts related by
+Matthew, or thought it unnecessary to allude to them.  Neither of these
+suppositions is tenable: but there would nevertheless be a shadow of
+ground for Dean Alford to stand upon if the other Evangelists were simply
+silent: but why does he omit all notice of their introducing matter which
+is absolutely incompatible with Matthew’s accuracy?
+
+There is one other consideration which must suggest itself to the reader
+in connection with this story of the guard.  It refers to the conduct of
+the chief priests and the soldiers themselves.  The conduct assigned to
+the chief priests in bribing the guard to lie against one whom they must
+by this time have known to be under supernatural protection, is contrary
+to human nature.  The chief priests (according to Matthew) knew that
+Christ had said he should rise: in spite of their being well aware that
+Christ had raised Lazarus from the dead but very recently they did not
+believe that he _would_ rise, but feared (so Matthew says) that the
+Apostles would steal the body and pretend a resurrection: up to this
+point we admit that the story, though very improbable, is still possible:
+but when we read of their bribing the guards to tell a lie under such
+circumstances as those which we are told had just occurred, we say that
+such conduct is impossible: men are too great cowards to be capable of
+it.  The same applies to the soldiers: they would never dare to run
+counter to an agency which had nearly killed them with fright on that
+very selfsame morning.  Let any man put himself in their position: let
+him remember that these soldiers were previously no enemies to Christ,
+nor, as far as we can judge, is it likely that they 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 on Matt.
+xxviii., 1–10) and referring to their “minor discrepancies,” the Dean
+says, “_Supposing us to be acquainted with every thing said and done in
+its order and exactness_, _we should doubtless be able to reconcile_, _or
+account for_, _the present forms of the narratives_; but not having this
+key to the harmonising of them, all attempts to do so in minute
+particulars must be full of arbitrary assumptions, and carry no certainty
+with them: and I may remark that _of all harmonies_ those of the
+_incidents of these chapters_ are to me the _most unsatisfactory_.
+Giving their compilers all credit for the best intentions, I confess they
+seem to me to _weaken_ instead of strengthening the evidence, which now
+rests (speaking merely _objectively_) on the unexceptionable testimony of
+three independent narrators, and one who besides was an eye witness of
+much that happened.  If we are to compare the four and ask which is to be
+taken as most nearly reporting the _exact_ words and incidents, on this
+there can, I think, be no doubt.  On internal as well as external ground
+_that of John_ takes the _highest place_, but not of course to the
+exclusion of those parts of the narrative which he _does not touch_.”
+
+Surely the above is a very extraordinary note.  The difficulty of the
+irreconcilable differences between the four narratives is not met nor
+attempted to be met: the Dean seems to consider the attempt as hopeless:
+no one, according to him, has been as yet successful, neither can he see
+any prospect of succeeding better himself: the expedient therefore which
+he proposes is that the whole should be taken on trust; that it should be
+assumed that no discrepancy which could not be accounted for would be
+found, if the facts were known in the exact order in which they occurred.
+In other words, he leaves the difficulty where it was.  Yet surely it is
+a very grave one.  The same events are recorded by three writers (one
+being professedly an eye-witness, and the others independent writers), in
+a way which is virtually the same, in spite of some unimportant
+variations in the manner of telling it, while a fourth gives a totally
+different and irreconcilable account; the matter stands in such confusion
+at present that even Dean Alford admits that any attempt to reconcile the
+differences leaves them in worse confusion than ever; the ablest and most
+spiritually minded of the German commentators suggest a way of escape;
+nevertheless, according to the Dean we are not to profit by 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 a
+subject treated thus.  What is trifling if this is not trifling?  What is
+disingenuousness if not this?  It involves some trouble and apparent
+danger to admit that the same thing has happened to the Christian records
+which has happened to all others—_i.e._, that they have
+suffered—miraculously little, but still something—at the hands of 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 by all means and at all
+risks to be avoided.  Who can doubt that some such feeling as this was in
+Dean Alford’s mind when the notes above criticised were written?  Yet
+what are the means taken to avoid the recognition of obvious truth?  They
+are disingenuous in the very highest degree.  Can this prosper?  Not if
+Christ is true.
+
+What is the practical result?  The loss of many souls who would gladly
+come to the Saviour, but who are frightened off by seeing the manner in
+which his case is defended.  And what after all is the danger 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 risk to this or that fundamental
+principle of our belief, nor yet with the possibility of lurid lights
+being thrown here or there.  What are these things to us?  They are not
+our business or concern, but rest with the Being who has required of _us_
+that we should reverently, patiently, unostentatiously, yet resolutely,
+strive to find out what things 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 we proceed to
+set aside the account of the Resurrection given in St. Matthew’s Gospel.
+That account must be looked upon as the invention of 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 of the Resurrection were
+becoming scarce, and when it was felt that some more unmistakably
+miraculous account than that given in the other three Gospels would be a
+comfort and encouragement to succeeding generations.  We, however, must
+now follow the example of “even the best” of the German commentators, and
+discard it as soon as possible.  On having done this the whole difficulty
+of the confusion of the four accounts of the Resurrection vanishes like
+smoke, and we find ourselves with three independent writers whose
+differences are exactly those which we might expect, considering the time
+and circumstances in which they wrote, but which are still so trifling as
+to disturb no man’s faith.
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+More Disingenuousness
+
+
+[Here, perhaps, will be the fittest place for introducing a letter to my
+brother from a gentleman who is well known to the public, but who does
+not authorise me to give his name.  I found this letter among my
+brother’s papers, endorsed with the words “this must be attended to,” but
+with nothing more.  I imagine that my brother would have incorporated the
+substance of his correspondent’s letter into this or the preceding
+chapter, but not venturing to do so myself, I have thought it best to
+give the letter and extract in full, and thus to let 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 of your
+argument.  I am sorry that you should be doing it, for I need not tell
+you that I do not and cannot sympathise with the great and unexpected
+change in your opinions.  You are the last man in the world from whom I
+should have expected such a change: but, as you well know, you are also
+the last man in the world whose sincerity in making it I should be
+inclined to question.  May you find peace and happiness in whatever
+opinions you adopt, and let me trust also that you will never forget the
+lessons of toleration which you learnt as the disciple of what you will
+perhaps hardly pardon me for calling a freer and happier school of
+thought than the one to which you now believe yourself to belong.
+
+Your brother tells me that you are ill; I need not say that I am sorry,
+and that I should not trouble you with any personal matter—I write solely
+in reference to the work which I hear that you have undertaken, and which
+I am given to understand consists mainly in the endeavour to conquer
+unbelief, by really entering into the difficulties felt by unbelievers.
+The scheme is a good one _if thoroughly carried out_.  We imagine that we
+stand in no danger from any such course as this, and should heartily
+welcome any book which tried to grapple with us, even though it were to
+compel us to admit a great deal more than I at present think it likely
+that even you can extort from us.  Much more should we welcome a work
+which made people understand us better than they do; this would indeed
+confer a lasting benefit 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 _pro tanto_: it is
+this:—Paley, in his third book, professes to give “a brief 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, and that
+people who are ill like being saved from small exertions.  I have,
+therefore, bought a second-hand Paley for a shilling, and have cut out
+the chapter to which I especially want to call your attention.  Will you
+kindly read it through from beginning to end?
+
+Is it fair?  Is the statement of our objections anything like what we
+should put forward ourselves?  And can you believe that Paley with his
+profoundly critical instinct, and really great knowledge of the New
+Testament, should not have been perfectly well aware that he was
+misrepresenting and ignoring the objections which he professed to be
+removing?
+
+He must have known very well that the principle of confirmation by
+discrepancy is one of very limited application, and that it will not
+cover anything approaching to such wide divergencies as those which are
+presented to us in the Gospels.  Besides, how _can_ he talk about
+Matthew’s object as he does, and yet omit all allusion to the wide and
+important differences between his account of the Resurrection, and those
+of Mark, Luke, and John?  Very few know what those differences really
+are, in spite of their having the Bible always open to them.  I suppose
+that Paley felt pretty sure that his readers would 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 to me) wicked.  Now don’t do
+this yourself.  If you are going to meet us, meet us fairly, and let us
+have our say.  Don’t pretend to let us have our say while taking good
+care that we get no chance of saying it.  I know you won’t.
+
+However, will you point out Paley’s unfairness in heading this part of
+his work “A brief consideration of some popular objections,” and then
+proceeding to give a chapter on “the discrepancies between the several
+Gospels,” without going into the details of any of those important
+discrepancies which can have been known to none better than himself?
+This is the only place, so far as I remember, in his whole book, where he
+even touches upon the discrepancies in the Gospels.  Does he do so as a
+man who felt that they were unimportant and could be approached with
+safety, or as one who is determined to carry the reader’s attention away
+from them, and fix it upon something else by a _coup de main_?
+
+This chapter alone has always convinced me that Paley did not believe in
+his own book.  No one could have rested satisfied with it for moment, if
+he felt that he was on really strong ground.  Besides, how insufficient
+for their purpose are his examples of discrepancies which do not impair
+the credibility of the main fact recorded!
+
+How would it have been if Lord Clarendon and three other historians had
+each told us that the Marquis of Argyll _came to life again after being
+beheaded_, and then set to work to contradict each other hopelessly as to
+the manner of his reappearance?  How if Burnet, Woodrow, and Heath had
+given an account which was not at all incompatible with a natural
+explanation of the whole matter, while Clarendon gave a circumstantial
+story in flat contradiction to all the others, and carefully excluded any
+but a supernatural explanation?  Ought we to, or should we, allow the
+discrepancies to pass unchallenged?  Not for an hour—if indeed we did not
+rather order the whole story out of court at once, as too wildly
+improbable to deserve a hearing.
+
+You will, I know, see all this, and a great deal more, and will point it
+better than I can.  Let me as an old friend entreat you not to pass this
+over, but to allow me to continue to think of you as I always have
+thought of you hitherto, namely, as the most impartial disputant in the
+world.—Yours, &c.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+ (_Extract from Paley’s_ “_Evidences_.”—_Part III._, _Chapter 1_.  “_The
+                  Discrepancies between the Gospels_.”)
+
+“I know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of the understanding,
+than to reject the substance of a story, by reason of some diversity in
+the circumstances with which it is related.  The usual character of human
+testimony is substantial truth under circumstantial variety.  This is
+what the daily experience of courts of justice teaches.  When accounts of
+a transaction come from the mouths of different witnesses, it is seldom
+that it is not possible to pick out apparent or real inconsistencies
+between them.  These inconsistencies are studiously displayed by an
+adverse pleader, but oftentimes with little impression upon the minds of
+the judges.  On the contrary, close and minute agreement induces the
+suspicion of confederacy and fraud.  When written histories touch upon
+the same scenes of action, the comparison almost always affords ground
+for a like reflection.  Numerous and sometimes important variations
+present themselves; not seldom, also, absolute and final contradictions;
+yet neither one nor the other are deemed sufficient to shake the
+credibility of the main fact.  The embassy of the Jews to deprecate the
+execution of Claudian’s order to place his statue in their temple Philo
+places in harvest, Josephus in seed-time, both contemporary writers.  No
+reader is led by this inconsistency to doubt whether such an embassy was
+sent, or whether such an order was given.  Our own history supplies
+examples of the same kind.  In the account of the Marquis of Argyll’s
+death in the reign of Charles II., we have a very remarkable
+contradiction.  Lord Clarendon relates that he was condemned to be
+hanged, which was performed the same day; on the contrary, Burnet,
+Woodrow, Heath, Echard, concur in stating that he was condemned upon the
+Saturday, and executed upon a Monday. {158a}  Was any reader of English
+history ever sceptic enough to raise from hence a question, whether the
+Marquis of Argyll was executed or not?  Yet this ought to be left in
+uncertainty, according to the principles upon which the Christian
+religion has sometimes been attacked.  Dr. Middleton contended that the
+different hours of the day assigned to the Crucifixion of Christ by John
+and the other Evangelists, did not admit of the reconcilement which
+learned men had proposed; and then concludes the discussion with this
+hard remark: ‘We must be forced, with several of the critics, to leave
+the difficulty just as we found it, chargeable with all the consequences
+of manifest inconsistency.’ {158b}  But what are these consequences?  By
+no means the discrediting of the history as to the principal fact, by a
+repugnancy (even supposing that repugnancy not to be resolvable into
+different modes of computation) in the time of the day in which it is
+said to have taken place.
+
+“A great deal of the discrepancy observable in the Gospels arises from
+_omission_; from a fact or a passage of Christ’s life being noticed by
+one writer, which is unnoticed by another.  Now, omission is at all times
+a very uncertain ground of objection.  We perceive it not only in the
+comparison of different writers, but even in the same writer, when
+compared with himself.  There are a great many particulars, and some of
+them of importance, mentioned by Josephus in his Antiquities, which as we
+should have supposed, ought to have been put down by him in their place
+in the Jewish Wars. {159a}  Suetonius, Tacitus, Dion Cassius have all
+three written of the reign of Tiberius.  Each has mentioned many things
+omitted by the rest, {159b} yet no objection is from thence taken to the
+respective credit of their histories.  We have in our own times, if there
+were not something indecorous in the comparison, the life of an eminent
+person, written by three of his friends, in which there is very great
+variety in the incidents selected by them, some apparent, and perhaps
+some real, contradictions: yet without any impeachment of the substantial
+truth of their accounts, of the authenticity of the books, of the
+competent information or general fidelity of the writers.
+
+“But these discrepancies will be still more numerous, when men do not
+write histories, but _memoirs_; which is perhaps the true name and proper
+description of our Gospels; that is, when they do not undertake, or ever
+meant to deliver, in order of time, a regular and complete account of
+_all_ the things of importance which the person who is the subject of
+their history did or said; but only, out of many similar ones, to give
+such passages, or such actions and discourses, as offered themselves more
+immediately to their attention, came in the way of their enquiries,
+occurred to their recollection, or were suggested by their _particular
+design_ at the time of writing.
+
+“This particular design may appear sometimes, but not always, nor often.
+Thus I think that the particular design which St. Matthew had in view
+whilst he was writing the history of the Resurrection, was to attest the
+faithful performance of Christ’s promise to his disciples to go before
+them into Galilee; because he alone, except Mark, who seems to have taken
+it from him, has recorded this promise, and he alone has confined his
+narrative to that single appearance to the disciples which fulfilled it.
+It was the preconcerted, the great and most public manifestation of our
+Lord’s person.  It was the thing which dwelt upon St. Matthew’s mind, and
+he adapted his narrative to it.  But, that there is nothing in St.
+Matthew’s language which negatives other appearances, or which imports
+that this his appearance 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 in
+Galilee as St. Matthew uses, yet itself records two other appearances
+prior to this: ‘Go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth
+before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you’
+(xvi., 7).  We might be apt to infer from these words, that this was the
+_first_ time they were to see him: at least, we might infer it with as
+much reason as we draw the inference from the same words in Matthew; yet
+the historian himself did not perceive that he was leading his readers to
+any such conclusion, for in the twelfth and two following verses of this
+chapter, he informs us of two appearances, which, by comparing the order
+of events, are shown to have been prior to the appearance in Galilee.
+‘He appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went
+into the country: and they went and told it unto the residue: neither
+believed they them.  Afterward He appeared unto the eleven as they sat at
+meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief, because they believed not
+them which had seen Him after He was risen.’  Probably the same
+observation, concerning the _particular design_ which guided the
+historian, may be of use in comparing many other passages of the
+Gospels.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+[My brother’s work, which has been interrupted by the letter and extract
+just given, will now be continued.  What follows should be considered 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 should put an end
+to such a style of argument, and get into a manner which shall commend
+itself to sincere and able adversaries, that I shall not apologise for
+giving them in full here.  They refer to the spear wound recorded in St.
+John’s Gospel as having been inflicted upon the body 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 the other which
+was crucified with Him.  But when they came to Jesus and saw that He was
+dead already they brake not His legs: but one of the soldiers with a
+spear pierced His side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.
+And he that saw it bare record, and we know that his record is true, and
+he knoweth that he saith true that ye might believe.  For these things
+were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled, ‘A bone of Him shall
+not be broken’ and again another Scripture saith, ‘They shall look on Him
+whom they pierced.’”
+
+In his note upon the thirty-fourth verse Dean Alford writes—“The lance
+must have penetrated deep, for the object was to _ensure_ death.”  Now
+what warrant is there for either of these assertions?  We are told that
+the soldiers saw that our Lord was dead already, and that for this reason
+they did not break his legs: if there had been any doubt about His being
+dead can we believe that they would have hesitated?  There is ample proof
+of the completeness of the death in the fact that those whose business it
+was to assure themselves of its having taken place were so satisfied that
+they would be at no further trouble; what need to kill a dead man?  If
+there had been any question as to the possibility of life remaining, it
+would not have been resolved by the thrust of the spear, but in a way
+which we must shudder to think of.  It is most painful to have had to
+write the foregoing lines, but are they not called for when we see a man
+so well intentioned and so widely read as the late Dean Alford
+condescending to argument which must only weaken the strength of his
+cause in the eyes of those who have not yet been brought to know the
+blessings and comfort of Christianity?  From the words of St. John no one
+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 that the wound
+must have been large enough for Thomas to get his hand into it, because
+our Lord says, “reach hither thine hand and thrust it into my side.”
+This is simply shocking.  Words cannot be pressed in this way.  Dean
+Alford then says that the spear was thrust “probably into the _left_ side
+on account of the position of the soldier” (no one can arrive at the
+position of the soldier, and no one would attempt to do so, unless
+actuated by a nervous anxiety to direct the spear into the heart of the
+Redeemer), “and of what followed” (the Dean here implies that the water
+must have come from the pericardium; yet in his next note we are led to
+infer that he rejects this supposition, inasmuch as the quantity of water
+would have been “so small as to have scarcely been observed”).  Is this
+fair and manly argument, and can it have any other effect than to
+increase the scepticism of those who doubt?
+
+Here this note ends.  The next begins upon the words “blood and water.”
+
+“The spear,” says the Dean, “perhaps pierced the pericardium or envelope
+of the heart” (but why introduce a “perhaps” when there is ample proof of
+the death without it?), “in which case a liquid answering to the
+description of water may have” (_may_ have) “flowed with the blood, but
+the quantity would have been so small as scarcely to have been observed”
+(yet in the preceding note he has led us to suppose that he thinks the
+water “probably” came from near the heart).  “It is scarcely possible
+that the separation of the blood into placenta and serum should have
+taken place so soon, or that if it had, it should have been described by
+an observe as blood and water.  It is more probable that the fact here so
+strongly testified was a consequence of the extreme exhaustion of the
+body of the Redeemer.”  (Now if this is the case, the spear-wound does
+not prove the death of Him on whom it was inflicted, and Dean Alford has
+weakened a strong case for nothing.)  “The medical opinions on the
+subject are very various and by no means satisfactory.”  Satisfactory!
+What does Dean Alford mean by satisfactory?  If the evidence does not go
+to prove that the spear-wound must have been necessarily fatal why not
+have said so at once, and have let the whole matter rest in the obscurity
+from which no human being can remove it.  The wound may have been severe
+or may not have been severe, it may have been given in mere wanton
+mockery of the dead King of the Jews, for the indignity’s sake: 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 the object of its having been recorded
+is no mystery, for we are expressly told that it was in order to shew
+_that prophecy was thus fulfilled_: the Evangelist tells us so in the
+plainest language: he even goes farther, for he says that these things
+were _done_ for this end (not only that they were _recorded_)—so that the
+primary motive of the Almighty in causing the soldier to be inspired with
+a desire to inflict the wound is thus graciously vouchsafed to us, and we
+have no reason to harrow our feelings by supposing that a deeper thrust
+was given than would suffice for the fulfilment of the prophecy.  May we
+not then well rest thankful with the knowledge which the Holy Spirit has
+seen fit to impart to us, without causing the weak brother to offend by
+our special pleading?
+
+The reader has now seen the two first of Dean Alford’s notes upon this
+subject, and I trust he will feel that I have used no greater plainness,
+and spoken with no greater severity than the case not only justifies but
+demands.  We can hardly suppose that the Dean himself is not firmly
+convinced that our Lord died upon the Cross, but there are millions who
+are not convinced, and whose conviction should be the nearest wish of
+every Christian heart.  How deeply, therefore, should we not grieve at
+meeting with a style of argument from the pen of one of our foremost
+champions, which can have no effect but that of making the sceptic
+suspect that the evidences for the death of our Lord are felt, even by
+Christians, to be insufficient.  For this is what it comes to.
+
+Let us, however, go on to the note on John xix., 35, that is to say on
+St. John’s emphatic assertion of the truth of what he is recording.  The
+note stands thus, “This emphatic assertion of the fact seems rather to
+regard the whole incident than the mere outflowing of the blood and
+water.  It was the object of John to shew that the Lord’s body was a
+_real body_ and _underwent real death_.”  (This is not John’s own
+account—supposing that John is the writer of the fourth Gospel—either of
+his own object in recording, or yet of the object of the wound’s having
+been inflicted; his words, as we have seen above, run thus:—“and he that
+saw it bare record, and we know that his record is true; and he knoweth
+that he saith true that ye might believe.  _For these things were done
+that the Scripture should be fulfilled_ which saith ‘a bone of him shall
+not be broken,’ and, again, another Scripture saith, ‘they shall look
+upon’ him whom they pierced.’”  Who shall dare to say that St. John had
+any other object than to show that the event which he relates had been
+long foreseen, and foretold by the words of the Almighty?)  And both
+these were shewn by what took place, _not so much by the phenomenon of
+the water and blood_” (then here we have it admitted that so much
+disingenuousness has been resorted to for no advantage, inasmuch as the
+fact of the water and blood having flowed is not _per se_ proof of a
+necessarily fatal wound) “as by the infliction of such a wound” (Such a
+wound!  What can be the meaning of this?  What has Dean Alford made clear
+about the wound?  We know absolutely nothing about the severity or
+intention of the wound, and it is mere baseless conjecture and assumption
+to say that we do; neither do we know anything concerning its effect
+unless it be shewn that the issuing of the blood and water _prove_ that
+death must have ensued, and this Dean Alford has just virtually admitted
+to be not shewn), after which, _even if death had not taken place before_
+(this is intolerable), _there could not by any possibility be life
+remaining_.”  (The italics on this page are mine.)
+
+With this climax of presumptuous assertion these disgraceful notes are
+ended.  They have shewn clearly that the wound does not in itself prove
+the death: they shew no less clearly that the Dean does not consider that
+the death is proved beyond possibility of doubt _without_ the wound; what
+therefore should be the legitimate conclusion?  Surely that we have no
+proof of the completeness of Christ’s death upon 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 Jesuitical unbeliever, who was trying to
+undermine our faith in our most precious convictions under the guise of
+defending them, than in those of 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 any scientific cause which we found thus defended?  We
+should exceedingly well know that it was lost.  And yet our leading
+theologians are to be applauded and set in high places for condescending
+to such sharp practice as would be despised even by a disreputable
+attorney, as too transparently 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’s body was
+wounded more severely, or less severely, as the case may be, with the
+point of a spear, that from this wound there flowed something which to
+the eyes of the writer resembled blood and water, and that the whole was
+done in order that a well-known prophecy might be fulfilled.  Yet his
+sentences in reference to this fact being ended, without his having added
+one iota to our knowledge upon the subject, the Dean gravely winds up by
+throwing a doubt upon the certainty of our Lord’s death which was not
+felt by a single one of those upon the spot, and resting his clenching
+proof of its having taken place upon a wound, which he has just virtually
+admitted to have not been necessarily fatal.  Nothing can be more
+deplorable either as morality or policy.
+
+Yet the Dean is justified by the event.  One would have thought he could
+have been guilty of nothing short of infatuation in hoping that the above
+notes would pass muster with any ordinarily intelligent person, but he
+knew that he might safely trust to the force of habit and prejudice in
+the minds of his readers, and his confidence has not been misplaced.  Of
+all those engaged in the training of our young men for Holy Orders, of
+all our Bishops and clergy and tutors at colleges, whose very profession
+it is to be lovers of truth and candour, who are paid for being so, and
+who are mere shams and wolves in sheep’s clothing if they are not ever on
+the look-out for falsehood, 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 in protest.  If a man has not lost his power of weeping let him
+weep for this; if there is any who realises the crime of self-deception,
+as perhaps the most subtle and hideous of all forms of sin, let him lift
+up his voice and proclaim it now; for the times are not of peace, but of
+a sowing of wind for the reaping of whirlwinds, and of the calm that is
+the centre of the hurricane.
+
+Either Christianity is the truth of truths—the one which should in this
+world overmaster all others in the thoughts of all men, and compared with
+which all other truths are insignificant except as grouping themselves
+around it—or it is at the best a mistake which should 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 Him so—that we should higgle for an
+inch of wound more, or an inch less, and haggle for the root νυy in the
+Greek word ενυξε.  Better admit that the death of Christ must be ever a
+matter of doubt, should so great a sacrifice be demanded of us, than go
+near to the handling of a lie in order to make assurance doubly sure.  No
+truthful mind can doubt that the cause of Christ is far better served by
+exposing an insufficient argument than by silently passing it over, or
+else that the 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 circumstances
+attendant upon the death of our Lord, using the plea that however
+excellent a quality intellect may be, and however desirable that the
+facts connected with the Crucifixion should be intelligently considered,
+yet that after all it is spiritual insight which is wanted for a just
+appreciation of spiritual truths, and that the way to be preserved from
+error is to cultivate holiness and purity of life.  This is well for
+those who are already satisfied with the evidences for their convictions.
+We could hardly give them any better advice than simply to “depart from
+evil, do good, seek peace and ensue it” (Psalm xxxiv., 14), if we could
+only make sure that their duty would never lead them into contact with
+those who hold the external evidences of Christianity to be insufficient.
+When, however, they meet with any of these unhappy persons they will find
+their influence for good paralysed; for unbelievers do not understand
+what is meant by appealing to their spiritual insight as a thing which
+can in any way affect the evidence for or against an alleged fact in
+history—or at any rate as forming evidence for a fact which they believe
+to be in itself improbable and unsupported by external proof.  They have
+not got any spiritual insight in matters of this sort; nor, indeed, do
+they recognise what is meant by the words at all, unless they be
+interpreted as self-respect and regard for the feelings and usages of
+other people.  What spiritual insight they have, they express by the very
+nearly synonymous terms, “current feeling,” or “common sense,” and
+however deep their reverence for these things may be, they will never
+admit that goodness or right feeling can guide them into intuitive
+accuracy upon a matter of history.  On the contrary, in any such case
+they believe that sentiment is likely to mislead, and that the
+well-disciplined intellect is alone trustworthy.  The question is,
+whether it is worth while to try and rescue those who are in this
+condition or not.  If it _is_ worth while, we must deal with them
+according to their sense of right and not ours: in other words, if we
+meet with an unbeliever we must not expect him to accept our faith unless
+we take much pains with him, and are prepared to make great sacrifice of
+our own peace and patience.
+
+Yet how many shrink from this, and think that they are doing God service
+by shrinking; the only thing from which they should really shrink, is the
+falsehood which has overlaid the best established fact in all history
+with so much sophistry, that even our own side has come to fear that
+there must be something lurking behind which will not bear daylight; to
+such a pass have we been brought by the desire to 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 the Crucifixion
+might end in suggesting a natural instead of a miraculous explanation of
+the Resurrection, for the comfort of such—and they indeed stand in need
+of comfort—let me say at once that the ablest of our adversaries would
+tell them that they need be under no such fear.  Strauss himself admits
+that our Lord died upon the Cross; he does not even attempt to dispute
+it, but writes as though he were well aware that there was no room for
+any difference of opinion about the matter.  He has therefore been
+compelled to adopt the hallucination theory, with a result which we have
+already considered.  Yet who can question that Strauss would have
+maintained the position that our Lord did not die upon the Cross, unless
+he had felt that it was one in which he would not be able to secure the
+support even of those who were inclined to disbelieve?  We cannot doubt
+that the conviction of the reality of our Lord’s death has been forced
+upon him by a weight of testimony which, like St. Paul, he has found
+himself utterly unable to resist.
+
+Here then, we might almost pause.  Strauss admits that our Lord died upon
+the Cross.  Yet can the reader help feeling that the vindication of the
+reality of our Lord’s reappearances, and the refutation of Strauss’s
+theories with which this work opened, was triumphant and conclusive?
+Then what follows?  That Christ died and rose again!  The central fact of
+our faith is proved.  It is proved externally by the most solid and
+irrefragable proofs, such as should appeal even to minds which reject all
+spiritual evidence, and recognise no canons of investigation but those of
+the purest reason.
+
+But anything and everything is believable concerning one whose
+resurrection from death to life has been established.  What need, then,
+to enter upon any consideration of the other miracles?  Of the Ascension?
+Of the descent of the Holy Spirit?  Who can feel difficulty about these
+things?  Would not the miracle rather be that they should _not_ have
+happened!  May we not now let the wings of our soul expand, and soar into
+the heaven of heavens, to the footstool of the Throne of Grace, secure
+that we have earned the right to hope and to glory by having consented to
+the pain of understanding?
+
+We may: and I have given the reader this foretaste of the prize which he
+may justly claim, lest he should be swallowed up in overmuch grief at the
+journey which is yet before him ere he shall have done all which may
+justly be required of him.  For it is not enough that his own sense of
+security should be perfected.  This is well; but let him also think of
+others.
+
+What then is their main difficulty, now that it has been shewn that the
+reappearances of our Lord were not due to hallucination?
+
+I propose to shew this by collecting from all the sources with which I
+was familiar in former years, and throwing the whole together as if it
+were my own.  I shall spare no pains to make the argument tell with as
+much force as fairness will allow.  I shall be compelled to be very
+brief, but the unbeliever will not, I hope, feel that anything of
+importance to his side has been passed over.  The believer, on the other
+hand, will be thankful both to know the worst and to see how shallow and
+impotent it will appear when it comes to be tested.  Oh! that this had
+been done at the beginning of the controversy, instead of (as I heartily
+trust) at the end of it.
+
+Our opponents, therefore, may be supposed to speak somewhat after the
+following manner:—“Granted,” they will say, “for the sake of argument,
+that Jesus Christ did reappear alive after his Crucifixion; it does not
+follow that we should at once necessarily admit that his reappearance was
+due to miracle.  What was enough, and reasonably enough, to make the
+first Christians accept the Resurrection, and hence the other miracles of
+Christ, is not enough and ought not to be enough to make men do so now.
+If we were to hear now of the reappearance of a man who had been believed
+to be dead, our first impulse would be to learn the when and where of the
+death, and the when and where of the first reappearance.  What had been
+the nature of the death?  What conclusive proof was there that the death
+had been actual and complete?  What examination had been made of the
+body?  And to whom had it been delivered on the completeness of the death
+having been established?  How long had the body been in the grave—if
+buried?  What was the condition of the grave on its being first
+revisited?  It is plain to any one that at the present day we should ask
+the above questions with the most jealous scrutiny and that our opinion
+of the character of the reappearance would depend upon the answers which
+could be given to them.
+
+“But it is no less plain that the distance of the supposed event from our
+own time and country is no bar to the necessity for the same questions
+being as jealously asked concerning it, as would be asked if it were
+alleged to have happened recently and nearer home.  On the contrary,
+distance of time and space introduces an additional necessity for
+caution.  It is one thing to know that the first Christians unanimously
+believed that their master had miraculously risen from death to life; it
+is another to know their reasons for so thinking.  Times have changed,
+and tests of truth are infinitely better understood, so that the
+reasonable of those days is reasonable to us no longer.  Nor would it be
+enough that the answers given could be just strained into so much
+agreement with one another as to allow of a _modus vivendi_ between them,
+_and not to exclude the possibility of death_, _they must exclude all
+possibility of life having remained_, or we should not hesitate for a
+moment about refusing to believe that the reappearance had been
+miraculous: indeed, so long as any chink or cranny or loophole for escape
+from the miraculous was afforded to us, we should unhesitatingly escape
+by it; this, at least, is the course which would be adopted by any judge
+and jury of sensible men if such a case were to come before their
+unprejudiced minds in the common course of affairs.
+
+“We should not refuse to believe in a miracle even now, if it were
+supported by such evidence as was considered to be conclusive by the
+bench of judges and by the leading scientific men of the day: in such a
+case as this we should feel bound to accept it; but we cannot believe in
+a miracle, no matter how deeply it has been engrained into the creeds of
+the civilised world, merely because it was believed by ‘unlettered
+fishermen’ two thousand years ago.  This is not a source from which such
+an event as a miracle should be received without the closest
+investigation.  We know, indeed, that the Apostles were sincere men, and
+that they firmly believed that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead;
+their lives prove their faith; but we cannot forget that the fact itself
+of Christ’s having been crucified and afterwards seen alive, would be
+enough, under the circumstances, to incline the men of that day to
+believe that he had died and had been miraculously restored to life,
+although we should ourselves be bound to make a far more searching
+inquiry before we could arrive at any such conclusion.  A miracle was not
+and could not be to them, what it is and ought to be to ourselves—a
+matter to be regarded _a priori_ with the very gravest suspicion.  To
+them it was what it is now to the lower and more ignorant classes of
+Irish, French, Spanish and Italian peasants: that is to say, a thing
+which was always more or less likely to happen, and which hardly demanded
+more than a _primâ facie_ case in order to establish its credibility.  If
+we would know what the Apostles felt concerning a miracle, we must ask
+ourselves how the more ignorant peasants of to-day feel: if we do this we
+shall have to admit that a miracle might have been accepted upon very
+insufficient grounds, and that, once accepted, it would not have had
+one-hundredth part so good a chance of being refuted as it would have
+now.
+
+“It should be borne in mind, and is too often lost sight of, that _we
+have no account of the Resurrection from any source whatever_.  We have
+accounts of the visit of certain women to a tomb which they found empty;
+but this is not an account of a resurrection.  We are told that Jesus
+Christ was seen alive after being thought to have been dead, but this
+again is not an account of a resurrection.  It is a statement of a fact,
+but it is not an account of the circumstances which attended that fact.
+In the story told by Matthew we have what comes nearest to an account of
+the Resurrection, but even here the principal figure is wanting; the
+angel rolls away the stone and sits upon it, but we hear nothing about
+the body of Christ emerging from the tomb; we only meet with this, when
+we come to the Italian painters.
+
+“Moreover, St. Matthew’s account is utterly incredible from first to
+last; we are therefore thrown back upon the other three Evangelists, none
+of whom professes to give us the smallest information as to the time and
+manner of Christ’s Resurrection.  _There is nothing in any of their
+accounts to preclude his having risen within two hours from his having
+been laid in the tomb_.
+
+“If a man of note were condemned to death, crucified and afterwards seen
+alive, the almost instantaneous conclusion in the days of the Apostles,
+and in such minds as theirs, would be that he had risen from the dead;
+but the almost instantaneous conclusion now, among all whose judgement
+would carry the smallest weight, would be that he had never died—that
+there must have been some mistake.  Children and inexperienced persons
+believe readily in all manner of improbabilities and impossibilities,
+which when they become older and wiser they cannot conceive their having
+ever seriously accepted.  As with men, so with ages; an unusual train of
+events brings about unusual results, whereon the childlike age turns
+instinctively to miracle for a solution of the difficulty.  In the days
+of Christ men would ask for evidence of the Crucifixion and the
+reappearance; when these two points had been established they would have
+been satisfied—not unnaturally—that a great miracle had been performed:
+but no sane man would be contented now with the evidence that was
+sufficient then, any more than he would be content to accept many things
+which a child must take upon authority, and authority only.  _We_ ought
+to require the most ample evidence that not only the appearance of death,
+but death itself, must have inevitably ensued upon the Crucifixion, and
+if this were not forthcoming we should not for a moment hesitate about
+refusing to believe that the reappearance was miraculous.
+
+“And this is what would most assuredly be done now by impartial
+examiners—by men of scientific mind who had no wish either to believe or
+disbelieve except according to the evidence; but even now, if their
+affections and their hopes of a glorious kingdom in a world beyond the
+grave were enlisted on the side of the miracle, it would go hard with the
+judgement of most men.  How much more would this be so, if they had
+believed from earliest childhood that miracles were still occasionally
+worked in England, and that a few generations ago they had been much more
+signal and common?
+
+“Can we wonder then, if we ourselves feel so strongly concerning events
+which are hull down upon the horizon of time, that those who lived in the
+very thick of them should have been possessed with an all absorbing
+ecstasy or even frenzy of excitement?  Assuredly there is no blame on the
+score of credulity to be attached to those who propagated the Christian
+religion, but the beliefs which were natural and lawful to them, are, if
+natural, yet not lawful to ourselves: they should be resisted: they are
+neither right nor wise, and do not form any legitimate ground for faith:
+if faith means only the believing facts of history upon insufficient
+evidence, we deny the merit of faith; on the contrary, we regard it as
+one of the most deplorable of all errors—as sapping the foundations of
+all the moral and intellectual faculties.  It is grossly immoral to
+violate one’s inner sense of truth by assenting to things which, though
+they may appear to be supported by much, are still not supported by
+enough.  The man who can knowingly submit to such a derogation from the
+rights of his self-respect, deserves the injury to his mental eye-sight
+which such a course will surely bring with it.  But the mischief will
+unfortunately not be confined to himself; it will devolve upon all who
+are ill-fated enough to be in his power; he will be reckless of the harm
+he works them, provided he can keep its consequences from being
+immediately offensive to himself.  No: if a good thing can be believed
+legitimately, let us believe it and be thankful, otherwise the goodness
+will have departed out of it; it is no longer ours; we have no right to
+it, and shall suffer for it, we and our children, if we try to keep it.
+It has been said that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
+children’s teeth are set on edge, but, more truly, it is the eating of
+sweet and stolen fruit by the fathers that sets the teeth of the children
+jarring.  Let those who love their children look to this, for on their
+own account they may be mainly trusted to avoid the sour.  Hitherto the
+intensity of the belief of the Apostles has been the mainstay of our own
+belief.  But that mainstay is now no longer strong enough.  A rehearing
+of the evidence is imperatively demanded, that it may either be confirmed
+or overthrown.”
+
+It cannot be denied that there is much in the above with which all true
+Christians will agree, and little to find fault with except the
+self-complacency which would seem to imply that common sense and plain
+dealing belong exclusively to the unbelieving side.  It is time that this
+spirit should be protested against not in word only but in deed.  The
+fact is, that both we and our opponents are agreed that nothing should be
+believed unless it can be proved to be true.  We repudiate the idea that
+faith means the accepting historical facts upon evidence which is
+insufficient to establish them.  We do not call this faith; we call it
+credulity, and oppose it to the utmost of our power.
+
+Our opponents imply that we regard as a virtue well-pleasing in the sight
+of God, and dignify with the name of faith, a state of mind which turns
+out to be nothing but a willingness to stand by all sorts of wildly
+improbable stories which have reached us from a remote age and country,
+and which, if true, must lead us to think otherwise of the whole course
+of nature than we should think if we were left to ourselves.  This
+accusation is utterly false and groundless.  Faith is the “evidence of
+things not seen,” but it is not “insufficient evidence for things alleged
+to have been seen.”  It is “the substance of things hoped for,” but
+“reasonably hoped for” was unquestionably intended by the Apostle.  We
+base our faith in the deeper mysteries of our religion, as in the nature
+of the Trinity and the sacramental graces, upon the certainty that other
+things which are within the grasp of our reason can be shewn to be beyond
+dispute.  We know that Christ died and rose again; therefore we believe
+whatever He sees fit to tell us, and follow Him, or endeavour to follow
+Him, whereinsoever He commands us, but we are not required to take both
+the commands of the Mediator _and His credentials_ upon faith.  It is
+because certain things within our comprehension are capable of the most
+irrefragable proof, that certain others out of it may justly be required
+to be believed, and indeed cannot be disbelieved without contumacy and
+presumption.  And this applies to a certain extent to the credentials
+also: for although no man should be captious, nor ask for more evidence
+than would satisfy a well-disciplined mind concerning the truth of any
+ordinary fact (as one who not contented with the evidence of a seal, a
+handwriting and a matter not at variance with probability, would
+nevertheless refuse to act upon instructions because he had not with his
+own eyes actually seen the sender write and sign and seal), yet it is
+both reasonable and indeed necessary that a certain amount of care should
+be taken before the credentials are accepted.  If our opponents mean no
+more than this we are at one with them, and may allow them to proceed.
+
+“Turn then,” they say, “to the account of the events which are alleged to
+have happened upon the morning of the Resurrection, as given in the
+fourth Gospel: and assume for the sake of the argument that that account,
+if not from John’s own hand, is nevertheless from a Johannean source, and
+virtually the work of the Apostle.  The account runs as follows:
+
+“‘The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene while it was yet dark
+unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.
+Then she runneth and cometh to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom
+Jesus loved, and saith unto them, ‘They have taken away the Lord out of
+the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid Him.’  Peter
+therefore went forth and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre.
+So they both ran together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and
+came first to the sepulchre.  And he stooping down and looking in, saw
+the linen clothes lying, yet went he not in.  Then cometh Simon Peter
+following him and went into the sepulchre and seeth the linen clothes
+lie, and the napkin that was about His head not lying with the linen
+clothes but wrapped together in a place by itself.  Then went in also
+that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw and
+believed.  For as yet they knew not the Scripture that he must rise from
+the dead.  Then the disciples went away again to their own home.  But
+Mary stood without 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
+Jesus had lain, and they say unto her, ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’  She
+saith unto them, ‘Because they have taken away my Lord and I know not
+where 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 two
+parts, let us examine first what we are told as having come actually
+under John’s own observation, and, secondly, what happened afterwards.
+
+I.  “It is clear that Mary had seen nothing miraculous before she came
+running to the two Apostles, Peter and John.  She had found the tomb
+empty when she reached it.  She did not know where the body of her Lord
+then was, _nor was there anything to shew how long it had been removed_:
+all she knew was that within thirty-six hours from the time of its having
+been laid in the tomb it had disappeared, but how much 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, simply the grave clothes (_which were
+probably of white linen_), lying _in two separate places_.  Then, _and
+not till then_, do they appear to have entertained their first belief or
+hope that Christ might have risen from the dead.
+
+“This is plain and credible; but it amounts to an empty tomb, and to an
+empty tomb only.
+
+“Here, for a moment, we must pause.  Had these men but a few weeks
+previously seen Lazarus raised from the corruption of the grave—to say
+nothing of other resurrections from the dead?  Had they seen their master
+override every known natural law, and prove that, as far as he was
+concerned, all human experience was worthless, by walking upon rough
+water, by actually talking to a storm of wind and making it listen to
+him, by feeding thousands with a few loaves, and causing the fragments
+that remained after all had eaten, to be more than the food originally
+provided?  Had they seen events of this kind continually happening for a
+space of some two years, and finally had they seen their master
+transfigured, conversing with the greatest of their prophets (men who had
+been dead for ages), and recognised by a voice from heaven as the Son of
+the Almighty, and had they also heard anything approaching to an
+announcement that he should himself rise from the dead—or had they not?
+They might have seen the raising of Lazarus and the rest of the miracles,
+but might not have anticipated that Christ himself would rise, for want
+of any announcement that this should be so; or, again, they might have
+heard a prophecy of his Resurrection from the lips of Christ, but
+disbelieved it for the want of any previous miracles which should
+convince them that the prophecy came from no ordinary person; so that
+their not having expected the Resurrection is explicable by giving up
+either the prophecies, or the miracles, but it is impossible to believe
+that _in spite both of the miracles and the prophecies_, the Apostles
+should have been still without any expectation of the Resurrection.  If
+they had both seen the miracles and heard the prophecies, they must have
+been in a state of inconceivably agitated excitement in anticipation of
+their master’s reappearance.  And this they were not; on the contrary,
+they were expecting nothing of the kind.  The condition of mind ascribed
+to them considering their supposed surroundings, is one which belongs to
+the drama only; it is not of nature: it is so utterly at variance with
+all human experience that it should be dismissed at once as incredible.
+
+“But it is very credible if Christ was seen alive after his Crucifixion,
+and his reappearance, though due to natural causes, was once believed to
+be miraculous, that this one seemingly well substantiated miracle should
+become the parent of all the others, and of the prophecies of the
+Resurrection.  Thirty years in all probability elapsed between the
+reappearances of Christ and the earliest of the four Gospels; thirty
+years of oral communication and spiritual enthusiasm, among an oriental
+people, and in an unscientific age; an age by which the idea of an
+interference with the modes of the universe from a point outside of
+itself, was taken as a matter of course; an age which believed in an
+anthropomorphic Deity who had back parts, which Moses had been allowed to
+see through the hand of God; an age which, over and above all this, was
+at the time especially convulsed with expectations of deliverance from
+the Roman yoke.  Have we not here a soil suitable for the growth of
+miracles, if the seed once fell upon it?  Under such conditions they
+would even spring up of themselves, seedless.
+
+“Once let the reappearances of Christ have been believed to be miraculous
+(and under all the circumstances they might easily have been believed to
+be so, though due to natural causes), and it is not wonderful that, in
+such an age and among such a people, the other miracles and the
+prophecies of the Resurrection should have become current within thirty
+years.  Even we ourselves, with all our incalculably greater advantages,
+could not withstand so great a temptation to let our wish become father
+to our thoughts.  If we had been the especially favoured friends of one
+whom we believed to have died, but who yet was not to beholden by death,
+no matter how careful and judicially minded we might be by nature, we
+should be blind to everything except the fact that we had once been the
+chosen companions of an immortal.  There lives no one who could withstand
+the intoxication of such an idea.  A single well-substantiated miracle 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 sense of the
+continuity of nature, in which our judgements are, consciously or
+unconsciously, anchored; but if we were very closely connected with it in
+our own persons, we should dwell upon the recollection of it and on
+little else.
+
+“Few of us can realise what happened so very long ago.  Men believe in
+the Christian miracles, though they would reject the notion of a modern
+miracle almost with ridicule, and would hardly even examine the evidence
+in its favour.  But the Christian miracles stand in their minds as things
+apart; their _prestige_ is greater than that attaching to any other
+events in the whole history of mankind.  They are hallowed by the
+unhesitating belief of many, many generations.  Every circumstance which
+should induce us to bow to their authority surrounds them with a bulwark
+of defences which may make us well believe that they must be impregnable,
+and sacred from attack.  Small wonder then that the many should still
+believe them.  Nevertheless they do not believe them so fully, nor nearly
+so fully, as they think they do.  For even the strongest imagination can
+travel but a very little way beyond a man’s own experience; it will not
+bear the burden of carrying him to a remote age and country; it will
+flag, wander and dream; it will not answer truly, but will lay hold of
+the most obvious absurdity, and present it impudently to its tired
+master, who will accept it gladly and have done with it.  Even
+recollection fails, but how much more imagination!  It is a high flight
+of imagination to be able to realise how weak imagination is.
+
+“We cannot therefore judge what would be the effect of immediate contact
+even with the wild hope of a miracle, from our conventional acceptance of
+the Christian miracles.  If we would realise this we must look to modern
+alleged miracles—to the enthusiasm of the Irish and American revivals,
+when mind inflames mind till strong men burst into hysterical tears like
+children; we must look for it in the effect produced by the supposed
+Irvingite miracles on those who believed in them, or in the miracles that
+followed the Port Royal miracle of the holy thorn.  There never was a
+miracle solitary yet: one will soon become the parent of many.  The minds
+of those who have believed in a single miracle as having come within
+their own experience become ecstatic; so deeply impressed are they with
+the momentous character of what they have known, that their power of
+enlisting sympathy becomes immeasurably greater than that of men who have
+never believed themselves to have come into contact with the miraculous;
+their deep conviction carries others along with it, and so the belief is
+strengthened till adverse influences check it, or till it reaches a pitch
+of grotesque horror, as in the case of the later Jansenist miracles.
+There is nothing, therefore, extraordinary in the gradual development
+within thirty years of all the Christian miracles, if the Resurrection
+were once held to be well substantiated; and there is nothing wonderful,
+under the circumstances, in the reappearance of Christ alive after his
+Crucifixion having been assigned to miracle.  He had already made
+sufficient impression upon his followers to require but little help from
+circumstances.  He had not so impressed them as to want _no_ help from
+any supposed miracle, but nevertheless any strange event in connection
+with him would pass muster, with little or no examination, as being
+miraculous.  He had undoubtedly professed himself to be, and had been
+half accepted as, the promised Messiah.  He had no less undoubtedly
+appeared to be dead, and had been believed to be so both by friends and
+foes.  Let us also grant that he reappeared alive.  Would it, then, be
+very astonishing that the little missing link in the completeness of the
+chain of evidence—_absolute certainty concerning the actuality of the
+death_—should have been allowed to drop out of sight?
+
+“Round such a centre, and in such an age, the other miracles would spring
+up spontaneously, and be accepted the moment that they arose; there is
+nothing in this which is foreign to the known tendencies of the human
+mind, but there would be something utterly foreign to all we know of
+human nature, in the fact of men not anticipating that Christ would rise,
+if they had already seen him raise others from the dead and work the
+miracles ascribed to him, and if they had also heard him prophesy that he
+should himself rise from the dead.  In fact nothing can explain the
+universally recorded incredulity of the Apostles as to the reappearance
+of Christ, except the fact that they had never seen him work a single
+miracle, or else that they had never heard him say anything which could
+lead them to suppose that he was to rise from the dead.
+
+“We are therefore not unwilling to accept the facts recorded in the
+fourth Gospel, in so far as they inform us of things which came under the
+knowledge of the writer.  Mary found the tomb empty.  Ignorant alike of
+what had taken place and of what was going to happen, she came to Peter
+and John to tell them that the body was gone; this was all 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 have flashed upon their minds,
+that the aspirations which they had already indulged in were to prove
+well founded.  Within an hour or two Christ was seen alive, nor can we
+wonder if the years which intervened between the morning of the
+Resurrection and the writing of the fourth Gospel, should have sufficed
+to make the writer believe that John had had an actual belief in the
+Resurrection, while in truth he had only wildly hoped it.  This much is
+at any rate plain, that neither he nor Peter had as yet heard any clearly
+intelligible prophecy that their master should rise from the dead.
+Whatever subsequent interpretation may have been given to some of the
+sayings of Jesus Christ, no saying was yet known which would of itself
+have suggested any such inference.  We may justly doubt the caution and
+accuracy of the first founders of Christianity, without, even in our
+hearts, for one moment impugning the honesty of their intentions.  We are
+ready to admit that had we been in their places we should in all
+likelihood have felt, believed, and, we will hope, acted as they did; but
+we cannot and will not admit, in the face of so much evidence to the
+contrary, that they were superior to the intelligence of their times, or,
+in other words, that they were capable critics of an event, in which both
+their feelings and the _primâ facie_ view of the facts would be so likely
+to mislead them.
+
+II.  “Turning now to the narrative of what passed when Peter and John
+were gone, we find that Mary, stooping down, looked through her tears
+into the darkness of the tomb, and saw two angels clothed in white, who
+asked her why she wept.  We must remember the wide difference between
+believing what the writer of the fourth Gospel tells us that John saw,
+and what he tells us that Mary Magdalene saw.  All we know on this point
+is that he believed that Mary had spoken truly.  Peter and John were men,
+they went into the tomb itself, and we may say for a certainty that they
+saw no angel, nor indeed anything at all, but the grave clothes (_which
+were probably of white linen_), lying _in two separate places_ within it.
+Mary was a woman—a woman whose parallel we must look for among Spanish or
+Italian women of the lower orders at the present day; she had, we are
+elsewhere told, been at one time possessed with devils; she was in a
+state of tearful excitement, and looking through her tears from light
+into comparative darkness.  Is it possible not to remember what Peter and
+John _did_ see when they were in the tomb?  Is it possible not to surmise
+that Mary in good truth saw nothing more?  She thought she saw more, but
+the excitement under which she was labouring at the time, an excitement
+which would increase tenfold after she had seen Christ (as she did
+immediately afterwards and before she had had time to tell her story),
+would easily distort either her vision or her memory, or both.
+
+“The evidence of women of her class—especially when they are highly
+excited—is not to be relied upon in a matter of such importance and
+difficulty as a miracle.  Who would dare to insist upon such evidence
+now?  And why should it be considered as any more trustworthy eighteen
+hundred years ago?  We are indeed told that the angels spoke to her; but
+the speech was very short; the angels simply ask her why she weeps; she
+answers them as though it were the common question of common people, and
+then leaves them.  This is in itself incredible; but it is not incredible
+that if Mary looking into the tomb saw two white objects within, she
+should have drawn back affrighted, and that her imagination, thrown into
+a fever by her subsequent interview with Christ, should have rendered her
+utterly incapable of recollecting the true facts of the case; or, again,
+it is not incredible that she should have been believed to have seen
+things which she never did see.  All we can say for certain is that
+before the fourth Gospel was written, and probably shortly after the
+first reappearance of Christ, Mary Magdalene believed, or was thought to
+have believed, that she had seen angels in the tomb; and this being so,
+the development of the short and pointless question attributed to
+them—possibly as much due to the eager cross-questioning of others as to
+Mary herself—is not surprising.
+
+“Before the Sunday of the Resurrection was over, the facts as derivable
+from the fourth Gospel would stand thus.  Jesus Christ, who was supposed
+to have been verily and indeed dead, was known to be alive again.  He had
+been seen, and heard to speak.  He had been seen by those who were
+already prepared to accept him as their leader, and whose previous
+education, and tone of mind, would lead them rather to an excess of faith
+in a miracle, than of scepticism concerning its miraculous character.
+The Apostles would be in no impartial nor sceptical mood when they saw
+that Christ was alive.  The miracle was too near themselves—too
+fascinating in its supposed consequences for themselves—to allow of their
+going into curious questions about the completeness of the death.  The
+Master whom they had loved, and in whom they had hoped, had been
+crucified and was alive again.  Is it a harsh or strained supposition,
+that what would have assuredly been enough for ourselves, if we had known
+and loved Christ and had been attuned in mind as the Apostles were,
+should also have been enough for them?  Who can say so?  The nature of
+our belief in our Master would have been changed once and for ever; and
+so we find it to have been with the Christian Apostles.
+
+“Over and above the reappearance of Christ, there would also be a report
+(probably current upon the very Sunday of the Resurrection), that Mary
+Magdalene had seen a vision of angels in the tomb in which Christ’s body
+had been laid; and this, though a matter of small moment in comparison
+with the reappearance of Christ himself, will nevertheless concern us
+nearly when we come to consider the narratives 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, they
+came unto the sepulchre bringing the spices which they had prepared, and
+certain others with them.  _And they found the stone rolled away from the
+sepulchre_.  _And they entered in_, _and found not the body of the Lord
+Jesus_.  And it came to pass as they were much perplexed thereabout,
+behold, two men stood by them in shining garments, _and as they were
+afraid_, _and bowed their faces to the earth_, they said unto them, “_Why
+seek ye the living among the dead_?  He is not here, but is risen:
+_remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee_, saying,
+‘_The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be
+crucified_, _and the third day rise again_.”  _And they remembered his
+words_, and returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto
+the eleven, and to all the rest.  It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and
+Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them which told
+these things unto the Apostles.  _And their words seemed unto them as
+idle tales_, _and they believed them not_.  Then arose Peter, and went
+unto the sepulchre: and, stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid
+by themselves, and departed wondering in himself at that which was come
+to pass.’
+
+“When we compare this account with John’s we are at once struck with the
+resemblances and the discrepancies.  Luke and John indeed are both agreed
+that Christ was seen alive after the Crucifixion.  Both agree that the
+tomb was found empty very early on the Sunday morning (_i.e._, within
+thirty-six hours of the deposition from the Cross), and neither writer
+affords us any clue whatever as to the time and manner of the removal of
+the body; but here the resemblances end; the angelic vision of Mary, seen
+_after_ Peter and John had departed from the tomb, and seen apparently by
+Mary alone, in Luke finds its way into the van of the narrative, and
+Peter is represented as having gone to the tomb, _not in consequence of
+having been simply told that the body of Christ was missing_, _but
+because he refused to believe the miraculous story which was told him by
+the women_.  In the fourth Gospel we heard of no miraculous story being
+carried by Mary to Peter and John.  The angels instead of being seen by
+one person only, as would have appeared from the fourth Gospel, are now
+seen _by many_; and the women instead of being almost stolidly
+indifferent to the presence of supernatural beings, are afraid, and bow
+down their faces to the earth; instead of merely wanting to be informed
+why Mary was weeping, the angels speak with definite point, and as angels
+might be expected to speak; they allude, also, to past prophecy, which
+the women at once remember.
+
+“Strange, that they should want reminding!  And stranger still that a few
+verses lower down we should find the Apostles remembering no prophetic
+saying, but regarding the story of the women as mere idle tales.  What
+shall we say?  Are not these differences precisely similar to those which
+we are continually meeting with, when a case of exaggeration comes before
+us?  Can we accept _both_ the stories?  Is this one of those cases in
+which all would be made clear if we did but know _all_ the facts, or is
+it rather one in which we can understand how easily the story given by
+the one writer might become distorted into the version of the other?
+Does it seem in any way improbable that within the forty years or so
+between the occurrences recorded by John and the writing of Luke’s
+Gospel, the apparently trifling, yet truly most important, differences
+between the two writers should have been developed?
+
+“No one will venture to say that the facts, upon the face of them, do not
+strongly suggest such an inference, and that, too, with no conscious
+fraud on the part of any of those through whose mouths the story must
+have passed.  If the fourth Gospel be assigned to John (and if it is
+_not_ assigned to John the difficulties on the Christian side become so
+great that the cause may be declared lost), his story is that of a
+principal actor and eye-witness; it bears every impress of truth and none
+of exaggeration upon any point which came under his own observation.
+Even when he tells of what Mary Magdalene said she saw, we see the myth
+in its earliest and crudest form; there is no attempt at circumstance in
+connection with it, and abundant reason for suspecting its supernatural
+character is given along with it; reason which to our minds is at any
+rate sufficient to make us doubt it, but which would naturally have no
+weight whatever with John after he had once seen Christ alive, or indeed
+with us if we had been in his place.  It is not to be wondered at that in
+such times many a fresh bud should be grafted on to the original story;
+indeed it was simply inevitable that this should have been the case.  No
+one would mean to deceive, but we know how, among uneducated and
+enthusiastic persons, the marvellous has an irresistible tendency to
+become more marvellous still; and, as far as we can gather, all the
+causes which bring this about were more actively at work shortly after
+the time of Christ’s first reappearance than at any other time which can
+be readily called to mind.  The main facts, as we derive them from the
+consent of _both_ writers, were simply these:—That the tomb of Christ was
+found unexpectedly empty on the Sunday morning; that this fact was
+reported to the Apostles; that Peter went into the tomb and saw the linen
+clothes laid by themselves; that Mary Magdalene said that she had seen
+angels; and that eventually Christ shewed himself undoubtedly alive.
+Both writers agree so far, but it is impossible to say that they agree
+farther.
+
+“Some may say that it is of little moment whether the angels appeared
+first or last; whether they were seen by many or by one; whether, if seen
+only by one, that one had previously been insane; whether they spoke as
+angels might be expected to speak, _i.e._, to the point, and are shewn to
+have been recognised as angels by the fear which their appearance caused;
+or whether they caused no alarm, and said nothing which was in the least
+equal to the occasion.  But most men will feel that the whole complexion
+of the story changes according to the answers which can be made to these
+very questions.  Surely they will also begin to feel a strong suspicion
+that the story told by Luke is one which has not lost in the telling.
+How natural was it that the angelic vision should find its way into the
+foreground of the picture, and receive those little circumstantial
+details of which it appeared most to stand in need; how desirable also
+that the testimony of Mary should be corroborated by that of others who
+were with her, and out of whom no devils had been cast.  The first
+Christians would not have been men and women at all unless they had felt
+thus; but they _were_ men and women, and hence they acted after the
+fashion of their age and unconsciously exaggerated; the only wonder is
+that they did not exaggerate more, for we must remember that even though
+the Apostles themselves be supposed to have been more judicially
+unimpassioned and less liable to inaccuracy than we have reason to
+believe they were, yet that from the very earliest ages of the Church
+there would be some converts of an inferior stamp.  No matter how small a
+society is, there will be bad in it as well as good—there was a Judas
+even in the twelve.
+
+“But to speak less harshly, there must from the first have been some
+converts who would be capable of reporting incautiously; visions and
+dreams were vouchsafed to many, and not a few marvels may be referable to
+this source; there is no trusting an age in which men are liable to give
+a supernatural interpretation to an extraordinary dream, nor is there any
+end to what may come of it, if people begin seriously confounding their
+sleeping and waking impressions.  In such times, then, Luke may have said
+with a clear conscience that he had carefully sifted the truth of what he
+wrote; but the world has not passed through the last two thousand years
+in vain, and we are bound to insist upon a higher standard of
+credibility.  Luke would believe at once, and as a matter of course,
+things which we should as a matter of course reject; yet it is probable
+that he too had heard much that he rejected; he seems to have been
+dissatisfied with all the records with the existence of which he was
+aware; the account which he gives is possibly derived from some very
+early report; even if this report arose at Jerusalem, and within a week
+after the Crucifixion, it might well be very inaccurate, though
+apparently supported by excellent authority, so that there is no
+necessity for charging Luke with unusual credulity.  No one can be
+expected to be greatly in advance of his surroundings; it is well for
+every one except himself if he should happen to be so, but no man is to
+be blamed if he is not; it is enough to save him if he is fairly up to
+the standard of his own times.  ‘Morality’ is rather of the custom which
+_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 mother of
+James, and Salome had bought sweet spices that they might come and anoint
+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 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 it was very
+great.  And entering into the sepulchre they saw _a young man_ sitting on
+the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were
+affrighted.  And he saith unto them, “Be not affrighted; ye seek Jesus of
+Nazareth which was crucified; he is risen; he is not here; behold the
+place where they laid him.  But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter
+that he goeth before you into Galilee: there ye shall see him, as he said
+unto you.”  And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; _for
+they trembled and were amazed_, _neither said they any thing to any man_,
+_for they were afraid_.  Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of
+the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast
+seven devils.  And she went and told 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, _believed not_.’
+
+“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 is possible that
+there may have been another who is not mentioned, inasmuch as he remained
+silent; the angelic vision, however, is again brought into the foreground
+of the story and the fear of the women is even more strongly insisted on
+than it was in Luke.  The angel reminds the women that Christ had said
+that he should be seen by his Apostles in Galilee, of which saying we
+again find that the Apostles seem to have had no recollection.  The linen
+clothes have quite dropped out of the story, and we can detect no trace
+of Peter and John’s visit to the tomb, but it is remarkable that the
+women are represented as not having said anything about the presence of
+the angel immediately on their having seen him; and this fact, which
+might be in itself suspicious, is apologised for on the score of fear,
+notwithstanding that their silence was a direct violation of the command
+of the being whom they so greatly feared.  We should have expected that
+if they had feared him so much they would have done as he told them, but
+here again everybody seems to act as in a dream or drama, in defiance of
+all the ordinary principles of human action.
+
+“Throughout the preceding paragraph we have assumed that Mark intended
+his readers to understand that the young man seen in the tomb was an
+angel; but, after all, this is rather a bold assumption.  On what grounds
+is it supported?  Because Luke tells us that when the women reached the
+tomb they found _two_ white angels within it, are we therefore to
+conclude that Mark, who wrote many years earlier, and as far as we can
+gather with much greater historical accuracy, must have meant an angel
+when he spoke of a ‘young man’?  Yet this can be the only reason, unless
+the young man’s having worn a long white robe is considered as sufficient
+cause for believing him to have been an angel; and this, again, is rather
+a bold assumption.  But if St. Mark meant 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, what becomes of the angelic visions at the tomb of
+Christ?  For St. Matthew’s account is wholly untenable; St. Luke is a
+much later writer, who must have got all his materials second or third
+hand; and although we granted, and are inclined to believe, that the
+accounts of the visits of Mary Magdalene, and subsequently of Peter and
+John to the tomb, which are given in the fourth Gospel, are from a
+Johannean source, if we were asked our reasons for this belief, we should
+be very hard put to it to give them.  Nevertheless we think it probable.
+
+“But take it either way; if the account in the fourth Gospel is supposed
+to have been derived from the Apostle John, we have already seen that
+there is nothing miraculous about it, so far as it deals with what came
+under John’s own observation; if, on the other hand, it is _not_
+authentic we are thrown back upon St. Mark as incomparably our best
+authority for the facts that occurred on the Sunday after the
+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 long white 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 asked to believe that
+the reappearance of Christ alive, after a hurried crucifixion, must have
+been due to supernatural causes, and supernatural causes only!  It will
+be easily seen what a number of threads might be taken up at this point,
+and followed with not uninteresting results.  For the sake, however, of
+brevity, we grant it as most probable that St. Mark meant the young man
+said to have been seen in the tomb, to be considered as an angel; but we
+must also express our conviction that this supposed angelic vision is a
+misplaced offshoot of the report that Mary Magdalene had seen angels in
+the tomb after Peter and John had left it.
+
+“It is possible that Mark’s account may be the most historic of all those
+that we have; but we incline to think otherwise, inasmuch as the angelic
+vision placed in the foreground by Mark and Luke, would not be likely to
+find its way into the background again, as it does in the fourth Gospel,
+unless in consequence of really authentic information; no unnecessary
+detraction from the miraculous element is conceivable as coming from the
+writer who has handed down to us the story of the raising of Lazarus,
+where we have, indeed, _a real account of a resurrection_, the continuity
+of the evidence being unbroken, and every link in the chain forged fast
+and strong, even to the unwrapping of the grave clothes from the body as
+it emerged from the sepulchre.  Is it possible that the writer may have
+given the story of the raising of Lazarus (of which we find no trace
+except in the fourth Gospel), because he felt that in giving the
+Apostolic version with absolute or substantial accuracy, he was so
+weakening the miraculous element in connection with the Resurrection of
+Jesus Christ himself, that it became necessary to introduce an
+incontrovertible 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 writers are
+agreed: we have the same substratum of facts, namely, _the tomb found
+already empty when the women reached it_, a confused and contradictory
+report of an angel or angels seen within it, and the subsequent
+reappearance of Christ.  Not one of the three writers affords us the
+slightest clue as to the time and manner of the removal of the body from
+the tomb; there is nothing in any of the narratives which is incompatible
+with its having been taken away on the very night of the Crucifixion
+itself.
+
+“Is this a case in which the defenders of Christianity would clamour for
+_all_ the facts, unless they exceedingly well knew that there was no
+chance of their getting them?  _All_ the facts, indeed—what tricks does
+our imagination play us!  One would have thought that there were quite
+enough facts given as the matter stands to make the defenders of
+Christianity wish that there were not so many; and then for them to say
+that if we had more, those that we have would become less contradictory!
+What right have they to assume that if they had all the 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 find these accounts even
+more inexplicable than we do at present?  Had _we_ argued thus we should
+have been accused of shameless impudence; of a desire to maintain any
+position in which we happened to find ourselves, and by which we made
+money, regardless of every common principle of truth or honour, or
+whatever else makes the difference between upright men and
+self-deceivers.
+
+“It may be said by some that the discrepancies between the three accounts
+given above are discrepancies concerning details only, but that all three
+writers agree about the ‘main fact.’  We are continually hearing about
+this ‘main fact,’ but nobody is good enough to tell us precisely what
+fact is meant.  Is the main fact the fact that Jesus Christ was
+crucified?  Then no one denies it.  We all admit that Jesus Christ was
+crucified.  Or, is it that he was seen alive several times after the
+Crucifixion?  This also we are not disposed to deny.  We believe that
+there is a considerable preponderance of evidence in its favour.  But if
+the ‘main fact’ turns out to be that Christ was crucified, _died_, and
+then came to life again, we admit that here too all the writers are
+agreed, but we cannot find with any certainty that one of them was
+present when Christ died or when his body was taken down from the Cross,
+or that there was any such examination of the body as would be absolutely
+necessary in order to prove that a man had been dead who was afterwards
+seen alive.  If Christ reappeared alive, there is not only no tittle of
+evidence in support of his death which would be allowed for a moment in
+an English court of justice, but there is an overwhelming amount of
+evidence which points inexorably in the direction of his never having
+died.  If he reappeared, there is no evidence of his having died.  If he
+did not reappear, there is no evidence of his having risen from the dead.
+
+“We are inclined, however, as has been said already, to believe that
+Jesus Christ really did reappear shortly after the Crucifixion, and that
+his reappearance, though due to natural causes, was conceived to be
+miraculous.  We believe also that Mary fancied that she had seen angels
+in the tomb, and openly said that she had done so; who would doubt her
+when so far greater a marvel than this had been made palpably manifest to
+all?  Who would care to inquire very particularly whether there were two
+angels or only one?  Whether there were other women with Mary or whether
+she was quite alone?  Who would compare notes about the exact moment of
+their appearing, and what strictly accurate account of their words could
+be expected in the ferment of such excitement and such ignorance?  Any
+speech which sounded tolerably plausible would be accepted under the
+circumstances, and none will complain of Mark as having wilfully
+attempted to deceive, any more than he will of Luke: the amplification of
+the story was inevitable, and the very candour and innocence with which
+the writers leave loophole after loophole for escape from the miraculous,
+is alone sufficient proof of their sincerity; nevertheless, it is also
+proof that they were all more or less inaccurate; we can only say in
+their defence, that in the reappearance of Christ himself we find
+abundant palliation of their inaccuracy.  Given one great miracle, proved
+with a sufficiency of evidence for the capacities and proclivities of the
+age, and the rest is easy.  The groundwork of the after-structure of the
+other miracles is to be found in the fact that Christ was crucified, and
+was afterwards seen alive.”
+
+There is no occasion for me to examine St. Matthew’s account of the
+Resurrection in company with the unhappy men whose views I have been
+endeavouring to represent above.  For reasons which have already been
+sufficiently dwelt upon I freely own that I agree with them in rejecting
+it.  I shall therefore admit that the story of the sealing of the tomb,
+and setting of the guard, the earthquake, the descent of the angel from
+Heaven, his rolling away the stone, sitting upon it, and addressing the
+women therefrom, is to be treated for all controversial purposes as
+though it had never been written.  By this admission, I confess to
+complete ignorance of the time when the stone was removed from the mouth
+of the tomb, or the hour when the Redeemer rose.  I should add that I
+agree with our opponents in believing that our Lord never foretold His
+Resurrection to the Apostles.  But how little does it matter whether He
+foretold His Resurrection or not, and whether He rose at one hour or
+another.  It is enough for me that he rose at all; for the rest I care
+not.
+
+“Yet, see,” our opponents will exclaim in answer, “what a mighty river
+has come from a little spring.  We heard first of two men going into an
+empty tomb, finding two bundles of grave clothes, and departing.  Then
+there comes a certain person, concerning whom we are elsewhere told a
+fact which leaves us with a very uncomfortable impression, and _she_
+sees, not two bundles of grave clothes, but two white angels, who ask a
+dreamy pointless question, and receive an appropriate answer.  Then we
+find the time of this apparition shifted; it is placed in the front, not
+in the background, and is seen by many, instead of being vouchsafed to no
+one but to a weeping woman looking into the bottom of a tomb.  The speech
+of the angels, also, becomes effective, and the linen clothes drop out of
+sight entirely, unless some faint trace of them is to be found in the
+‘long white garment’ which Mark tells us was worn by the young man who
+was in the tomb when the women reached it.  Finally, we have a guard set
+upon the tomb, and the stone which was rolled in front of it is sealed;
+the angel _is seen to descend from Heaven_, to roll away the stone, and
+sit upon it, and there is a great earthquake.  Oh! how things grow, how
+things grow!  And, oh! how people believe!
+
+“See by what easy stages the story has grown up from the smallest seed,
+as the mustard tree in the parable, and how the account given by Matthew
+changes the whole complexion of the events.  And see how this account has
+been dwelt upon to the exclusion of the others by the great painters and
+sculptors from whom, consciously or unconsciously, our ideas of the
+Christian era are chiefly drawn.  Yes.  These men have been the most
+potent of theologians, for their theology has reached and touched most
+widely.  We have mistaken their echo of the sound for the sound itself,
+and what was to them an aspiration, has, alas! been to us in the place of
+science and reality.
+
+“Truly the ease with which the plainest inferences from the Gospel
+narratives have been overlooked is the best apology for those who have
+attributed unnatural blindness to the Apostles.  If we are so blind, why
+not they also?  A pertinent question, but one which raises more
+difficulties than it solves.  The seeing of truth is as the finding of
+gold in far countries, where the shepherd has drunk of the stream and
+used it daily to cleanse the sweat of his brow, and recked little of the
+treasure which lay abundantly concealed therein, until one luckier than
+his fellows espies it, and the world comes flocking thither.  So with
+truth; a little care, a little patience, a little sympathy, and the
+wonder is that it should have lain hidden even from the merest child, not
+that it should now be manifest.
+
+“How early must it have been objected that there was no evidence that the
+tomb had not been tampered with (not by the Apostles, for they were
+scattered, and of him who laid the body in the tomb—Joseph of
+Arimathæa—we hear no more) and that the body had been delivered not to
+enemies, but friends; how natural that so desirable an addition to the
+completeness of the evidences in favour of a miraculous Resurrection
+should have been early and eagerly accepted.  Would not twenty years of
+oral communication and Spanish or Italian excitability suffice for the
+rooting of such a story?  Yet, as far as we can gather, the Gospel
+according to St. Matthew was even then unwritten.  And who was Matthew?
+And what was his original Gospel?
+
+“There is one part of his story, and one only, which will stand the test
+of criticism, and that is this:—That the saying that the disciples came
+by night and stole the body of Jesus away was current among the Jews, at
+the time when the Gospel which we now have appeared.  Not that they did
+so—no one will believe this; but the allegation of the rumour (which
+would hardly have been ventured unless it would command assent as true)
+points in the direction of search 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 any
+miracle in connection with the tomb of Christ.  He probably reappeared
+alive, but not with any circumstances which we are justified in regarding
+as supernatural.  We are therefore at length led to a consideration of
+the Crucifixion itself.  Is there evidence for more than this—that Christ
+was crucified, was afterwards seen alive, and that this was regarded by
+his first followers as a sufficient proof of his having risen from the
+dead?  This would account for the rise of Christianity, and for all the
+other miracles.  Take the following passage from Gibbon:—‘The grave and
+learned Augustine, whose understanding scarcely admits the excuse of
+credulity, has attested the innumerable prodigies which were worked in
+Africa by the relics of St. Stephen, and this marvellous narrative is
+inserted in the elaborate work of “The City of God,” which the Bishop
+designed as a solid and immortal proof of the truth of Christianity.
+Augustine solemnly declares that he had selected those miracles only
+which had been publicly certified by persons who were either the objects
+or the spectators of the powers of the martyr.  Many prodigies were
+omitted or forgotten, and Hippo had been less favourably treated than the
+other cities of the province, yet the Bishop enumerates above seventy
+miracles, of which three were resurrections from the dead, within the
+limits of his own diocese.  If we enlarge our view to all the dioceses
+and all the saints of the Christian world, it will not be easy to
+calculate the fables and errors which issued from this inexhaustible
+source.  But we may surely be allowed to observe that a miracle in that
+age of superstition and credulity lost its name and its merits, since it
+could hardly be considered as a deviation from the established laws of
+Nature.’—(Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_, chap. xxviii., sec. 2).
+
+“Who believes in the miracles, or who would dare to quote them?  Yet on
+what better foundation do those of the New Testament rest?  For the death
+of Christ there is no evidence at all.  There is evidence that he was
+believed to have been dead (under circumstances where a misapprehension
+was singularly likely to arise), by men whose minds were altogether in a
+different _clef_ to ours as regards the miraculous, and whom we cannot
+therefore fairly judge by any modern standard.  We cannot judge _them_,
+but we are bound to weigh the facts which they relate, not in their
+balance, but in our own.  It is not what might have seemed reasonably
+believable to them, but what is reasonably believable in our own more
+enlightened age which can be alone accepted sinlessly by ourselves.
+Men’s modes of thought concerning facts change from age to age; but the
+facts change not at all, and it is of them that we are called to judge.
+
+“We turn to the fourth Gospel, as that from which we shall derive the
+most accurate knowledge of the facts connected with the Crucifixion.
+Here we find that it was about twelve o’clock when Pilate brought out
+Christ for the last time; the dialogue that followed, the preparations
+for the Crucifixion, and the leading Christ outside the city to the place
+where the Crucifixion was to take place, could hardly have occupied less
+than an hour.  By six o’clock (by consent of all writers) the body was
+entombed, so that the actual time during which Christ hung upon the cross
+was little more than four hours.  Let us be thankful to hope that the
+time of suffering may have been so short—but say five hours, say six, say
+whatever the reader chooses, the Crucifixion was avowedly too hurried for
+death in an ordinary case to have ensued.  The thieves had to be killed,
+as yet alive.  Immediately before being taken down from the cross the
+body was delivered to friends.  Within thirty-six hours afterwards the
+tomb 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 later Christ
+was seen alive.
+
+“Let it be remembered also that the fact of the body having been
+delivered to Joseph _before_ the taking down from the cross, greatly
+enhanced the chance of an escape from death, inasmuch as the duties of
+the soldiers would have ended with the presentation of the order from
+Pilate.  If any faint symptom of returning animation shewed itself in
+consequence of the mere change of position and the inevitable shock
+attendant upon being moved, the soldiers would not know it; their task
+was ended, and they would not be likely either to wish, or to be allowed,
+to have anything to do with the matter.  Joseph appears to have been a
+rich man, and would be followed by attendants.  Moreover, although we are
+told by Mark that Pilate sent for the centurion to inquire whether Christ
+was dead, yet the same writer also tells us that this centurion had
+already come to the conclusion that Christ was the Son of God, a
+statement which is supported by the accounts of Matthew and Luke; Mark is
+the only Evangelist who tells us that the centurion _was_ sent for, but
+even granting that this was so, would not one who had already recognised
+Christ as the Son of God be inclined to give him every assistance in his
+power?  He would be frightened, and anxious to get the body down from the
+cross as fast as possible.  So long as Christ appeared to be dead, there
+would be no unnecessary obstacle thrown in the way of the delivery of the
+body to Joseph, by a centurion who believed that he had 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 of the
+body, except Joseph of Arimathæa, for the presence of Nicodemus, and
+indeed his existence, rests upon the slenderest evidence.  None of the
+Apostles appear to have had anything to do with the deposition, nor yet
+the women who had come from Galilee, who are represented as seeing where
+the body was laid (and by Luke as seeing _how_ it was laid), but do not
+seem to have come into close contact with the body.
+
+“Would any modern jury of intelligent men believe under similar
+circumstances that the death had been actual and complete?  Would they
+not regard—and ought they not to regard—reappearance as constituting
+ample proof that there had been no death?  Most assuredly, unless Christ
+had had his head cut off, or had been seen to be burnt to ashes.  Again,
+if unexceptionable medical testimony as to the completeness of the death
+had reached us, there would be no help for it; we should have to admit
+that something had happened which was at variance with all our experience
+of the course of nature; or again if his legs had been broken, or his
+feet pierced, we could say nothing; but what irreparable mischief is done
+to any vital function of the body by the mere act of crucifixion?  The
+feet were not always, ‘nor perhaps generally,’ pierced (so Dean Alford
+tells us, quoting from Justin Martyr), nor is there a particle of
+evidence to shew that any exception was made in the present instance.  A
+man who is crucified dies from sheer exhaustion, so that it cannot be
+deemed improbable that he might swoon away, and that every outward
+appearance of death might precede death by several hours.
+
+“Are we to suppose that a handful of ignorant soldiers should be above
+error, when we remember that men have been left for dead, been laid out
+for burial and buried by their best friends—nay, that they have over and
+over again been pronounced dead by skilled physicians, when the
+facilities for knowing the truth were far greater, and when a mistake was
+much less likely to occur, than at the hurried Crucifixion of Jesus
+Christ?  The soldiers would apply no polished mirror to the lips, nor
+make use of any of those tests which, under the circumstances, would be
+absolutely necessary before life could be pronounced to be extinct; they
+would see that the body was lifeless, inanimate, to all outward
+appearance like the few other dead bodies which they had probably
+observed closely; with this they would rest contented.
+
+“It is true, they probably believed Christ to be dead at the time they
+handed over the body to his friends, and if we had heard nothing more of
+the matter we might assume that they were right; but the reappearance of
+Christ alive changes the whole complexion of the story.  It is not very
+likely that the Roman soldiers would have been mistaken in believing him
+to be dead, unless the hurry of the whole affair, and the order from
+Pilate, had disposed them to carelessness, and to getting the matter done
+as fast as possible; but it is much less likely that a dead man should
+come to life again than that a mistake should have been made about his
+having being dead.  The latter is an event which probably happens every
+week in one part of the world or another; the former has never yet been
+known.
+
+“It is not probable that a man officially executed should escape death;
+but that a _dead man_ should escape from it is more improbable still; in
+addition to the enormous preponderance of probability on the side of
+Christ’s never having died which arises from this consideration alone, we
+are told many facts which greatly lessen the improbability of his having
+escaped death, inasmuch as the Crucifixion was hurried, and the body was
+immediately delivered to friends without the known destruction of any
+organic function, and while still hanging upon the cross.
+
+“Joseph and Nicodemus (supposing that Nicodemus was indeed a party to the
+entombment) may be believed to have thought that Christ was dead when
+they received the body, but they could not refuse him their assistance
+when they found out their mistake, nor, again, could they forfeit their
+high position by allowing it to be known that they had restored the life
+of one who was so obnoxious to the authorities.  They would be in a very
+difficult position, and would take the prudent course of backing out of
+the matter at the first moment that humanity would allow, of leaving the
+rest to chance, and of keeping their own counsel.  It is noticeable that
+we never hear of them again; for there were no two people in the world
+better able to know whether the Resurrection was miraculous or not, and
+none who would be more deeply interested in favour of the miracle.  They
+had been faithful when the Apostles themselves had failed, and if their
+faith had been so strong while everything pointed in the direction of the
+utter collapse of Christianity, what would it be, according to every
+natural impulse of self-approbation, when so transcendent a miracle as a
+resurrection had been worked almost upon their own premises, and upon one
+whose remains they had generously taken under their protection at a time
+when no others had ventured to shew them respect?
+
+“We should have fancied that Mary would have run to Joseph and Nicodemus,
+not to the Apostles; that Joseph and Nicodemus would then have sent for
+the Apostles, or that, to say the least of it, we should have heard of
+these two persons as having been prominent members of the Church at
+Jerusalem; but here again the experience of the ordinary course of nature
+fails us, and we do not find another word or hint concerning them.  This
+may be the result of accident, but if so, it is a very unfortunate
+accident, and we have already had a great deal too much of unfortunate
+accidents, and of truths which _may_ be truths, but which are uncommonly
+like exaggeration.  Stories are like people, whom we judge of in no small
+degree by the dress they wear, the company they keep, and that subtle
+indefinable something which we call their expression.
+
+“Nevertheless, there arise the questions how far the spear wound recorded
+by the writer of the fourth Gospel must be regarded, firstly, as an
+actual occurrence, and, secondly, as having been necessarily fatal, for
+unless these things are shewn to be indisputable we have seen that the
+balance of probability lies greatly 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 wound was actually inflicted, and that death must
+have inevitably followed, then the death of Christ is proved.  The
+Resurrection becomes supernatural; the Ascension forthwith ceases to be
+marvellous; the Miraculous Conception, the Temptation in the Wilderness,
+all the other miracles of Christ and his Apostles, become believable at
+once upon so signal a failure of human experience; human experience
+ceases to be a guide at all, inasmuch as it is found to fail on the very
+point where it has been always considered to be most firmly
+established—the remorselessness of the grip of death.  But before we can
+consent to part with the firm ground on which we tread, in the confidence
+of which we live, move, and have our being—the trust in the established
+experience of countless ages—we must prove the infliction of the wound
+and its necessarily fatal character beyond all possibility of mistake.
+We cannot be expected to reject a natural solution of an event however
+mysterious, and to adopt a supernatural in its place, so long as there is
+any element of doubt upon the supernatural side.
+
+“The natural solution of the origin of belief in the Resurrection lies
+very ready to our hands; once admit that Christ was crucified hurriedly,
+that there is no proof of the destruction of any organic function of the
+body, that the body itself was immediately delivered to friends, and that
+thirty-six hours afterwards Christ was seen alive, and it is impossible
+to understand how any human being can doubt what he ought to think.  We
+must own also that once let Joseph have kept his own counsel (and he had
+a great stake to lose if he did _not_ keep it), once let the Apostles
+believe that Christ’s restoration to life was miraculous (and under the
+circumstances they would be sure to think so), and their reason would be
+so unsettled that in a very short time all the recognised and all the
+apocryphal miracles of Christ would pass current with them without a
+shadow of difficulty.”
+
+It will be observed that throughout both this and the preceding chapter I
+have been dealing with those of our opponents who, while admitting the
+reappearances of our Lord, ascribe them to natural causes only.  I
+consider this position to be only second in importance to the one taken
+by Strauss, and as perhaps in some respects capable of being supported
+with an even greater outward appearance of probability.  I therefore
+resolved to combat it, and as a preliminary to this, have taken care that
+it shall be stated in the clearest and most definite manner possible.
+But it is plain that those who accept the fact that our Lord reappeared
+after the Crucifixion differ hardly less widely from Strauss than they do
+from ourselves; it will therefore be expedient to shew how they maintain
+their ground against so formidable an antagonist.  Let it be remembered
+that Strauss and his followers admit that _the Death_ of our Lord is
+proved, while those of our opponents who would deny this, nevertheless
+admit that we can establish _the reappearances_; it follows therefore
+that each of our most important propositions is admitted by one section
+or other of the enemy, and each section would probably be heartily glad
+to be able to deny what it admits.  Can there be any doubt about the
+significance of this fact?  Would not a little reflection be likely to
+suggest to the distracted host of our adversaries that each of its two
+halves is right, as _far as it goes_, but that agreement will only be
+possible between them when each party has learnt that it is in possession
+of only half the truth, and has come to admit both the _Death of our Lord
+and His Resurrection_?
+
+Returning, however, to the manner in which the section of our opponents
+with whom I am now dealing meet Strauss, they may be supposed 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 of Jesus is
+clear, unanimous, and connected.’  If this means that the Evangelists
+would certainly know whether Christ died or not, we demur to it at once.
+Strauss would himself admit that not one of the writers who have recorded
+the facts connected with the Crucifixion was an eyewitness of that event,
+and he must also be aware that the very utmost which any of these writers
+can have _known_, was _that Christ was believed to have been dead_.  It
+is strange to see Strauss so suddenly struck with the clearness,
+unanimity, and connectedness of the Evangelists.  In the very next
+sentence he goes on to say, ‘Equally fragmentary, full of contradiction
+and obscurity, is all that they tell us of the opportunities of observing
+him which his adherents are supposed to have had after his resurrection.’
+Now, this seems very unfair, for, after all, the gospel writers are quite
+as unanimous in asserting the main fact that Christ reappeared, as they
+are in asserting that he died; they would seem to be just as ‘clear,
+unanimous, and connected,’ about the former event as the latter (for the
+accounts of the Crucifixion vary not a little), and they must have had
+infinitely better means of knowing whether Christ reappeared than whether
+he had actually died.  There is not the same scope for variation in the
+bare assertion that a man died, as there is in the narration of his
+sayings and doings upon the several occasions of his reappearance.
+Besides, in support of the reappearances, we have the evidence of Paul,
+who, though not an eye-witness, was well acquainted with those who were;
+whereas no man can make more out of the facts recorded concerning the
+death of Jesus, than that he was believed to be dead under circumstances
+in which mistake might easily arise, that there is no reason to think
+that any organic function of the body had been destroyed at the time that
+it was delivered over to friends, and that none of those who testified to
+Christ’s death appear to have verified their statement by personal
+inspection of the body.  On these points the Evangelists do indeed appear
+to be ‘clear, unanimous, and connected.’
+
+“Later on Strauss is even more unsatisfactory, for on the page which
+follows the one above quoted from, he writes: ‘Besides which, it is quite
+evident that this (the natural) view of the resurrection of Jesus, apart
+from the difficulties in which it is involved, does not even solve the
+problem which is here under consideration: the origin, that is, of the
+Christian Church by faith in the miraculous resurrection of the Messiah.
+It is impossible that a being who had stolen half-dead out of a
+sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treatment, who
+required bandaging, strengthening, and indulgence, and who still, at
+last, yielded to his sufferings, could have given to the disciples the
+impression that he was a conqueror over death and the grave, the Prince
+of Life, an impression which lay at the bottom of their future ministry.
+Such a resuscitation could only have weakened the impression which he had
+made upon them in life and in death; at the most could only have given it
+an elegiac voice, but could by no possibility have changed their sorrow
+into enthusiasm, have elevated their reverence into worship.’
+
+“Now, the fallacy in the above is obvious; it assumes that _Christ_ was
+in such a state as to be compelled to creep about, weak and ill, &c., and
+ultimately to die from the effects of his sufferings; whereas there is
+not a word of evidence in support of all this.  He may have been weak and
+ill when he forbade Mary to touch him, on the first occasion of his being
+seen alive; but it would be hard to prove even this, and on no subsequent
+occasion does he shew any sign of weakness.  The supposition that he died
+of the effects of his sufferings is quite gratuitous; one would like to
+know where Strauss got it from.  He _may_ have done so, or he may have
+been assassinated by some one commissioned by the Jewish Sanhedrim, or he
+may have felt that his work was done, and that any further interference
+upon his part would only mar it, and therefore resolved upon withdrawing
+himself from Palestine for ever, or Joseph of Arimathæa may have feared
+the revolution which he saw approaching—or twenty things besides might
+account for Christ’s final disappearance.  The only thing, however, which
+we can say with any certainty is that he disappeared, and that there is
+no reason to believe that he died of his wounds.  All over and above this
+is guesswork.
+
+“Again, if Christ on reappearing had continued in daily intercourse with
+his disciples, it might have been impossible that they should not find
+out that he was in all respects like themselves.  But he seems to have
+been careful to avoid seeing them much.  Paul only mentions five
+reappearances, only one of which was to any considerable number of
+people.  According also to the gospel writers, the reappearances were
+few; they were without preparation, and nothing seems to have been known
+of where he resided between each visit; this rarity and mysteriousness of
+the reappearances of Christ (whether dictated by fear of his enemies or
+by policy) would heighten their effect, and prevent the Apostles from
+knowing much more about their master than the simple fact that he was
+indisputably alive.  They saw enough to assure them of this, but they did
+not see enough to prevent their being able to regard their master as a
+conqueror over death and the grave, even though it could be shewn (which
+certainly cannot be done) that he continued in infirm health, and
+ultimately died of his wounds.
+
+“If the Apostles had been highly educated English or German Professors,
+it might be hard to believe them capable of making any mistake; but they
+were nothing of the kind; they were ignorant Eastern peasants, living in
+the very thick of every conceivable kind of delusive influence.  Strauss
+himself supposes their minds to have been so weak and unhinged that they
+became easy victims to hallucination.  But if this was the case, they
+would be liable to other kinds of credulity, and it seems strange that
+one who would bring them down so low, should be here so suddenly jealous
+for their intelligence.  There is no reason to suppose that Christ _was_
+weak and ill after the first day or two, any more than there is for
+believing that he died of his wounds.  This being so, is it not more
+simple and natural to believe that the Apostles were really misled by a
+solid substratum of strange events—a substratum which seems to be
+supported by all the evidence which we can get—than that the whole story
+of the appearances of Christ after the Crucifixion should be due to
+baseless dreams and fancies?  At any rate, if the Apostles could be
+misled by hallucination, much more might they be misled by a natural
+reappearance, which looked not unlike a supernatural one.
+
+“The belief in the miraculous character of the Resurrection is the
+central point of the whole Christian system.  Let this be once believed,
+and considering the times, which, it must always be remembered, were in
+respect of credulity widely different from our own, 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, and unfamiliarity with the ideas of
+accuracy and science, and considering also the unquestionable beauty and
+wisdom of much which is recorded as having been taught by Christ, and the
+really remarkable circumstances of the case—we say, once let the
+Resurrection be believed to be miraculous, and the rest is clear; there
+is no further mystery about the origin of the Christian religion.
+
+“So the matter has now come to this pass, that we are to jeopardise our
+faith in all human experience, if we are unable to see our way clearly
+out of a few words about a spear wound, recorded as having been inflicted
+in a distant country nearly two thousand years ago, by a writer
+concerning whom we are entirely ignorant, and whose connection with any
+eye-witness of the events which he records is a matter of pure
+conjecture.  We will see about this hereafter; all that 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 of the
+arguments which have led our opponents as well as the Dean of Canterbury,
+and I may add, with due apology, myself, to conclude that nothing is
+known as to the severity or purpose of the spear wound.  The case,
+therefore, of our adversaries will rest thus:—that there is not only no
+sufficient reason for believing that Christ died upon the cross, but that
+there are the strongest conceivable reasons for believing that He did not
+die; that the shortness of time during which He remained upon the cross,
+the immediate delivery of the body to friends, and, above all, the
+subsequent reappearance alive, are ample grounds for arriving at such a
+conclusion.  They add further that it would seem a monstrous supposition
+to believe that a good and merciful God should have designed to redeem
+the world by the infliction of such awful misery upon His own Son, and
+yet determined to condemn every one who did not believe in this design,
+in spite of such a deficiency of evidence that disbelief would appear to
+be a moral obligation.  No good God, they say, would have left a matter
+of such unutterable importance in a state of such miserable uncertainty,
+when the addition of a very small amount of testimony would have been
+sufficient to establish it.
+
+In the two following chapters I shall show the futility and irrelevancy
+of the above reasoning—if, indeed, that can be called reasoning which is
+from first to last essentially unreasonable.  Plausible as, in parts, it
+may have appeared, I have little doubt that the reader will have already
+detected the greater number of the fallacies which underlie it.  But
+before I can allow myself to enter upon the welcome task of refutation, a
+few more words from our opponents will yet be necessary.  However
+strongly I disapprove of their views, I trust they will admit that I have
+throughout expressed them as one who thoroughly understands them.  I am
+convinced that the course I have taken is the only one which can lead to
+their being brought into the way of truth, and I mean to persevere in it
+until I have explained the views which they take concerning our Lord’s
+Ascension, with no less clearness than I shewed forth their opinions
+concerning the Resurrection.
+
+“In St. Matthew’s Gospel,” they will say, “we find no trace whatever of
+any story concerning the Ascension.  The writer had either never heard
+anything about the matter at all, or did not consider it of sufficient
+importance to deserve notice.
+
+“Dean Alford, indeed, maintains otherwise.  In his notes on the words,
+‘And lo!  I am with you always unto the end of the world,’ he says,
+‘These words imply and set forth the Ascension’; it is true that 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 his disciples to the end of
+time; but how do they set forth the fact that his body was seen by a
+number of people to rise into the air and actually to mount up far into
+the region of the clouds?
+
+“The fact is simply this—and nobody can know it better than Dean
+Alford—that Matthew tells us nothing about the Ascension.
+
+“The last verses of Mark’s Gospel are admitted by Dean Alford himself to
+be not genuine, but even in these the subject is dismissed in a single
+verse, and although it is stated that Christ was received into Heaven,
+there is not a single word to imply that any one was supposed to have
+seen him actually on his way thither.
+
+“The author of the fourth Gospel is also silent concerning the Ascension.
+There is not a word, nor hint, nor faintest trace of any knowledge of the
+fact, unless an allusion be detected in the words, ‘What and if ye shall
+see the Son of Man ascending where he was before?’ (John vi., 62) in
+reference to which passage Dean Alford, in his note on Luke xxiv., 52,
+writes as follows:—‘And might not we have concluded from the wording of
+John vi., 62, that our Lord must have intended an ascension _insight of
+some of those to whom he spoke_, and that the Evangelist _gives that
+hint_, _by recording those words without comment_, _that he had seen
+it_?’  That is to say, we are to conclude that the writer of the fourth
+Gospel actually _saw_ the Ascension, because he tells us that Christ
+uttered the words, ‘What and 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 is there
+for thinking that that work is genuine?  Let us make another extract 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 had related
+regarding the life of Christ; nor Polycarp, who was himself a disciple of
+the Apostle John; nor Barnabas, nor Clement of Rome, in their epistles;
+nor, lastly, Ignatius (in his genuine writings), makes any mention of, or
+allusion to, this gospel.  _So that in the most ancient circle of
+ecclesiastical testimony_, _it appears to be unknown or not recognised_.’
+We may add that there is no trace of its existence before the latter half
+of the second century, and that the internal evidence against its
+genuineness appears to be more and more conclusive the more it is
+examined.
+
+“St. Paul, when enumerating the last appearances of his master, in a
+passage where the absence of any allusion to the Ascension is almost
+conclusive as to his never having heard a word about it, is also silent.
+In no part of his genuine writings does he give any sign of his having
+been aware that any story was in existence as to the manner 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 than half
+a century after the supposed event, when few, or more probably none, of
+those who were supposed to have seen it were either living or within
+reach to contradict it.  Luke writes (xxiv., 51), ‘And it came to pass
+that while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into
+Heaven.’  This is the only account of the Ascension given in any part of
+the Gospels which can be considered genuine.  It gives Bethany as the
+place of the miracle, whereas, if Dean Alford is right 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 some Christian writers will maintain
+that it happened both at Bethany and in Galilee.
+
+“In his subsequent work, written some sixty or seventy years after the
+Ascension, St. Luke gives us that more detailed account which is commonly
+present to the imagination of all men (thanks to the Italian painters),
+when the Ascension is alluded to.  The details, it would seem, came to
+his knowledge after he had written his Gospel, and many a long year after
+Matthew and Mark and Paul had written.  How he came by the additional
+details we do not know.  Nobody seems to care to know.  He must have had
+them revealed to him, or been told them by some one, and that some one,
+whoever he was, doubtless knew what he was saying, and all Europe at one
+time believed the story, and this is sufficient proof that mistake was
+impossible.
+
+“It is indisputable that from the very earliest ages of the Church there
+existed a belief that Christ was at the right hand of God; but no one who
+professes to have seen him on his way thither has left a single word of
+record.  It is easy to believe that the facts may have been revealed in a
+night vision, or communicated in one or other of the many ways in which
+extraordinary circumstances _are_ communicated, during the years of oral
+communication and enthusiasm which elapsed between the supposed Ascension
+of Christ and the writing of Luke’s second work.  It is not surprising
+that a firm belief in Christ’s having survived death should have arisen
+in consequence of the actual circumstances connected with the Crucifixion
+and entombment.  Was it then strange that this should develop itself into
+the belief that he was now in Heaven, sitting at the right hand of God
+the Father?  And finally was it strange that a circumstantial account of
+the manner in which he left this earth should be eagerly accepted?”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+[In an appendix at the end of the book I have given the extracts from the
+Gospels which are necessary for a full comprehension of the preceding
+chapters.—W. B. O.]
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+The Christ-Ideal
+
+
+I HAVE completed a task painful to myself and the reader.  Painful to
+myself inasmuch as I am humiliated upon remembering the power which
+arguments, so shallow and so easily to be refuted, once had upon me;
+painful to the reader, as everything must be painful which even appears
+to throw doubt upon the most sublime event that has happened in human
+history.  How little does all that has been written above touch the real
+question at issue, yet, what self-discipline and mental training is
+required before we learn to distinguish the essential from the
+unessential.
+
+Before, however, we come to close quarters with our opponents concerning
+the views put forward in the preceding chapters, it will be well to
+consider two questions of the gravest and most interesting character,
+questions which will probably have already occurred to the reader with
+such force as to demand immediate answer.  They are these.
+
+Firstly, what will be the consequences of admitting any considerable
+deviation from historical accuracy on the part of the sacred writers?
+
+Secondly, how can it be conceivable that God should have permitted
+inaccuracy or obscurity in the evidence concerning the Divine commission
+of His Son?
+
+If God so loved the World that He sent His only begotten Son into it to
+rescue those who believed in Him from destruction, how is it credible
+that He should not have so arranged matters as that all should find it
+easy to believe?  If He wanted to save mankind and knew that the only way
+in which mankind could be saved was by believing certain facts, how can
+it be that the records of the facts should have been allowed to fall into
+confusion?
+
+To both these questions I trust that the following answers may appear
+conclusive.
+
+I.  As regards the consequences which may be supposed to follow upon
+giving up any part of the sacred writings, no matter how seemingly
+unimportant, it is undoubtedly true that to many minds they have appeared
+too dangerous to be even contemplated.  Thus through fear of some
+supposed unutterable consequences which would happen to the cause of
+truth if truth were spoken, people profess to believe in the genuineness
+of many passages in the Bible which are universally acknowledged by
+competent judges of every shade of theological opinion to be
+interpolations into the original text.  To say nothing of the Old
+Testament, where many whole books are of disputed genuineness or
+authenticity, there are portions of the New which none will seriously
+defend;—for example, the last verses of St. Mark’s Gospel,—containing, as
+they do, the sentence of damnation against all who do not believe—the
+second half of the third, and the whole of the fourth verse of the fifth
+chapter of St. John’s Gospel, the story of the woman taken in adultery,
+and probably the whole of the last chapter of St. John’s Gospel, not to
+mention the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and
+to the Ephesians, the Epistles of Peter and James, the famous verses as
+to the three witnesses in the First Epistle of St. John, and perhaps also
+the book of Revelation.  These are passages and works about which there
+is either no doubt at all as to their not being genuine, or over which
+there hangs so much uncertainty that no dependence can be placed upon
+them.
+
+But over and above these, there are not a few parts of each of the
+Gospels which, though of undisputed genuineness, cannot be accepted as
+historical; thus the account of the Resurrection given by St. Matthew,
+and parts of those by Luke and Mark, the cursing of the barren fig-tree,
+and the prophecies of His Resurrection ascribed to our Lord Himself, will
+not stand the tests of criticism which we are bound to apply to them if
+we are to exercise the right of private judgement; instead of handing
+ourselves over to a priesthood as the sole custodians and interpreters of
+the Bible.  It has been said by some that the miracle of the penny found
+in the fish’s mouth should be included in the above category, but it
+should be remembered that we have only the injunction of our Lord to St.
+Peter that he should catch the fish and the promise that he should find
+the penny in its mouth, but that we have no account of the sequel, it is
+therefore possible that in the event of St. Peter’s faith having failed
+him he may have procured the money from some other source, and that thus
+the miracle, though undoubtedly intended, was never actually performed.
+How unnecessary therefore as well as presumptuous are the Rationalistic
+interpretations which have been put upon the event by certain German
+writers!
+
+Now there are few, if any, who would be so illiberal as to wish for the
+exclusion from the sacred volume of all those books or passages which,
+though neither genuine nor perhaps edifying, have remained in the Canon
+of Scripture for many centuries.  Any serious attempt to reconstruct the
+Canon would raise a theological storm which would not subside in this
+century.  The work could never be done perfectly, and even if it could,
+it would have to be done at the expense of tearing all Christendom in
+pieces.  The passages do little or no harm where they are, and have
+received the sanction of time; let them therefore by all means remain in
+their present position.  But the question is still forced upon us whether
+the consequences of openly admitting the certain spuriousness of many
+passages, and the questionable nature of others as regards morality,
+genuineness and authenticity, should be feared as being likely to
+prejudice the main doctrines of Christianity.
+
+The answer is very plain.  He who has vouchsafed to us the Christian
+dispensation may be safely trusted to provide that no harm shall happen,
+either to it or to us, from an honest endeavour to attain the truth
+concerning it.  What have we to do with consequences?  These are in the
+hands of God.  Our duty is to seek out the truth in prayer and humility,
+and when we believe that we have found it, to cleave to it 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 is wiser to gloss over
+this or that, and who consider it “injudicious” to announce the whole
+truth in connection with Christianity, should have learnt by this time
+that no admission which can by any possibility be required of them can be
+so perilous to the cause of Christ as the appearance of shirking
+investigation.  It has already been insisted upon that cowardice is at
+the root of the infidelity which we see around us; the want of faith in
+the power of truth which exists in certain pious but timid hearts has
+begotten utter unbelief in the minds of all superficial investigators
+into Christian evidences.  Such persons see that the defenders have
+something in the background, something which they would cling to although
+they are secretly aware that they cannot justly claim it.  This is enough
+for many, and hence more harm is done by fear than could ever have been
+done by boldness.  Boldness goes out into the fight, and if in the wrong
+gets slain, childless.  Fear stays at home and is prolific of a brood of
+falsehoods.
+
+It is immoral to regard consequences at all, where truth and justice are
+concerned; the being impregnated with this conviction to the inmost core
+of one’s heart is an axiom of common honesty—one of the essential
+features which distinguish a good man from a bad one.  Nevertheless, to
+make it plain that the consequences of outspoken truthfulness in
+connection with the scriptural writings would have no harmful effect
+whatever, but would, on the contrary, be of the utmost service as
+removing a stumbling-block from the way of many—let us for the moment
+suppose that very much more would have to be given up than can ever be
+demanded.
+
+Suppose we were driven to admit that nothing in the life of our Lord can
+be certainly depended upon beyond the facts that He was begotten by the
+Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary; that He worked many miracles upon earth,
+and delivered St. Matthew’s version of the sermon on the mount and most
+of the parables as we now have them; finally, that He was crucified,
+dead, and buried, that He rose again from the dead upon the third day,
+and ascended unto Heaven.  Granting for the sake of argument that we
+could rely on no other facts, what would follow?  Nothing which could in
+any way impair the living power of Christianity.
+
+The essentials of Christianity, _i.e._, a belief in the Divinity of the
+Saviour and in His Resurrection and Ascension, have stood, and will
+stand, for ever against any attacks that can be made upon them, and these
+are probably the only facts in which belief has ever been absolutely
+necessary for salvation; the answer, therefore, to the question what ill
+consequences would arise from the open avowal of things which every
+student must know to be the fact concerning the biblical writings is that
+there would be none at all.  The Christ-ideal which, after all, is the
+soul and spirit of Christianity would remain precisely where it was,
+while its recognition would be far more general, owing to the departure
+on the part of its apologists from certain lines of defence which are
+irreconcilable with the ideal itself.
+
+II.  Returning to the objection how it could be possible that God should
+have left the records of our Lord’s history in such a vague and
+fragmentary condition, if it were really of such intense importance for
+the world to understand it and believe in it, we find ourselves face to
+face with a question of far greater importance and difficulty.
+
+The old theory that God desired to test our faith, and that there would
+be no merit in believing if the evidence were such as to commend itself
+at once to our understanding, is one which need only be stated to be set
+aside.  It is blasphemy against the goodness of God 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 to violate one of the very most
+precious of God’s own gifts.  There is an ingenious cruelty about such
+conduct which it is revolting even to imagine.  Indeed, the whole theory
+reduces our Heavenly Father to a level of wisdom and goodness far below
+our own; and this is sufficient answer to it.
+
+But when, turning aside from the above, we try to adopt some other and
+more reasonable view, we naturally set ourselves to consider why the
+Almighty should have required belief in the Divinity of His Son from man.
+What is there in this belief on man’s part which can be so grateful to
+God that He should make it a _sine quâ non_ for man’s salvation?  As
+regards Himself, how can it matter to Him what man should think of Him?
+Nay, it must be for man’s own good that the belief is demanded.
+
+And why?  Surely we can see plainly that it is the beauty of the
+Christ-ideal which constitutes the working power of Christianity over the
+hearts and lives of men, leading them to that highest of all worships
+which consists in imitation.  Now the sanction which is given to this
+ideal by belief in the Divinity of our Lord, raises it at once above all
+possibility of criticism.  If it had not been so sanctioned it might have
+been considered open to improvement; one critic would have had this, and
+another that; comparison would have been made with ideals of purely human
+origin such as the Greek ideal, exemplified in the work of Phidias, and
+in later times with the mediæval Italian ideal, as deducible from the
+best fifteenth and early sixteenth Italian painting and sculpture, the
+Madonnas of Bellini and Raphael, or the St. George of Donatello; or again
+with the ideal derivable from the works of our own Shakespeare, and there
+are some even now among those who deny the Divinity of Christ who will
+profess that each one of these ideals is more universal, more fitted for
+the spiritual food of a man, and indeed actually higher, than that
+presented by the life and death of our Saviour.  But once let the Divine
+origin of this last ideal be admitted, and there can be no further
+uncertainty; hence the absolute necessity for belief in Christ’s Divinity
+as closing the most important of all questions, Whereunto should a man
+endeavour to liken both himself and his children?
+
+Seeing then that we have reasonable ground for thinking that belief in
+the Divinity of our Lord is mainly required of us in order to exalt our
+sense of the paramount importance of following and obeying the life and
+commands of Christ, it is natural also to suppose _that whatever may have
+happened to the records of that life_ should have been ordained with a
+view to the enhancing of the preciousness of the ideal.
+
+Now, the fragmentary character, and the partial obscurity—I might have
+almost written, the incomparable _chiaroscuro_—of the Evangelistic
+writings have added to the value of our Lord’s character as an ideal, not
+only in the case of Christians, but as bringing the Christ-ideal within
+the reach and comprehension of an infinitely greater number of minds than
+it could ever otherwise have appealed to.  It is true that those who are
+insensible to spiritual influences, and whose materialistic instinct
+leads them to deny everything which is not as clearly demonstrable by
+external evidence as a fact in chemistry, geography, or mathematics, will
+fail to find the hardness, definition, tightness, and, let me add,
+littleness of outline, in which their souls delight; they will find
+rather the gloom and gleam of Rembrandt, or the golden twilight of the
+Venetians, the losing and the finding, and the infinite liberty of
+shadow; and this they hate, inasmuch as it taxes their imagination, which
+is no less deficient than their power of sympathy; they would have all
+found, as in one of those laboured pictures wherein each form is as an
+inflated bladder and, has its own uncompromising outline remorselessly
+insisted upon.
+
+Looking to the ideals of purely human creation which have come down to us
+from old times, do we find that the Theseus suffers because we are unable
+to realise to ourselves the precise features of the original?  Or again
+do the works of John Bellini suffer because the hand of the painter was
+less dexterous than his intention pure?  It is not what a man has
+actually put upon his canvas, but what he makes us feel that he felt,
+which makes the difference between good and bad in painting.  Bellini’s
+hand was cunning enough to make us feel what he intended, and did his
+utmost to realise; but he has not realised it, and the same hallowing
+effect which has been wrought upon the Theseus by decay (to the enlarging
+of its spiritual influence), has been wrought upon the work of Bellini by
+incapacity—the incapacity of the painter to utter perfectly the perfect
+thought which was within.  The early Italian paintings have that stamp of
+individuality upon them which assures us that they are not only
+portraits, but as faithful portraits as the painter could make them, more
+than this we know not, but more is unnecessary.
+
+Do we not detect an analogy to this in the records of the Evangelists?
+Do we not see the child-like unself-seeking work of earnest and loving
+hearts, whose innocence and simplicity more than atone for their many
+shortcomings, their distorted renderings, and their omissions?  We can
+see _through_ these things as through a glass darkly, or as one looking
+upon some ineffable masterpiece of Venetian portraiture by the fading
+light of an autumnal evening, when the beauty of the picture is enhanced
+a hundredfold by the gloom and mystery of dusk.  We may indeed see less
+of the actual lineaments themselves, but the echo is ever more
+spiritually tuneful than the sound, and the echo we find within us.  Our
+imagination is in closer communion with our longings than the hand of any
+painter.
+
+Those who relish definition, and definition only, are indeed kept away
+from Christianity by the present condition of the records, but even if
+the life of our Lord had been so definitely rendered as to find a place
+in their system, would it have greatly served their souls?  And would it
+not repel hundreds and thousands of others, who find in the
+suggestiveness of the sketch a completeness of satisfaction, which no
+photographic reproduction could have given?  The above may be difficult
+to understand, but let me earnestly implore the reader to endeavour to
+master its import.
+
+People misunderstand the aim and scope of religion.  Religion is only
+intended 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 ever kindled by a
+mechanical drawing?  How cold and dead were science unless supplemented
+by art and by religion!  Not joined with them, for the merest touch of
+these things impairs scientific value—which depends essentially upon
+accuracy, and not upon any feeling for the beautiful and lovable.  In
+like manner the merest touch of science chills the warmth of
+sentiment—the spiritual life.  The mechanical drawing is spoiled by being
+made artistic, and the work of the artist by becoming mechanical.  The
+aim of the one is to teach men how to construct, of the other how to
+feel.
+
+For the due conservation therefore of both the essential requisites of
+human well-being—science, and religion—it is requisite that they be kept
+asunder and reserved for separate use at different times.  Religion is
+the mistress of the arts, and every art which does not serve religion
+truly is doomed to perish as a lying and unprofitable servant.  Science
+is external to religion, being a separate dispensation, a distinct
+revelation to mankind, whereby we are put into full present possession of
+more and more of God’s modes of dealing with material things, according
+as we become more fitted to receive them through the apprehension of
+those modes which have been already laid open to us.
+
+We ought not therefore to have expected scientific accuracy from the
+Gospel records—much less should we be required to believe that such
+accuracy exists.  Does any great artist ever dream of aiming directly at
+imitation?  He aims at representation—not at imitation.  In order to
+attain true mastery here, he must spend years in learning how to see; and
+then no less time in learning how _not_ to see.  Finally, he learns how
+to translate.  Take Turner for example.  Who conveys so living an
+impression of the face of nature?  Yet go up to his canvas and what does
+one find thereon?  Imitation?  Nay—blotches and daubs of paint; the
+combination of these daubs, each one in itself when taken alone
+absolutely untrue, forms an impression which is quite truthful.  No
+combination of minute truths in a picture will give so faithful a
+representation of nature as a wisely arranged tissue of untruths.
+
+Absolute reproduction is impossible even to the photograph.  The work of
+a great artist is far more truthful than any photograph; but not even the
+greatest artist can convey to our minds the whole truth of nature; no
+human hand nor pigments can expound all that lies hidden in “Nature’s
+infinite book of secrecy”; the utmost that can be done is to convey an
+impression, and if the impression is to be conveyed truthfully, the means
+must often be of the most unforeseen character.  The old Pre-Raphaelites
+aimed at absolute reproduction.  They were succeeded by a race of men who
+saw all that their predecessors had seen, but also something higher.  The
+Van Eycks and Memling paved the way 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, and Tintoretto; Perugino was succeeded by Raphael.  It is
+everywhere the same story; a reverend but child-like worship of the
+letter, followed by a manful apprehension of the spirit, and, alas! in
+due time by an almost total disregard of the letter; then rant and cant
+and bombast, till the value of the letter is reasserted.  In theology the
+early men are represented by the Evangelicals, the times of utter
+decadence by infidelity—the middle race of giants is yet to come, and
+will be found in those who, while seeing something far beyond either
+minute accuracy or minute inaccuracy, are yet fully alive both to the
+letter and to the spirit of the Gospels.
+
+Again, do not the seeming wrongs which the greatest ideals of purely
+human origin have suffered at the hands of time, add to their value
+instead of detracting from it?  Is it not probable that if we were to see
+the glorious fragments from the Parthenon, the Theseus and the Ilyssus,
+or even the Venus of Milo, in their original and unmutilated condition,
+we should find that they appealed to us much less forcibly than they do
+at present?  All ideals gain by vagueness and lose by definition,
+inasmuch as more scope is left for the imagination of the beholder, who
+can thus fill in the missing detail according to his own spiritual needs.
+This is how it comes that nothing which is recent, whether animate or
+inanimate, can serve as an ideal unless it is adorned by more than common
+mystery and uncertainty.  A new Cathedral is necessarily very ugly.
+There is too much found and too little lost.  Much less could an
+absolutely perfect Being be of the highest value as an ideal, as long as
+He could be clearly seen, for it is impossible that He could be known as
+perfect by imperfect men, and His very perfections must perforce appear
+as blemishes to any but perfect critics.  To give therefore an impression
+of perfection, to create an absolutely unsurpassable ideal, it became
+essential that the actual image of the original should become blurred and
+lost, whereon the beholder now supplies from his own imagination that
+which is _to him_ more perfect than the original, though objectively it
+must be infinitely less so.
+
+It is probably to this cause that the incredulity of the Apostles during
+our Lord’s life-time must be assigned.  The ideal was too near them, and
+too far above their comprehension; for it must be always remembered that
+the convincing power of miracles in the days of the Apostles must have
+been greatly weakened by the current belief in their being events of no
+very unusual occurrence, and in the existence both of good and evil
+spirits who could take possession of men and compel them to do their
+bidding.  A resurrection from the dead or a restoration of sight to the
+blind, must have seemed even less portentous to them, than an unusually
+skilful treatment of disease by a physician is to us.  We can therefore
+understand how it happened that the faith of the Apostles was so little
+to be depended upon even up to the Crucifixion, inasmuch as the
+convincing power of miracles had been already, so to speak, exhausted, a
+fact which may perhaps explain the early withdrawal of the power to work
+them; we cannot indeed believe that it could have been so far weakened as
+to make the Apostles disregard the prophecies of their Master that He
+should rise from the dead, if He had ever uttered them, and we have
+already seen reason to think that these prophecies are the _ex post
+facto_ handiwork of time; but the incredulity of the disciples, when seen
+through the light now thrown upon it, loses that wholly inexplicable
+character which it would otherwise bear.
+
+But to return to the subject of the ideal presented by the life and death
+of our Lord.  In the earliest days of the Church there can have been no
+want of the most complete and irrefragable evidence for the objective
+reality of the miracles, and especially of the Resurrection and
+Ascension.  The character of Christ would also stand out revealed to all,
+with the most copious fulness of detail.  The limits within which so
+sharply defined an ideal could be acceptable were narrow, but as the
+radius of Christian influence increased, so also would the vagueness and
+elasticity of the ideal; and as the elasticity of the ideal, so also the
+range of its influence.
+
+A beneficent and truly marvellous provision for the greater complexity of
+man’s spiritual needs was thus provided by a gradual loss of detail and
+gain of breadth.  Enough evidence was given in the first instance to
+secure authoritative sanction for the ideal.  During the first thirty or
+forty years after the death of our Lord no one could be in want of
+evidence, and the guilt of unbelief is therefore brought prominently
+forward.  Then came the loss of detail which was necessary in order to
+secure the universal acceptability of the ideal; but the same causes
+which blurred the distinctness of the features, involved the inevitable
+blurring of no small portions of the external evidences whereby the
+Divine origin of the ideal was established.  The primary external
+evidence became less and less capable of compelling instantaneous assent,
+according as it was less wanted, owing to the greater mass of secondary
+evidence, and to the growth of appreciation of the internal evidences, a
+growth which would be fostered by the growing adaptability of the ideal.
+
+Some thirty or forty years, then, from the death of our Saviour the case
+would stand thus.  The Christ-ideal would have become infinitely more
+vague, and hence infinitely more universal: but the causes which had thus
+added to its value would also have destroyed whatever primary evidence
+was superabundant, and the vagueness which had overspread the ideal would
+have extended itself in some measure over the 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 the ideal, and
+too little distinctness in the evidences.  It became necessary therefore
+to provide against this danger.
+
+_Precisely at that epoch the Gospels made their appearance_.  Not
+simultaneously, not in concert, and not in perfect harmony with each
+other, yet with the error distributed skilfully among them, as in a
+well-tuned instrument wherein each string is purposely something out of
+tune with every other.  Their divergence of aim, and different
+authorship, secured the necessary breadth of effect when the accounts
+were viewed together; their universal recognition afforded the necessary
+permanency, and arrested further decay.  If I may be pardoned for using
+another illustration, I would say that as the roundness of the
+stereoscopic image can only be attained by the combination of two
+distinct pictures, neither of them in perfect harmony with the other, so
+the highest possible conception of Christ, cannot otherwise be produced
+than through the discrepancies of the Gospels.
+
+From the moment of the appearing of the Gospels, and, I should add, of
+the Epistles of St. Paul, the external evidences of Christianity became
+secured from further change; as they were then, so are they now, they can
+neither be added to nor subtracted from; they have lain as it were
+sleeping, till the time should come to awaken them.  And the time is
+surely now, for there has arisen a very numerous and increasing class of
+persons, whose habits of mind unfit them for appreciating the value of
+vagueness, but who have each one of them a soul which may be lost or
+saved, and on whose behalf the evidences for the authority whereby the
+Christ-ideal is sanctioned, should be restored to something like their
+former sharpness.  Christianity contains provision for all needs upon
+their arising.  The work of restoration is easy.  It demands this much
+only—the recognition that time has made incrustations upon some parts of
+the evidences, and that 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
+not to the disturbance of their present form and arrangement.
+
+The above explanation of the causes for the obscurity which rests upon
+much of our Lord’s life and teaching, may give us ground for hoping that
+some of those who have failed to feel the force of the external evidences
+hitherto, may yet be saved, provided they have fully 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 so imperatively
+insisted upon, in order that the ideal might thus be exalted above
+controversy, and made more sacred in the eyes of men than it could have
+been if referable to a purely human source.  May not, then, one who
+recognises the ideal as his _summum bonum_ find grace although he knows
+not, or even cares not, how it should have come to be so?  For even a
+sceptic who regarded the whole New Testament as a work of art, a poem, a
+pure fiction from beginning to end, and who revered it for its intrinsic
+beauty only, as though it were a picture or statue, even such a person
+might well find that it engendered in him an ideal of goodness and power
+and love and human sympathy, which could be derived from no other source.
+If, then, our blessed Lord so causes the sun of His righteousness to
+shine upon these men, shall we presume to say that He will not in another
+world restore them to that full communion with Himself which can only
+come from a belief in His Divinity?
+
+We can understand that it should have been impossible to proclaim this in
+the earliest ages of the Church, inasmuch as no weakening of the
+sanctions of the ideal could be tolerated, but are we bound to extend the
+operation of the many passages condemnatory of unbelief to a time so
+remote as our own, and to circumstances so widely different from those
+under which they were uttered?  Do we so extend the command not to eat
+things strangled or blood, or the assertion of St. Paul that the
+unmarried state is higher than the married?  May we not therefore hope
+that certain kinds of unbelief have become less hateful in the sight of
+God inasmuch as they are less dangerous to the universal acceptance of
+our Lord as the one model for the imitation of all men?  For, after all,
+it is not belief in the facts which constitutes the essence of
+Christianity, but rather the being so impregnated with love at the
+contemplation of Christ that imitation becomes almost instinctive; this
+it is which draws the hearts of men to God the Father, far more than any
+intellectual belief that God sent our Lord into the world, ordaining that
+he should be crucified and rise from the dead.  Christianity is addressed
+rather to the infinite spirit of man than to his finite intelligence, and
+the believing in Christ through love is more precious in the sight of God
+than any loving through belief.  May we not hope, then, that those whose
+love is great may in the end find acceptance, though their belief is
+small?  We dare not answer this positively; but we know that there are
+times of transition in the clearness of the Christian evidences as in all
+else, and the treatment of those whose lot is cast in such times will
+surely not escape the consideration of our Heavenly Father.
+
+But with reference to the many-sidedness of the Christ-ideal, as having
+been part of the design of God, and not attainable otherwise than as the
+creation of destruction—as coming out of the waste of time—it is clear
+that the perception of such a design could only be an offspring of modern
+thought; the conception of such an apparently self-frustrating scheme
+could only arise in minds which were familiar with the manner in which it
+is necessary “to hound nature in her wanderings” before her feints can be
+eluded, and her prevarications brought to book.  A deep distrust of the
+over-obvious is wanted, before men can be brought to turn aside from
+objections which at the first blush appear to be very serious, and to
+take refuge in solutions which seem harder than the problems which they
+are intended to solve.  What a shock must the discovery of the rotation
+of the earth have given to the moral sense of the age in which it was
+made.  How it contradicted all human experience.  How it must have
+outraged common sense.  How it must have encouraged scepticism even about
+the most obvious truths of morality.  No question could henceforth be
+considered settled; everything seemed to require reopening; for if man
+had once been deceived by Nature so entirely, if he had been so utterly
+led astray and deluded by the plausibility of her pretence that the earth
+was immovably fixed, what else, that seemed no less incontrovertible,
+might not prove no less false?
+
+It is probable that the opposition to Galileo on the part of the Roman
+church was as much due to some such feelings as these, as to theological
+objections; the discovery was felt to unsettle not only the foundations
+of the earth, but those of every branch of human knowledge and polity,
+and hence to be an outrage upon morality itself.  A man has no right to
+be very much in advance of other people; he is as a sheep, which may lead
+the mob, but must not stray forward a quarter of a mile in front of it;
+if he does this, he must be 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 to keep him company; the shock to morality and the
+encouragement to lawlessness do more harm than his discovery can atone
+for.  Let him hold 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
+the Christ ideal in consequence of the inaccuracies and inconsistencies
+of the Gospels—reflections which must now occur to any one—been put
+forward a hundred years ago, they would have met justly with the severest
+condemnation.  But now, even those to whom they may not have occurred
+already will have little difficulty in admitting their force.
+
+But be this as it may, it is certain that the inability to understand how
+the sense of Christ in the souls of men could be strengthened by the loss
+of much knowledge of His character, and of the facts connected with His
+history, lies at the root of the error even of the Apostle St. Paul, who
+exclaims with his usual fervour, but with less than his usual wisdom,
+“Has Christ been divided?” (I. Cor. i., 13).  “Yea,” we may make answer,
+“He is divided and is yet divisible that all may share in Him.”  St. Paul
+himself had realised that it was the spiritual value of the Christ-ideal
+which was the purifier and refresher of our souls, inasmuch as he
+elsewhere declares that even though he had known Christ Himself after the
+flesh, he knew Him no more; the spiritual Christ, that is to say the
+spirit of Christ as recognisable by the spirits of men, was to him all in
+all.  But he lived too near the days of our Lord for a full comprehension
+of the Christian scheme, and it is possible that had he known Christ
+after the flesh, his soul might have been less capable of recognising the
+spiritual essence, rather than more so.  Have we here a faint glimmering
+of the motive of the Almighty in not having allowed the Gentile Apostle
+to see Christ after the flesh?  We cannot say.  But we may say this much
+with certainty, that had he been living now, St. Paul would have rejoiced
+at the many-sidedness of Christ, which he appears to have hardly
+recognised in his own life-time.
+
+The apparently contradictory portraits of our Lord which we find in the
+Gospels—so long a stumbling-block to unbelievers—are now seen to be the
+very means which enable men of all ranks, and all shades of opinion, to
+accept Christ as their ideal; they are like the sea, which from having
+seemed the most impassable of all objects, turns out to be the greatest
+highway of communication.  To the artisan, for instance, who may have
+long been out of work, or who may have suffered from the greed and
+selfishness of his employers, or again, to the farm labourer who has been
+discharged perhaps at the approach of winter, the parable of “the
+Labourers in the Vineyard” offers itself as a divinely sanctioned picture
+of the dealings of God with man; few but those who have mixed much with
+the less educated classes, can have any idea of the priceless comfort
+which this parable affords daily to those whose lot it has been to remain
+unemployed when their more fortunate brethren have been in full work.
+How many of the poor, again, are drawn to Christianity by the parable of
+Dives and Lazarus.  How many a humble-minded Christian while reflecting
+upon the hardness of his lot, and tempted to cast a longing eye upon the
+luxuries which are at the command of his richer neighbours, is restrained
+from seriously coveting them, by remembering the awful fate of Dives, and
+the happy future which was in store for Lazarus.  “Dives,” they exclaim,
+“in his life-time possessed good things and in like manner Lazarus evil
+things, but now the one is comforted in the bosom of Abraham, and the
+other tormented in a lake of fire.”  They remember, also, that it is
+easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man
+to enter into the kingdom of Heaven.
+
+It has been said by some that the poor are thus encouraged to gloat over
+the future misery of the rich, and that many of the sayings ascribed to
+our Lord have an unhealthy influence over their minds.  I remember to
+have thought so once myself, but I have seen reason to change my mind.
+Hope is given by these sayings to many whose lives would be otherwise
+very nearly hopeless, and though I fully grant that the parable of Dives
+and Lazarus can only afford comfort to the very poor, yet it is most
+certain that it _does_ afford comfort to this numerous class, and helps
+to keep them contented with many things which they would not otherwise
+endure.
+
+On the other hand, though the poor are first provided for, the rich are
+not left without their full share of consolation.  Joseph of Arimathæa
+was rich, and modern criticism forbids us to believe that the parable of
+Dives and Lazarus was ever actually spoken by our Lord—at any rate not in
+its present form.  Neither are the children of the rich forgotten; the
+son who repents at length of a course of extravagant or riotous living is
+encouraged to return to virtue, and to seek reconciliation with his
+father, by reflecting upon the parable of the Prodigal Son, wherein he
+will find an everlasting model for the conduct of all earthly fathers.  I
+will say nothing of the parable of the Unjust Steward, for it is one of
+which the interpretation is most uncertain; nevertheless I am sure that
+it affords comfort to a very large number of persons.
+
+Christ came not to the whole, but to those that were sick; he came not to
+call the righteous but sinners to repentance.  Even our fallen sisters
+are remembered in the story of the woman taken in adultery, which reminds
+them that they can only be condemned justly by those who are without sin.
+It is to the poor, the weak, the ignorant and the infirm that
+Christianity appeals most strongly, and to whose needs it is most
+especially adapted—but these form by far the greater portion of mankind.
+“Blessed are they that mourn!”  Whose sorrow is not assuaged by the mere
+sound of these words?  Who again is not reassured by being reminded that
+our Heavenly Father feeds the sparrows and clothes the lilies of the
+field, and that if we will only seek the kingdom of God and His
+righteousness we need take no heed for the morrow what we shall eat, and
+what we shall drink, nor wherewithal we shall be clothed.  God will
+provide these things for us if we are true Christians, whether we take
+heed concerning them or not.  “I have been young and now am old,” saith
+the Psalmist, “yet never saw I the righteous forsaken nor his seed
+begging their bread.”
+
+How infinitely nobler and more soul-satisfying is the ideal of the
+Christian saint with wasted limbs, and clothed in the garb of poverty—his
+upturned eyes piercing the very heavens in the ecstasy of a divine
+despair—than any of the fleshly ideals of gross human conception such as
+have already been alluded to.  If a man does not feel this instinctively
+for himself, let him test it thus—whom does his heart of hearts tell him
+that his son will be most like God in resembling?  The Theseus?  The
+Discobolus? or the St. Peters and St. Pauls of Guido and Domenichino?
+Who can hesitate for a moment as to which ideal presents the higher
+development of human nature?  And this I take it should suffice; the
+natural instinct which draws us to the Christ-ideal in preference to all
+others as soon as it has been once presented to us, is a sufficient
+guarantee of its being the one most tending to the general well-being of
+the world.
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+Conclusion
+
+
+IT only remains to return to the seventh and eighth chapters, and to pass
+in review the reasons which will lead us to reject the conclusions
+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 confine themselves
+to maintaining that exaggeration has to a certain extent impaired the
+historic value of some of the Gospel records of the Resurrection.  They
+have made out this much, but have they made out more?  They have mistaken
+the question—which is this—“Did Jesus Christ die and rise from the dead?”
+And in the place of it they have raised another, namely, “Has there been
+any inaccuracy in the records of the time and manner of His reappearing?”
+
+Our error has been that instead of demurring to the relevancy of the
+issue raised by our opponents, we have accepted it.  We have thus placed
+ourselves in a false position, and have encouraged our opponents by doing
+so.  We have undertaken to fight them upon ground of their own choosing.
+We have been discomfited; but instead of owning to our defeat, and
+beginning the battle anew from a fresh base of operations, we have
+declared that we have not been defeated; hence those lamentable and
+suicidal attempts at disingenuous reasoning which we have seen reason to
+condemn so strongly in the works of Dean Alford and others.  How
+deplorable, how unchristian they are!
+
+The moment that we take a truer ground, the conditions of the strife
+change.  The same spirit of candid criticism which led us to reject the
+account of Matthew _in toto_, will make it easy for us to admit that
+those of Mark, Luke, and John, may not be so accurate as we could have
+wished, and yet to feel that our cause has sustained no injury.  There
+are probably very few who would pin their faith to the fact that Julius
+Cæsar fell exactly at the feet of Pompey’s statue, or that he uttered the
+words “Et tu, Brute.”  Yet there are still fewer who would dispute the
+fact that Julius Caesar was assassinated by 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 the manner in which each event took place.
+
+We had thought that these details were known, and so thinking, we had a
+certain consolation in realising to ourselves the precise manner in which
+every incident occurred; yet on reflection we must feel that the desire
+to realise is of the essence of idolatry, which, not content with knowing
+that there is a God, will be satisfied with nothing if it has not an
+effigy of His face and figure.  If it has not this it falls straight-way
+to the denial of God’s existence, being unable to conceive how a Being
+should exist and yet be incapable of representation.  We are as those who
+would fall down and worship the idol; our opponents, as those who upon
+the destruction of the idol would say that there was no God.
+
+We have met sceptics hitherto by adhering to the opinions as to the
+necessity of accuracy which prevailed among our forefathers, and instead
+of saying, “You are right—we do _not_ know all that we thought we
+did—nevertheless we know enough—we know the fact, though the manner of
+the fact be hidden,” we have preferred to say, “You are mistaken, our
+severe outline, our hard-and-fast lines are all perfectly accurate, there
+is not a detail of our theories which we are not prepared to stand by.”
+On this comes recrimination and mutual anger, and the strife grows hotter
+and hotter.
+
+Let us now rather say to the unbeliever, “We do not deny the truth of
+much which you assert.  We give up Matthew’s account of the Resurrection;
+we may perhaps accept parts of those of Mark and Luke and John, but it is
+impossible to say which parts, unless those in which all three agree with
+one another; and this being so, it becomes wiser to regard all the
+accounts as early and precious memorials of the certainty felt by the
+Apostles that Christ died and rose again, but as having little historic
+value with regard to the time and manner of the Resurrection.”
+
+Once take this ground, and instead of demurring to the truth of many of
+the assertions of our opponents, demur to their relevancy, and the
+unbeliever will find the ground cut away from under his feet
+independently of the fact that the reasonableness of the concession, and
+the discovery that we are not fighting merely to maintain a position,
+will incline him to calmness and to the reconsideration of his own
+opinions—which will in itself be a great gain—he will soon perceive that
+we are really standing upon firm ground, from which no enemy can dislodge
+us.  The discovery that we know less of the time and manner of our Lord’s
+death and Resurrection than we thought we did, does not invalidate a
+single one of the irresistible arguments whereby we can establish the
+fact of His having died and risen again.  The reader will now perhaps
+begin to perceive that the sad division between Christians and
+unbelievers has been one of those common cases in which both are right
+and both wrong; Christians being right in their chief assertion, and
+wrong in standing out for the accuracy of their details, while
+unbelievers are right in denying that our details are accurate, but wrong
+in drawing the inference that because certain facts have been
+inaccurately recorded, therefore certain others never happened at all.
+Both the errors are natural; it is high time, however, that upon both
+sides they should be recognised and avoided.
+
+But as regards the demolition of the structure raised in the seventh and
+eighth chapters of this book, whereinsoever, that is to say, it seems to
+menace the more vital part of our faith, the ease with which this will
+effected may perhaps lead the reader to think that I have not fulfilled
+the promise made in the outset, and have failed to put the best possible
+case for our opponents.  This supposition would be unjust; I have done
+the very best for them that I could.  For it is plain that they can only
+take one of two positions, namely, _either_ that Christ really died upon
+the Cross but was never seen alive again afterwards at all, and that the
+stories of His having been so seen are purely mythical, _or_, if they
+admit that He was seen alive after His Crucifixion, they must deny the
+completeness of the death; in other words, if they are to escape miracle,
+they must either deny the reappearances or the death.
+
+Now in the commencement of this work I dealt with those who deny that our
+Lord rose from the dead, and as the exponent of those who take this view
+I selected Strauss, who is undoubtedly the ablest writer they have.
+Whether I shewed sufficient reason for thinking that his theory was
+unsound must remain for the decision of the reader, but I certainly
+believe that I succeeded in doing so.  Perhaps the ablest of all the
+writers who have treated the facts given us in the Gospels from the
+Rationalistic point of view, is the author of an anonymous work called
+_The Jesus of History_ (Williams and Norgate, 1866); but this writer (and
+it is a characteristic feature of the Rationalistic school to become
+vague precisely at this very point) leaves us entirely in doubt as to
+whether he accepts the reappearances of Christ or not, and his treatment
+of the facts connected both with the Crucifixion and Resurrection is less
+definite than that of any other part of the life of our Lord.  He does
+not seem to see his own way clearly, and appears to consider that it must
+for ever remain a matter of doubt whether the Death of Christ or His
+reappearance is to be rejected.
+
+It is evident that it was most desirable to examine _both_ sets of
+arguments, _i.e._, those against the Resurrection, and those against the
+completeness of the Death; I have therefore mainly drawn the opinions of
+those who deny the Death from the same pamphlet as that from which I drew
+the criticisms on Dean Alford’s notes.  I know of no other English work,
+indeed, in which whatever can be said against us upon this all-important
+head has been put forward, and was therefore compelled to draw from this
+source, or to invent the arguments for our opponents, which would have
+subjected me to the accusation of stating them in such way as should best
+suit my own purpose.  The reader, however, must now feel that since there
+can be no 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 did
+actually shew Himself subsequently alive; and this amounts to a
+demonstration of the miraculous character of the Resurrection.  If, then,
+this one miracle be established, I think it unnecessary to defend the
+others, because I cannot think that any will attack them.
+
+But, as has been seen already, Strauss admits that our Lord died upon the
+Cross, and denies the reality of the reappearances.  It is not probable
+that Strauss would have taken refuge in the hallucination theory if he
+had felt that there was the remotest chance of successfully denying our
+Lord’s death; for the difficulties of his present position are
+overwhelming, as was fully pointed out in the second, third, and fourth
+chapters of this work.  I regret, however, to say that I can nowhere find
+any detailed account of the reasons which have led him to feel so
+positively about our Lord’s Death.  Such reasons must undoubtedly be at
+his command, or he would indisputably have referred the Resurrection to
+natural causes.  Is it possible that he has thought it better to keep
+them to himself, as proving the Death of our Lord _too_ convincingly?  If
+so, the course which 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 Death of our
+Lord, call upon us to reject.
+
+I regret to pass so quickly over one great field of evidence which in
+justice to myself I must allude to, though I cannot dwell upon it, for in
+the outset I declared that I would confine myself to the historical
+evidence, and to this only.  I refer to spiritual insight; to the
+testimony borne by the souls of living persons, who from personal
+experience _know_ that their Redeemer liveth, and that though worms
+destroy this body, yet in their flesh shall they see God.  How many
+thousands are there in the world at this moment, who have known Christ as
+a personal friend and comforter, and who can testify to the work which He
+has wrought upon them!  I cannot pass over such testimony as this in
+silence.  I must assign it a foremost place in reviewing the reasons for
+holding that our hope is not in vain, but I may not dwell upon it,
+inasmuch as it would carry no weight with those for whom this work is
+designed, I mean with those to whom this precious experience of Christ
+has not yet been vouchsafed.  Such persons require the external evidence
+to be made clear to demonstration before they will trust themselves to
+listen to the voices of hope or fear, and it is of no use appealing to
+the knowledge and hopes of others without making it clear upon what that
+knowledge and those hopes are grounded.  Nevertheless, I may be allowed
+to point out that those who deny the Death and Resurrection of our Lord,
+call upon us to believe that an immense multitude of most truthful and
+estimable people are no less deceivers of their own selves and others,
+than Mohammedans, Jews and Buddhists are.  How many do we not each of us
+know to whom Christ is the spiritual meat and drink of their whole lives.
+Yet our opponents call upon us to ignore all this, and to refer the
+emotions and elation of soul, which the love of Christ kindles in his
+true followers, to an inheritance of 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 from which he
+cannot see one or several churches.  There is hardly a hamlet which is
+not also a centre for the celebration of our Redemption by the Death and
+Resurrection of Christ.  Not one of these churches, say the Rationalists,
+not one of the clergymen who minister therein, not one single village
+school in all England, but must be regarded as a fountain of error, if
+not of deliberate falsehood.  Look where they may, they cannot escape
+from the signs of a vital belief in the Resurrection.  All these signs,
+they will tell us, are signs of superstition only; it is superstition
+which they celebrate and would confirm; they are founded upon fanaticism,
+or at the best upon sheer delusion; they poison the fountain heads of
+moral and intellectual well-being, by teaching men to set human
+experience on the one side, and to refer their conduct to the supposed
+will of a personal anthropomorphic God who was actually once a baby—who
+was born of one of his own creatures—and who is now locally and
+corporeally in Heaven, “of reasonable soul and _human flesh_ subsisting.”
+
+Thus do our opponents taunt us, but when we think not only of the present
+day, but of the nearly two thousand years during which Christianity has
+flourished, not in England only, but over all Europe, that is to say,
+over the quarter of the globe which is most civilised, and whose
+civilisation is in itself proof both of capacity to judge and of having
+judged rightly—what an awful admission do unbelievers require us to make,
+when they bid us think that all these ages and countries have gone astray
+to the imagining of a vain thing.  All the self-sacrifice of the holiest
+men for sixty generations, all the wars that have been waged for the sake
+of Christ and His truth, all the money spent upon churches, clergy,
+monasteries and religious education, all the blood of martyrs, all the
+celibacy of priests and nuns, all the self-denying lives of those who are
+now ministers of the Gospel—according to the Rationalist, no part of all
+this devotion to the cause of Christ has had any justifiable base on
+actual fact.  The bare contemplation of such a stupendous misapplication
+of self-sacrifice and energy, should be enough to prevent any one from
+ever smiling again to whose mind such a deplorable view was present: we
+wonder that our opponents do not shrink back appalled from the
+contemplation of a picture which they must regard as containing so much
+of sin, impudence and folly; yet it is to the contemplation of such a
+picture, and to a belief in its truthfulness to nature, that they would
+invite us; they cannot even see a clergyman without saying to themselves,
+“There goes one whose trade is the promotion of error; whose whole life
+is devoted to the upholding of the untrue.”  To them the sight of people
+flocking to a church must be as painful as it would be to us to see a
+congregation of Jews or Mohammedans: they ought to have no happiness in
+life so long as they believe that the vast majority of their
+fellow-countrymen are so lamentably deluded; yet they would call on us to
+join 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 and I
+think not unprofitable, had my aim been different, to have drawn an
+ampler picture of the heart-rending amount of falsehood, stupidity,
+cruelty and folly which must be referable to a belief in Christianity,
+if, as our opponents maintain, there is no solid ground for believing it;
+but my present purpose is to prove that there _is_ such ground, and
+having said enough to shew that I do not ignore the fields of evidence
+which lie beyond the purpose of my work, I will return 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 but the
+one given in Scripture which will set it at rest_.  Thus it has been said
+that Christ survived the Cross, lingered for a few weeks, and in the end
+succumbed to the injuries which He had sustained.  On this there arises
+the question, did the Apostles know of His death?  And if so, were they
+likely to mistake the reappearance of a dying man, so shattered and weak
+as He must have been, for the glory of an immortal being?  We know that
+people can idealise a great deal, but they cannot idealise as much as
+this.  The Apostles cannot have known of any death of Christ except His
+Death upon the Cross, and it is not credible that if He had died from the
+effects of the Crucifixion the Apostles should not have been aware of it.
+No one will pretend that they were, so it is needless to discuss this
+theory further.
+
+It has also been said that our Lord, having seen the effect of His
+reappearance on the Apostles, considered that further converse with them
+would only weaken it; and that He may have therefore thought it wiser to
+withdraw Himself finally from them, and to leave His teaching in their
+hands, with the certainty that it would never henceforth be lost sight
+of; but this view is inconsistent with the character which even our
+adversaries themselves assign to our Saviour.  The idea is one which
+might occur to a theorist sitting in his study, and enlightened by a
+knowledge of events, but it would not suggest itself to a leader in the
+heat of action.
+
+Another supposition has been that our Lord on recovering consciousness
+after He had been left alone in the tomb, or perhaps even before Joseph
+had gone, may have been unable to realise to Himself the nature of the
+events that had befallen Him, and may have actually believed that He had
+been dead, and been miraculously restored to life; that He may yet have
+felt a natural fear of again falling into the hands of His enemies; and
+partly from this cause, and partly through awe at the miracle that He
+supposed had been worked upon Him, have only shewn Himself to His
+disciples hurriedly, in secret, and on rare occasions, spending the
+greater part of His time in some one or other of the secret places of
+resort, in which He had been wont to live apart from the Apostles before
+the Crucifixion.
+
+I have known it urged that our Lord never said or even thought that He
+had risen from the dead, but shewed Himself alive secretly and fearfully,
+and bade His disciples follow Him to Galilee, where He might, and perhaps
+did, appear more openly, though still rarely and with caution; that the
+rarity and mystery of the reappearances would add to the impression of a
+miraculous resurrection which had instantly presented itself to the minds
+of the Apostles on seeing Christ alive; that this impression alone would
+prevent them from heeding facts which must have been obvious to any whose
+minds were not already unhinged by the knowledge that Christ was alive,
+and by the belief that He had been dead; and that they would be blinded
+by awe, 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 for
+not having been dictated by policy; finally that the report of Christ’s
+having been seen alive reached the Chief Priests (or perhaps Joseph of
+Arimathæa), and that they determined at all hazards to nip the coming
+mischief in the bud; that they therefore watched their opportunity, and
+got rid of so probable a cause of disturbance by the knife of the
+assassin, or induced Him to depart by threats, which He did not venture
+to resist.
+
+But if our Lord was secretly assassinated how could it have happened that
+the body should never have been found, and produced, when the Apostles
+began declaring publicly that Christ had risen?  What could be easier
+than to bring it forward and settle the whole matter?  It cannot be
+doubted that the body must have been looked for when the Apostles began
+publishing their story; we saw reason for believing this when we
+considered the account of the Resurrection given by St. Matthew.  _Now
+those that hide can find_; and if the enemies of Christ had got rid of
+Him by foul play, they would know very well where to lay their hands upon
+that which would be the death blow to Christianity.  If then Christ did
+not go away of His own accord, as feeling that His teaching would be
+better preserved by His absence, and if He did not die from wounds
+received upon the Cross, and if He was not assassinated secretly, what
+remains as the most reasonable view to be taken concerning His
+disappearance?  Surely the one that _was_ taken; the view which commended
+itself to those who were best able to judge—namely, _that He had ascended
+bodily into Heaven and was sitting at the right hand of God the Father_.
+
+Where else could He be?
+
+For that He disappeared, and disappeared finally, within six weeks of the
+Crucifixion must be considered certain; there is no one who will be bold
+enough even to hazard a conjecture that the appearance of Christ alluded
+to by St. Paul, as having been vouchsafed to him some years later, was
+that of the living Christ, who had chosen upon this one occasion to
+depart from the seclusion and secrecy which he had maintained hitherto.
+But if Christ was still living on earth, how was it possible that no
+human being should have the smallest clue to His whereabouts?  If He was
+dead how is it that no one should have produced the body?  Such a
+mysterious and total disappearance, even in the face of great jeopardy,
+has never yet been known, and can only be satisfactorily explained by
+adopting the belief which has prevailed for nearly the last two thousand
+years, and which will prevail more and more triumphantly so long as the
+world shall last—the belief that Christ was restored to the glory which
+He had shared with the Father, as soon as ever He had given sufficient
+proofs of His being alive to ensure the devotion of His followers.
+
+Before we can reject the supernatural solution of a mystery otherwise
+inexplicable, we should have some natural explanation which will meet the
+requirements of the case.  A confession of ignorance is not enough here.
+_We_ are _not_ ignorant; we _know_ that Christ died, inasmuch as we have
+the testimony of all the four Evangelists to this effect, the testimony
+of the Apostle Paul, and through him that of all the other Apostles; we
+have also the certainty that the centurion in charge of the soldiers at
+the Crucifixion would not have committed so grave a breach of discipline
+as the delivery of the body to Joseph and Nicodemus, unless he had felt
+quite sure that life was extinct; and finally we have the testimony of
+the Church for sixty generations, and that of myriads now living, whose
+experience assures them that Christ died and rose from the dead; in
+addition to this tremendous body of evidence we have also the story of
+the spear wound recorded in a Gospel which even our opponents believe to
+be from a Johannean source in its later chapters; and though, as has been
+already stated, this wound cannot be insisted upon as in itself
+sufficient to prove our Lord’s death, yet it must assuredly be allowed
+its due weight in reviewing the evidence.  The unbeliever cannot surely
+have considered how shallow are all the arguments which he can produce,
+in comparison with those that make against him.  He cannot say that I
+have not done him justice, and I feel confident that when he reconsiders
+the matter in that spirit of humility without which he cannot hope to be
+guided to a true conclusion, he will feel sure that Strauss is right in
+believing that the death of our Lord cannot be seriously called in
+question.
+
+But this being so, the reappearances, which we have seen to be
+established by the collapse of the hallucination theory, must be referred
+to supernatural or miraculous agency; that is to say, our Lord died and
+rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures.  Whereon His
+disappearance some six weeks later must be looked upon very differently
+from that of any ordinary person.  If our Lord could have been shewn to
+have been a mere man, who had escaped death only by a hair’s breadth, but
+still escaped it, perhaps some one of the theories for His disappearance,
+or some combination of 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 and rose from the dead, there is no theory which will stand,
+except the one which it has been reserved for our own lawless and
+self-seeking times to question.  Through the light of the Resurrection
+the Ascension is clearly seen.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+My task is now completed.  In an age when Rationalism has become
+recognised as the only basis upon which faith can rest securely, I have
+established the Christian faith upon a Rationalistic basis.
+
+I have made no concession to Rationalism which did not place all the
+vital parts of Christianity in a far stronger position than they were in
+before, yet I have conceded everything which a sincere Rationalist is
+likely to desire.  I have cleared the ground for reconciliation.  It only
+remains for the two contending parties to come forward and occupy it in
+peace jointly.  May it be mine to see the day when all traces of
+disagreement have been long obliterated!
+
+To the unbeliever I can say, “Never yet in any work upon the Christian
+side have your difficulties been so fully and fairly stated; never yet
+has orthodox disingenuousness been so unsparingly exposed.”  To the
+Christian I can say with no less justice, “Never yet have the true
+reasons for the discrepancies in the Gospels been so put forward as to
+enable us to look these discrepancies boldly in the face, and to thank
+God for having graciously allowed them to exist.”  I do not say this in
+any spirit of self-glorification.  We are children of the hour, and
+creatures of our surroundings.  As it has been given unto us, so will it
+be required at our hands, and we are at best unprofitable servants.
+Nevertheless I cannot refrain from expressing my gratitude at having been
+born in an age when Christianity and Rationalism are not only ceasing to
+appear antagonistic to one another, _but have each become essential to
+the very existence of the other_.  May the reader feel this no less
+strongly than I do, and may he also feel that I have supplied the missing
+element which could alone cause them to combine.  If he asks me what
+element I allude to, I answer Candour.  This is the pilot that has taken
+us safely into the Fair Haven of universal brotherhood in Christ.
+
+
+
+Appendix
+
+
+I
+The Burial
+
+
+                            (John xix. 38–42)
+
+And after this Joseph of Arimathæa, being a disciple of Jesus, but
+secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away
+the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave.  He came therefore, and
+took the body of Jesus.  And there came also Nicodemus, which at the
+first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes,
+about an hundred pound weight.  Then took they the body of Jesus, and
+wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is
+to bury.  Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and
+in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid.  There
+laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jews’ preparation day; for the
+sepulchre was nigh at hand.
+
+                           (Luke xxiii. 50–56)
+
+And, behold, there was a man named Joseph, a counsellor; and he was a
+good man, and a just: (the same had not consented to the counsel and deed
+of them;) he was of Arimathæa, a city of the Jews: who also himself
+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 in linen, and laid it
+in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.
+And that day was the preparation, and the sabbath drew on.  And the women
+also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the
+sepulchre, and how his body was laid.  And they returned, and prepared
+spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the
+commandment.
+
+                             (Mark xv. 42–47)
+
+And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation, that is,
+the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathæa, an honourable
+counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in
+boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.  And Pilate marvelled
+if he were already dead: and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him
+whether he had been any while dead.  And when he knew it of the
+centurion, he gave the body to Joseph.  And he bought 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 rolled a stone unto the door of the
+sepulchre.  And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph beheld where
+he was laid.
+
+                          (Matthew xxvii. 57–61)
+
+When the even was come, there came a rich man of Arimathæa, named Joseph,
+who also himself was Jesus’ disciple.  He went to Pilate, and begged the
+body of Jesus.  Then Pilate commanded the body to be delivered.  And when
+Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth.  And
+laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock: and he
+rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.  And
+there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, 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 chief
+priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate.  Saying, Sir, we
+remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three
+days I will rise again.  Command therefore that the sepulchre be made
+sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him
+away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last
+error shall be worse than the first.  Pilate said unto them, Ye have 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 was yet
+dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the
+sepulchre.  Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other
+disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the
+Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.
+Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the
+sepulchre.  So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun
+Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.  And he stooping down, and
+looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in.  Then cometh
+Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the
+linen clothes lie.  And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying
+with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.  Then
+went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and
+he saw, and believed.  For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he
+must rise again from the dead.  Then the disciples went away again unto
+their own home.  But Mary stood without 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, and the other at the feet,
+where the body of Jesus had lain.  And they say unto her, Woman, why
+weepest thou?  She saith unto them, Because they have taken 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, they came
+unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and
+certain others with them.  And they found the stone rolled away from the
+sepulchre.  And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord
+Jesus.  And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout,
+behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: and as they were
+afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why
+seek ye the living among the dead?  He is not here, but is risen:
+remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, saying, The
+Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be
+crucified, and the third day rise again.  And they remembered his words,
+and returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the
+eleven, and to all the rest.  It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary
+the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told
+these things unto the apostles.  And their words seemed to them as idle
+tales, and they believed them not.  Then arose Peter, and ran unto the
+sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by
+themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to
+pass.
+
+                             (Mark xvi. 1–8)
+
+And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of
+James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and
+anoint 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 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 it was very great.  And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a
+young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and
+they were affrighted.  And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek
+Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here:
+behold the place where they laid him.  But go your way, tell his
+disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye
+see him, as he said unto you.  And they went out quickly, and fled from
+the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they
+anything to any man; for they were afraid.
+
+                          (Matthew xxviii. 1–8)
+
+In the end of the sabbath, as it began to draw toward the first day of
+the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.
+And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord
+descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door,
+and sat upon it.  His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment
+white as snow, and for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as
+dead men.  And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye:
+for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.  He is not here: for
+he is risen, as he said.  Come, see the place where the Lord lay.  And go
+quickly, 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 sepulchre with fear
+and great joy; and did run 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 Jesus
+standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.  Jesus saith unto her, Woman,
+why weepest thou?  Whom seekest thou?  She, supposing him to be 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.  Jesus saith unto
+her, Mary.  She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to
+say, Master.  Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; 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 to my God, and your God.  Mary
+Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and
+that he had spoken these things unto her.
+
+                             (Mark xvi. 9–11)
+
+Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared
+first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.  And she
+went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept.  And
+they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been seen 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, and worshipped him.
+Then said Jesus unto them, Be not afraid: go tell my 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 the city,
+and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.  And
+when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they
+gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, Say ye, 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, 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.
+
+
+VI
+Appearance to Cleopas (and James?)
+
+
+                            (Luke xxiv. 13–35)
+
+And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus,
+which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.  And they talked
+together of all these things which had happened.  And it came to pass,
+that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near,
+and went with them.  But their eyes were holden that they should not know
+him.  And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that
+ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?  And the one of them,
+whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger
+in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there
+in these days?  And he said unto them, What things?  And they said unto
+him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and
+word before God and all the people: And how the chief priests and our
+rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him.
+But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and
+beside all this, to-day is the third day since these things were done.
+Yea, and certain women also of our company made us astonished, which were
+early at the sepulchre; and when they found not his body, they came,
+saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said that he
+was alive, and certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre,
+and found it even so as the women had said: but him they saw not.  Then
+he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the
+prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and
+to enter into his glory?  And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he
+expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
+And they drew nigh unto the village, whither they went: and he made as
+though he would have gone further.  But they constrained him, saying,
+Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.  And
+he went in to tarry 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.
+And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of
+their sight.  And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within
+us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the
+scriptures?  And they rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem,
+and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them,
+saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon.  And they
+told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in
+breaking of bread.
+
+                            (Mark xvi. 12–13)
+
+After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked,
+and went into the country.  And they went and told it unto the 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, when the
+doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the 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 hands and 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 hath sent me, even, so send I
+you.  And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto
+them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.  Whose soever sins ye remit, they are
+remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.
+But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when
+Jesus came.  The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen
+the Lord.  But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the
+print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and
+thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.  And after eight days
+again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus,
+the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto
+you.  Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my
+hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not
+faithless, but believing.  And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord
+and my God.  Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen 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 on
+account 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, and
+saith unto them, Peace be unto you.  But they were terrified and
+affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.  And he said unto
+them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?
+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 unto them, Have ye here any
+meat?  And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, 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, which were written in the law of Moses, and in
+the prophets, and in the psalms concerning me.  Then opened he their
+understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.  And said unto
+them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to
+rise from the dead the third day: And that repentance and remission of
+sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at
+Jerusalem.  And ye are witnesses of these things.  And, behold, I send
+the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem,
+until ye be endued with power from on high.
+
+                            (Mark xvi. 14–18)
+
+Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided
+them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not
+them which had seen him after he was risen.  And he saith unto them, Go
+ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.  He that
+believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall
+be damned.  And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name
+shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall
+take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt
+them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
+
+                          (Matthew xviii. 16–20)
+
+Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where
+Jesus had appointed them.  And when they saw him, they worshipped him:
+but some doubted.  And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power
+is given unto me in heaven and in earth, go ye therefore, and teach all
+nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
+the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have
+commanded you: and, lo, I am with 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 was parted
+from them, and carried up into heaven.  And they worshipped him, and
+returned to Jerusalem with great joy.  And were continually in the
+temple, praising and blessing God.  Amen.
+
+                            (Mark xvi. 19–20)
+
+So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into
+heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.  And they went forth, and
+preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word
+with signs following.  Amen.
+
+                              (Acts i. 1–12)
+
+The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began
+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 the apostles whom
+he had chosen.  To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by
+many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of
+the things pertaining to the kingdom of God: and, being assembled
+together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from
+Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye
+have heard of me.  For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be
+baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.  When they therefore
+were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this
+time restore again the kingdom to Israel?  And he said unto them, It is
+not for you to know the 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 upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem,
+and in all Judæa, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the
+earth.  And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was
+taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight, And while they
+looked stedfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by
+them in white apparel; Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye
+gazing up into heaven?  This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into
+heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.
+Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mount called 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, how
+that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he
+was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the
+scriptures: and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve; after
+that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the
+greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.  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 due time.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{82}  It should be borne in mind that this passage was written five or
+six years ago, before the commencement of the Franco-Prussian war, What
+would my brother have said had he been able to comprehend the events of
+1870 and 1871?—W. B. O.
+
+{141}  This pamphlet was by Butler himself.
+
+{158a}  See Biog. Britann.
+
+{158b}  Middleton’s Reflections answered by Benson.  Hist. Christ, vol.
+iii., p. 50.
+
+{159a}  Lardner, part I., vol. ii., p. 135 et seq.
+
+{159b}  Ibid., part I., vol. ii., p. 742.
+
+
+
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>The Fair Haven, by Samuel Butler</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Fair Haven, by Samuel Butler, Edited by
+R. A. Streatfeild
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Fair Haven
+
+
+Author: Samuel Butler
+
+Editor: R. A. Streatfeild
+
+Release Date: July 30, 2014  [eBook #6092]
+[This file was first posted on November 4, 2002]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAIR HAVEN***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1913 A. C. Fifield edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<h1>The Fair Haven</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>A Work in Defence of the
+Miraculous Element</i><br />
+<i>in our Lord&rsquo;s Ministry upon Earth</i>, <i>both as
+against</i><br />
+<i>Rationalistic Impugners and certain Orthodox Defenders</i>,<br
+/>
+<i>by the late John Pickard Owen</i>, <i>with a Memoir</i><br />
+<i>of the Author by William Bickersteth Owen</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">By</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>Samuel Butler</b></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">Author of
+&ldquo;Erewhon&rdquo;</span></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall"><span
+class="smcap">Op</span></span><span class="GutSmall">.
+2</span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>Now Reset</i>; <i>and
+Edited</i>, <i>with an Introduction</i>,<br />
+<i>by R. A. Streatfeild</i></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">London<br />
+A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford&rsquo;s Inn, E.C.<br />
+1913</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">WILLIAM
+BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH</span></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="GutSmall">Contents</span></p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Introduction by R. A. Streatfeild</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#pageix">ix</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Butler&rsquo;s Preface to the Second Edition</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#pagexv">xv</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Memoir of the late John Pickard Owen</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="GutSmall">CHAPTER</span></p>
+</td>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: right">&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Introduction</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page61">61</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Strauss and the Hallucination Theory</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page83">83</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>The Character and Conversion of St. Paul</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Paul&rsquo;s Testimony considered</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page120">120</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">V.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>A Consideration of Certain Ill-judged Methods of
+Defence</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page134">134</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VI.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>More Disingenuousness</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page153">153</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Difficulties felt by our Opponents</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VIII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>The Preceding Chapter Continued</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page194">194</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IX.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>The Christ-Ideal</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page230">230</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">X.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Conclusion</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page255">255</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Appendix</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page273">273</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="pageix"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+ix</span>INTRODUCTION<br />
+By R. A. Streatfeild</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> demand for a new edition of
+<i>The Fair Haven</i> gives me an opportunity of saying a few
+words about the genesis of what, though not one of the most
+popular of Samuel Butler&rsquo;s books, is certainly one of the
+most characteristic.&nbsp; Few of his works, indeed, show more
+strikingly his brilliant powers as a controversialist and his
+implacable determination to get at the truth of whatever engaged
+his attention.</p>
+<p>To find the germ of <i>The Fair Haven</i> we should probably
+have to go back to the year 1858, when Butler, after taking his
+degree at Cambridge, was preparing himself for holy orders by
+acting as a kind of lay curate in a London parish.&nbsp; Butler
+never took things for granted, and he felt it to be his duty to
+examine independently a good many points of Christian dogma which
+most candidates for ordination accept as matters of course.&nbsp;
+The result of his investigations was that he eventually declined
+to take orders at all.&nbsp; One of the stones upon which he then
+stumbled was the efficacy of infant baptism, and I have no doubt
+that another was the miraculous element of Christianity, which,
+it will be remembered, was the cause of grievous searchings of
+heart to Ernest Pontifex in Butler&rsquo;s semi-autobiographical
+novel, <i>The Way of All Flesh</i>.&nbsp; While Butler was in New
+Zealand (1859&ndash;64) he had leisure for prosecuting his
+Biblical studies, the result of which he published in 1865, after
+his return to England, in an anonymous pamphlet entitled
+&ldquo;The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given
+by the Four Evangelists critically examined.&rdquo;&nbsp; This
+pamphlet passed unnoticed; probably only a few copies were
+printed and it is now extremely rare.&nbsp; After the publication
+of <i>Erewhon</i> in 1872, Butler returned once more to theology,
+and made his anonymous pamphlet the basis of the far more
+elaborate <i>Fair Haven</i>, which was originally published 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.&nbsp; It is possible that the memoir was the
+fruit of a suggestion made by Miss Savage, an able and witty
+woman with whom Butler corresponded at the time.&nbsp; Miss
+Savage was so much impressed by the narrative power displayed in
+<i>Erewhon</i> that she urged Butler to write a novel, and we
+shall probably not be far wrong in regarding the biography of
+John Pickard Owen as Butler&rsquo;s trial trip in the art of
+fiction&mdash;a prelude to <i>The Way of All Flesh</i>, which he
+began in 1873.</p>
+<p>It has often been supposed that the elaborate paraphernalia of
+mystification which Butler used in <i>The Fair Haven</i> was
+deliberately designed in order to hoax the public.&nbsp; I do not
+believe that this was the case.&nbsp; Butler, I feel convinced,
+provided an ironical framework for his arguments merely that he
+might render them more effective than they had been when plainly
+stated in the pamphlet of 1865.&nbsp; He fully expected his
+readers to comprehend his irony, and he anticipated that some at
+any rate of them would keenly resent it.&nbsp; Writing to Miss
+Savage in March, 1873 (shortly before the publication of the
+book), he said: &ldquo;I should hope that attacks on <i>The Fair
+Haven</i> will give me an opportunity of excusing myself, and if
+so I shall endeavour that the excuse may be worse than the fault
+it is intended to excuse.&rdquo;&nbsp; A few days later he
+referred to the difficulties that he had encountered in getting
+the book accepted by a publisher: &ldquo;&mdash; were frightened
+and even considered the scheme of the book unjustifiable.&nbsp;
+&mdash; urged me, as politely as he could, not to do it, and
+evidently thinks I shall get myself into disgrace even among
+freethinkers.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s all nonsense.&nbsp; I dare say I
+shall get into a row&mdash;at least I hope I shall.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Evidently there is here no anticipation of <i>The Fair Haven</i>
+being misunderstood.&nbsp; Misunderstood, however, it was, not
+only by reviewers, some of whom greeted it solemnly as a defence
+of orthodoxy, but by divines of high standing, such as the late
+Canon Ainger, who sent it to a friend whom he wished to
+convert.&nbsp; This was more than Butler could resist, and he
+hastened to issue a second edition bearing his name and
+accompanied by a preface in which the deceived elect were held up
+to ridicule.</p>
+<p>Butler used to maintain that <i>The Fair Haven</i> did his
+reputation no harm.&nbsp; Writing in 1901, he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>The Fair Haven</i> got me into no social disgrace
+that I have ever been able to discover.&nbsp; I might attack
+Christianity as much as I chose and nobody cared one straw; but
+when I attacked Darwin it was a different matter.&nbsp; For many
+years <i>Evolution</i>, <i>Old and New</i>, and <i>Unconscious
+Memory</i> made a shipwreck of my literary prospects.&nbsp; I am
+only now beginning to emerge from the literary and social injury
+which those two perfectly righteous books inflicted on me.&nbsp;
+I dare say they abound with small faults of taste, but I rejoice
+in having written both of them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Very likely Butler was right as to the social side of the
+question, but I am convinced that <i>The Fair Haven</i> did him
+grave harm in the literary world.&nbsp; Reviewers fought shy of
+him for the rest of his life.&nbsp; They had been taken in once,
+and they took very good care that they should not be taken in
+again.&nbsp; The word went forth that Butler was not to be taken
+seriously, whatever he wrote, and the results of the decree were
+apparent in the conspiracy of silence that greeted not only his
+books on evolution, but his Homeric works, his writings on art,
+and his edition of Shakespeare&rsquo;s sonnets.&nbsp; Now that he
+has passed beyond controversies and mystifications, and now that
+his other works are appreciated at their true value, it is not
+too much to hope that tardy justice will be accorded also to
+<i>The Fair Haven</i>.&nbsp; It is true that the subject is no
+longer the burning question that it was forty years ago.&nbsp; In
+the early seventies theological polemics were fashionable.&nbsp;
+Books like Seeley&rsquo;s <i>Ecce Homo</i> and Matthew
+Arnold&rsquo;s <i>Literature and Dogma</i> were eagerly devoured
+by readers of all classes.&nbsp; Nowadays we take but a languid
+interest in the problems that disturbed our grandfathers, and
+most of us have settled down into what Disraeli described as the
+religion of all sensible men, which no sensible man ever talks
+about.&nbsp; There is, however, in <i>The Fair Haven</i> a good
+deal more than theological controversy, and our Laodicean age
+will appreciate Butler&rsquo;s humour and irony if it cares
+little for his polemics.&nbsp; <i>The Fair Haven</i> scandalised
+a good many people when it first appeared, but I am not afraid of
+its scandalising anybody now.&nbsp; I should be sorry,
+nevertheless, if it gave any reader a false impression of
+Butler&rsquo;s Christianity, and I think I cannot do better than
+conclude with a passage from one of his essays which represents
+his attitude to religion perhaps more faithfully than anything in
+<i>The Fair Haven</i>: &ldquo;What, after all, is the essence of
+Christianity?&nbsp; What is the kernel of the nut?&nbsp; Surely
+common sense and cheerfulness, with unflinching opposition to the
+charlatanisms and Pharisaisms of a man&rsquo;s own times.&nbsp;
+The essence of Christianity lies neither in dogma, nor yet in
+abnormally holy life, but in faith in an unseen world, in doing
+one&rsquo;s duty, in speaking the truth, in finding the true life
+rather in others than in oneself, and in the certain hope that he
+who loses his life on these behalfs finds more than he has
+lost.&nbsp; What can Agnosticism do against such Christianity as
+this?&nbsp; I should be shocked if anything I had ever written or
+shall ever write should seem to make light of these
+things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">R. A. <span
+class="smcap">Streatfeild</span>.</p>
+<p><i>August</i>, 1913.</p>
+<h2><a name="pagexv"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xv</span>Butler&rsquo;s Preface to the Second Edition</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> occasion of a Second Edition of
+<i>The Fair Haven</i> enables me to thank the public and my
+critics for the favourable reception which has been accorded to
+the First Edition.&nbsp; I had feared that the freedom with which
+I had exposed certain untenable positions taken by Defenders of
+Christianity might have given offence to some reviewers, but no
+complaint has reached me from any quarter on the score of my not
+having put the best possible case for the evidence in favour of
+the miraculous element in Christ&rsquo;s teaching&mdash;nor can I
+believe that I should have failed to hear of it, if my book had
+been open to exception on this ground.</p>
+<p>An apology is perhaps due for the adoption of a pseudonym, and
+even more so for the creation of two such characters as <span
+class="smcap">John Pickard Owen</span> and his brother.&nbsp; Why
+could I not, it may be asked, have said all that I had to say in
+my own proper person?</p>
+<p>Are there not real ills of life enough already?&nbsp; Is there
+not a &ldquo;lo here!&rdquo; from this school with its gushing
+&ldquo;earnestness,&rdquo; it distinctions without differences,
+its gnat strainings and camel swallowings, its pretence of
+grappling with a question while resolutely bent upon shirking it,
+its dust throwing and mystification, its concealment of its own
+ineffable insincerity under an air of ineffable candour?&nbsp; Is
+there not a &ldquo;lo there!&rdquo; from that other school with
+its bituminous atmosphere of exclusiveness and self-laudatory
+dilettanteism?&nbsp; Is there not enough actual exposition of
+boredom come over us from many quarters without drawing for new
+bores upon the imagination?&nbsp; It is true I gave a single drop
+of comfort.&nbsp; <span class="smcap">John Pickard Owen</span>
+was dead.&nbsp; But his having ceased to exist (to use the
+impious phraseology of the present day) did not cancel the fact
+of his having once existed.&nbsp; That he should have ever been
+born gave proof of potentialities in Nature which could not be
+regarded lightly.&nbsp; What hybrids might not be in store for us
+next?&nbsp; Moreover, though <span class="smcap">John
+Pickard</span> was dead, <span class="smcap">William
+Bickersteth</span> was still living, and might at any moment
+rekindle his burning and shining lamp of persistent
+self-satisfaction.&nbsp; Even though the <span
+class="smcap">Owens</span> had actually existed, should not their
+existence have been ignored as a disgrace to Nature?&nbsp; Who
+then could be justified in creating them when they did not
+exist?</p>
+<p>I am afraid I must offer an apology rather than an
+excuse.&nbsp; The fact is that I was in a very awkward
+position.&nbsp; My previous work, <i>Erewhon</i>, had failed to
+give satisfaction to certain ultra-orthodox Christians, who
+imagined that they could detect an analogy between the English
+Church and the Erewhonian Musical Banks.&nbsp; It is
+inconceivable how they can have got hold of this idea; but I was
+given to understand that I should find it far from easy to
+dispossess them of the notion that something in the way of satire
+had been intended.&nbsp; There were other parts of the book which
+had also been excepted to, and altogether I had reason to believe
+that if I defended Christianity in my own name I should not find
+<i>Erewhon</i> any addition to the weight which my remarks might
+otherwise carry.&nbsp; If I had been suspected of satire once, I
+might be suspected again with no greater reason.&nbsp; Instead of
+calmly reviewing the arguments which I adduced, <i>The Rock</i>
+might have raised a cry of <i>non tali auxilio</i>.&nbsp; It must
+always be remembered that besides the legitimate investors in
+Christian stocks, if so homely a metaphor may be pardoned, there
+are unscrupulous persons whose profession it is to be bulls,
+bears, stags, and I know not what other creatures of the various
+Christian markets.&nbsp; It is all nonsense about hawks not
+picking out each other&rsquo;s eyes&mdash;there is nothing they
+like better.&nbsp; I feared <i>The Guardian</i>, <i>The
+Record</i>, <i>The John Bull</i>, etc., lest they should suggest
+that from a bear I now turned bull with a view to an eventual
+bishopric.&nbsp; Such insinuations would have impaired the value
+of <i>The Fair Haven</i> as an anchorage for well-meaning
+people.&nbsp; I therefore resolved to obey the injunction of the
+Gentile Apostle and avoid all appearance of evil, by dissociating
+myself from the author of <i>Erewhon</i> as completely as
+possible.&nbsp; At the moment of my resolution <span
+class="smcap">John Pickard Owen</span> came to my assistance; I
+felt that he was the sort of man I wanted, but that he was hardly
+sufficient in himself.&nbsp; I therefore summoned his
+brother.&nbsp; The pair have served their purpose; a year
+nowadays produces great changes in men&rsquo;s thoughts
+concerning Christianity, and the little matter of <i>Erewhon</i>
+having quite blown over I feel that I may safely appear in my
+true colours as the champion of orthodoxy, discard the <span
+class="smcap">Owens</span> as other than mouthpieces, and relieve
+the public from uneasiness as to any further writings from the
+pen of the surviving brother.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless I am bound to own that, in spite of a generally
+favourable opinion, my critics have not been unanimous in their
+interpretation of <i>The Fair Haven</i>.&nbsp; Thus, <i>The
+Rock</i> (April 25, 1873, and May 9, 1873), says that the work is
+&ldquo;an extraordinary one, whether regarded as a biographical
+record or a theological treatise.&nbsp; Indeed the importance of
+the volume compels us to depart from our custom of reviewing with
+brevity works entrusted to us, and we shall in two consecutive
+numbers of <i>The Rock</i> lay before its readers what appear to
+us to be the merits and demerits of this posthumous
+production.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;His exhibition of the certain proofs furnished of the
+Resurrection of our Lord is certainly masterly and
+convincing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To the sincerely inquiring doubter, the striking way in
+which the truth of the Resurrection is exhibited must be most
+beneficial, but such a character we are compelled to believe is
+rare among those of the schools of neology.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. <span class="smcap">Owen&rsquo;s</span> exposition
+and refutation of the hallucination and mythical theories of
+Strauss and his followers is most admirable, and all should read
+it who desire to know exactly what excuses men make for their
+incredulity.&nbsp; The work also contains many beautiful passages
+on the discomfort of unbelief, and the holy pleasure of a settled
+faith, which cannot fail to benefit the reader.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>On the other hand, in spite of all my precautions, the same
+misfortune which overtook <i>Erewhon</i> has also come upon
+<i>The Fair Haven</i>.&nbsp; It has been suspected of a satirical
+purpose.&nbsp; The author of a pamphlet entitled <i>Jesus versus
+Christianity</i> says:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>The Fair Haven</i> is an ironical defence of
+orthodoxy at the expense of the whole mass of Church tenet and
+dogma, the character of Christ only excepted.&nbsp; Such at least
+is our reading of it, though critics of the <i>Rock</i> and
+<i>Record</i> order have accepted the book as a serious defence
+of Christianity, and proclaimed it as a most valuable
+contribution in aid of the faith.&nbsp; Affecting an orthodox
+standpoint it most bitterly reproaches all previous apologists
+for the lack of candour with which they have ignored or explained
+away insuperable difficulties and attached undue value to
+coincidences real or imagined.&nbsp; One and all they have, the
+author declares, been at best, but zealous &lsquo;liars for
+God,&rsquo; or what to them was more than God, their own
+religious system.&nbsp; This must go on no longer.&nbsp; We, as
+Christians having a sound cause, need not fear to let the truth
+be known.&nbsp; He proceeds accordingly to set forth the truth as
+he finds it in the New Testament; and in a masterly analysis of
+the account of the Resurrection, which he selects as the
+principal crucial miracle, involving all other miracles, he shows
+how slender is the foundation on which the whole fabric of
+supernatural theology has been reared.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As told by our author the whole affords an exquisite
+example of the natural growth of a legend.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If the reader can once fully grasp the intention of the
+style, and its affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy,
+and perceive also how utterly destructive are its &lsquo;candid
+admissions&rsquo; to the whole fabric of supernaturalism, he will
+enjoy a rare treat.&nbsp; It is not however for the purpose of
+recommending what we at least regard as a piece of exquisite
+humour, that we call attention to <i>The Fair Haven</i>, but
+&amp;c. &amp;c.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>This is very dreadful; but what can one do?</p>
+<p>Again, <i>The Scotsman</i> speaks of the writer as being
+&ldquo;throughout in downright almost pathetic
+earnestness.&rdquo;&nbsp; While <i>The National Reformer</i>
+seems to be in doubt whether the book is a covert attack upon
+Christianity or a serious defence of it, but declares that both
+orthodox and unorthodox will find matter requiring thought and
+answer.</p>
+<p>I am not responsible for the interpretations of my
+readers.&nbsp; It is only natural that the same work should
+present a very different aspect according as it is approached
+from one side or the other.&nbsp; There is only one way out of
+it&mdash;that the reader should kindly interpret according to his
+own fancies.&nbsp; If he will do this the book is sure to please
+him.&nbsp; I have done the best I can for all parties, and feel
+justified in appealing to the existence of the widely conflicting
+opinions which I have quoted, as a proof that the balance has
+been evenly held, and that I was justified in calling the book a
+defence&mdash;both as against impugners and defenders.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">S. <span
+class="smcap">Butler</span>.</p>
+<p><i>Oct.</i> 8, 1873.</p>
+<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>Memoir
+of<br />
+The late John Pickard Owen</h2>
+<h3>Chapter I</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> subject of this Memoir, and
+Author of the work which follows it, was born in Goodge Street,
+Tottenham Court Road, London, on the 5th of February, 1832.&nbsp;
+He was my elder brother by about eighteen months.&nbsp; Our
+father and mother had once been rich, but through a succession of
+unavoidable misfortunes they were left with but a very moderate
+income when my brother and myself were about three and four years
+old.&nbsp; My father died some five or six years afterwards, and
+we only recollected him as a singularly gentle and humorous
+playmate who doted upon us both and never spoke unkindly.&nbsp;
+The charm of such a recollection can never be dispelled; both my
+brother and myself returned his love with interest, and cherished
+his memory with the most affectionate regret, from the day on
+which he left us till the time came that the one of us was again
+to see him face to face.&nbsp; So sweet and winning was his
+nature that his slightest wish was our law&mdash;and whenever we
+pleased him, no matter how little, he never failed to thank us as
+though we had done him a service which we should have had a
+perfect right to withhold.&nbsp; How proud were we upon any of
+these occasions, and how we courted the opportunity of being
+thanked!&nbsp; He did indeed well know the art of becoming
+idolised by his children, and dearly did he prize the results of
+his own proficiency; yet truly there was no art about it; all
+arose spontaneously from the wellspring of a sympathetic nature
+which knew how to feel as others felt, whether old or young, rich
+or poor, wise or foolish.&nbsp; On one point alone did he neglect
+us&mdash;I refer to our religious education.&nbsp; On all other
+matters he was the kindest and most careful teacher in the
+world.&nbsp; Love and gratitude be to his memory!</p>
+<p>My mother loved us no less ardently than my father, but she
+was of a quicker temper, and less adept at conciliating
+affection.&nbsp; She must have been exceedingly handsome when she
+was young, and was still comely when we first remembered her; she
+was also highly accomplished, but she felt my father&rsquo;s loss
+of fortune more keenly than my father himself, and it preyed upon
+her mind, though rather for our sake than for her own.&nbsp; Had
+we not known my father we should have loved her better than any
+one in the world, but affection goes by comparison, and my father
+spoiled us for any one but himself; indeed, in after life, I
+remember my mother&rsquo;s telling me, with many tears, how
+jealous she had often been of the love we bore him, and how mean
+she had thought it of him to entrust all scolding or repression
+to her, so that he might have more than his due share of our
+affection.&nbsp; Not that I believe my father did this
+consciously; still, he so greatly hated scolding that I dare say
+we might often have got off scot free when we really deserved
+reproof had not my mother undertaken the <i>onus</i> of scolding
+us herself.&nbsp; We therefore naturally feared her more than my
+father, and fearing more we loved less.&nbsp; For as love casteth
+out fear, so fear love.</p>
+<p>This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew
+the way to bear it.&nbsp; She tried to upbraid us, in little
+ways, into loving her as much as my father; the more she tried
+this, the less we could succeed in doing it; and so on and so on
+in a fashion which need not be detailed.&nbsp; Not but what we
+really loved her deeply, while her affection for us was
+unsurpassable still, we loved her less than we loved my father,
+and this was the grievance.</p>
+<p>My father entrusted our religious education entirely to my
+mother.&nbsp; He was himself, I am assured, of a deeply religious
+turn of mind, and a thoroughly consistent member of the Church of
+England; but he conceived, and perhaps rightly, that it is the
+mother who should first teach her children to lift their hands in
+prayer, and impart to them a knowledge of the One in whom we live
+and move and have our being.&nbsp; My mother accepted the task
+gladly, for in spite of a certain narrowness of view&mdash;the
+natural but deplorable result of her earlier
+surroundings&mdash;she was one of the most truly pious women whom
+I have ever known; unfortunately for herself and us she had been
+trained in the lowest school of Evangelical literalism&mdash;a
+school which in after life both my brother and myself came to
+regard as the main obstacle to the complete overthrow of
+unbelief; we therefore looked upon it with something stronger
+than aversion, and for my own part I still deem it perhaps the
+most insidious enemy which the cause of Christ has ever
+encountered.&nbsp; But of this more hereafter.</p>
+<p>My mother, as I said, threw her whole soul into the work of
+our religious education.&nbsp; Whatever she believed she believed
+literally, and, if I may say so, with a harshness of realisation
+which left very little scope for imagination or mystery.&nbsp;
+Her plans of Heaven and solutions of life&rsquo;s enigmas were
+direct and forcible, but they could only be reconciled with
+certain obvious facts&mdash;such as the omnipotence and
+all-goodness of God&mdash;by leaving many things absolutely out
+of sight.&nbsp; And this my mother succeeded effectually in
+doing.&nbsp; She never doubted that her opinions comprised the
+truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; she therefore
+made haste to sow the good seed in our tender minds, and so far
+succeeded that when my brother was four years old he could repeat
+the Apostles&rsquo; Creed, the General Confession, and the
+Lord&rsquo;s Prayer without a blunder.&nbsp; My mother made
+herself believe that he delighted in them; but, alas! it was far
+otherwise; for, strange as it may appear concerning one whose
+later life was a continual prayer, in childhood he detested
+nothing so much as being made to pray and to learn his
+Catechism.&nbsp; In this I am sorry to say we were both heartily
+of a mind.&nbsp; As for Sunday, the less said the better.</p>
+<p>I have already hinted (but as a warning to other parents I had
+better, perhaps, express myself more plainly), that this aversion
+was probably the result of my mother&rsquo;s undue eagerness to
+reap an artificial fruit of lip service, which could have little
+meaning to the heart of one so young.&nbsp; I believe that the
+severe check which the natural growth of faith experienced in my
+brother&rsquo;s case was due almost entirely to this cause, and
+to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but,
+however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our
+prayers&mdash;morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we
+would avoid it, as indeed children generally will, by every
+artifice which we could employ.&nbsp; Thus we were in the habit
+of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer time, and would
+gratefully hear my father tell my mother that it was a shame to
+wake us; whereon he would carry us up to bed in a state
+apparently of the profoundest slumber when we were really wide
+awake and in great fear of detection.&nbsp; For we knew how to
+pretend to be asleep, but we did not know how we ought to wake
+again; there was nothing for it therefore when we were once
+committed, but to go on sleeping till we were fairly undressed
+and put to bed, and could wake up safely in the dark.&nbsp; But
+deceit is never long successful, and we were at last
+ignominiously exposed.</p>
+<p>It happened one evening that my mother suspected my brother
+John, and tried to open his little hands which were lying clasped
+in front of him.&nbsp; Now my brother was as yet very crude and
+inconsistent in his theories concerning sleep, and had no
+conception of what a real sleeper would do under these
+circumstances.&nbsp; Fear deprived him of his powers of
+reflection, and he thus unfortunately concluded that because
+sleepers, so far as he had observed them, were always motionless,
+therefore, they must be quite rigid and incapable of motion, and
+indeed that any movement, under any circumstances (for from his
+earliest childhood he liked to carry his theories to their
+legitimate conclusion), would be physically impossible for one
+who was really sleeping; forgetful, oh! unhappy one, of the
+flexibility of his own body on being carried upstairs, and, more
+unhappy still, ignorant of the art of waking.&nbsp; He,
+therefore, clenched his fingers harder and harder as he felt my
+mother trying to unfold them while his head hung listless, and
+his eyes were closed I as though he were sleeping sweetly.&nbsp;
+It is needless to detail the agony of shame that followed.&nbsp;
+My mother begged my father to box his ears, which my father
+flatly refused to do.&nbsp; Then she boxed them herself, and
+there followed a scene and a day or two of disgrace for both of
+us.</p>
+<p>Shortly after this there happened another misadventure.&nbsp;
+A lady came to stay with my mother, and was to sleep in a bed
+that had been brought into our nursery, for my father&rsquo;s
+fortunes had already failed, and we were living in a humble
+way.&nbsp; We were still but four and five years old, so the
+arrangement was not unnatural, and it was assumed that we should
+be asleep before the lady went to bed, and be downstairs before
+she would get up in the morning.&nbsp; But the arrival of this
+lady and her being put to sleep in the nursery were great events
+to us in those days, and being particularly wanted to go to
+sleep, we of course sat up in bed talking and keeping ourselves
+awake till she should come upstairs.&nbsp; Perhaps we had fancied
+that she would give us something, but if so we were
+disappointed.&nbsp; However, whether this was the case or not, we
+were wide awake when our visitor came to bed, and having no
+particular object to gain, we made no pretence of sleeping.&nbsp;
+The lady kissed us both, told us to lie still and go to sleep
+like good children, and then began doing her hair.</p>
+<p>I remember that this was the occasion on which my brother
+discovered a good many things in connection with the fair sex
+which had hitherto been beyond his ken; more especially that the
+mass of petticoats and clothes which envelop the female form were
+not, as he expressed it to me, &ldquo;all solid woman,&rdquo; but
+that women were not in reality more substantially built than men,
+and had legs as much as he had, a fact which he had never yet
+realised.&nbsp; On this he for a long time considered them as
+impostors, who had wronged him by leading him to suppose that
+they had far more &ldquo;body in them&rdquo; (so he said), than
+he now found they had.&nbsp; This was a sort of thing which he
+regarded with stern moral reprobation.&nbsp; If he had been old
+enough to have a solicitor I believe he would have put the matter
+into his hands, as well as certain other things which had lately
+troubled him.&nbsp; For but recently my mother had bought a fowl,
+and he had seen it plucked, and the inside taken out; his
+irritation had been extreme on discovering that fowls were not
+all solid flesh, but that their insides&mdash;and these formed,
+as it appeared to him, an enormous percentage of the
+bird&mdash;were perfectly useless.&nbsp; He was now beginning to
+understand that sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good
+meat was concerned; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in
+comparison with what they ought to have considering their
+apparent bulk&mdash;insignificant, mere skin and bone covering a
+cavern.&nbsp; What right had they, or anything else, to assert
+themselves as so big, and prove so empty?&nbsp; And now this
+discovery of woman&rsquo;s falsehood was quite too much for
+him.&nbsp; The world itself was hollow, made up of shams and
+delusions, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.</p>
+<p>Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough.&nbsp; Everything with
+him was to be exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the
+face of it, and everything was to go on doing exactly what it had
+been doing hitherto.&nbsp; If a thing looked solid, it was to be
+very solid; if hollow, very hollow; nothing was to be half and
+half, and nothing was to change unless he had himself already
+become accustomed to its times and manners of changing; there
+were to be no exceptions and no contradictions; all things were
+to be perfectly consistent, and all premises to be carried with
+extremest rigour to their legitimate conclusions.&nbsp; Heaven
+was to be very neat (for he was always tidy himself), and free
+from sudden shocks to the nervous system, such as those caused by
+dogs barking at him, or cows driven in the streets.&nbsp; God was
+to resemble my father, and the Holy Spirit to bear some sort of
+indistinct analogy to my mother.</p>
+<p>Such were the ideal theories of his
+childhood&mdash;unconsciously formed, but very firmly believed
+in.&nbsp; As he grew up he made such modifications as were forced
+upon him by enlarged perceptions, but every modification was an
+effort to him, in spite of a continual and successful resistance
+to what he recognised as his initial mental defect.</p>
+<p>I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark
+in the preceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used
+to notice it as an almost invariable rule that children&rsquo;s
+earliest ideas of God are modelled upon the character of their
+father&mdash;if they have one.&nbsp; Should the father be kind,
+considerate, full of the warmest love, fond of showing it, and
+reserved only about his displeasure, the child having learned to
+look upon God as His Heavenly Father through the Lord&rsquo;s
+Prayer and our Church Services, will feel towards God as he does
+towards his own father; this conception will stick to a man for
+years and years after he has attained manhood&mdash;probably it
+will never leave him.&nbsp; For all children love their fathers
+and mothers, if these last will only let them; it is not a little
+unkindness that will kill so hardy a plant as the love of a child
+for its parents.&nbsp; Nature has allowed ample margin for many
+blunders, provided there be a genuine desire on the
+parent&rsquo;s part to make the child feel that he is loved, and
+that his natural feelings are respected.&nbsp; This is all the
+religious education which a child should have.&nbsp; As he grows
+older he will then turn naturally to the waters of life, and
+thirst after them of his own accord by reason of the spiritual
+refreshment which they, and they only, can afford.&nbsp;
+Otherwise he will shrink from them, on account of his
+recollection of the way in which he was led down to drink against
+his will, and perhaps with harshness, when all the analogies with
+which he was acquainted pointed in the direction of their being
+unpleasant and unwholesome.&nbsp; So soul-satisfying is family
+affection to a child, that he who has once enjoyed it cannot bear
+to be deprived of the hope that he is possessed in Heaven of a
+parent who is like his earthly father&mdash;of a friend and
+counsellor who will never, never fail him.&nbsp; There is no such
+religious nor moral education as kindly genial treatment and a
+good example; all else may then be let alone till the child is
+old enough to feel the want of it.&nbsp; It is true that the seed
+will thus be sown late, but in what a soil!&nbsp; On the other
+hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh and
+uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will be
+painful.&nbsp; He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated
+likeness of his father.&nbsp; He will therefore shrink from
+Him.&nbsp; The rottenness of stillborn love in the heart of a
+child poisons the blood of the soul, and hence, later, crime.</p>
+<p>To return, however, to the lady.&nbsp; When she had put on her
+night-gown, she knelt down by her bedside and, to our
+consternation, began to say her prayers.&nbsp; This was a cruel
+blow to both of us; we had always been under the impression that
+grownup people were not made to say their prayers, and the idea
+of any one saying them of his or her own accord had never
+occurred to us as possible.&nbsp; Of course the lady would not
+say her prayers if she were not obliged; and yet she did say
+them; therefore she must be obliged to say them; therefore we
+should be obliged to say them, and this was a very great
+disappointment.&nbsp; Awe-struck and open-mouthed we listened
+while the lady prayed in sonorous accents, for many things which
+I do not now remember, and finally for my father and mother and
+for both of us&mdash;shortly afterwards she rose, blew out the
+light and got into bed.&nbsp; Every word that she said had
+confirmed our worst apprehensions; it was just what we had been
+taught to say ourselves.</p>
+<p>Next morning we compared notes and drew the most painful
+inferences; but in the course of the day our spirits
+rallied.&nbsp; We agreed that there were many mysteries in
+connection with life and things which it was high time to
+unravel, and that an opportunity was now afforded us which might
+not readily occur again.&nbsp; All we had to do was to be true to
+ourselves and equal to the occasion.&nbsp; We laid our plans with
+great astuteness.&nbsp; We would be fast asleep when the lady
+came up to bed, but our heads should be turned in the direction
+of her bed, and covered with clothes, all but a single
+peep-hole.&nbsp; My brother, as the eldest, had clearly a right
+to be nearest the lady, but I could see very well, and could
+depend on his reporting faithfully whatever should escape me.</p>
+<p>There was no chance of her giving us anything&mdash;if she had
+meant to do so she would have done it sooner; she might, indeed,
+consider the moment of her departure as the most auspicious for
+this purpose, but then she was not going yet, and the interval
+was at our own disposal.&nbsp; We spent the afternoon in trying
+to learn to snore, but we were not certain about it, and in the
+end regretfully concluded that as snoring was not <i>de
+rigueur</i> we had better dispense with it.</p>
+<p>We were put to bed; the light was taken away; we were told to
+go to sleep, and promised faithfully that we would do so; the
+tongue indeed swore, but the mind was unsworn.&nbsp; It was
+agreed that we should keep pinching one another to prevent our
+going to sleep.&nbsp; We did so at frequent intervals; at last
+our patience was rewarded with the heavy creak, as of a stout
+elderly lady labouring up the stairs, and presently our victim
+entered.</p>
+<p>To cut a long story short, the lady on satisfying herself that
+we were asleep, never said her prayers at all; during the
+remainder of her visit whenever she found us awake she always
+said them, but when she thought we were asleep, she never
+prayed.&nbsp; It is needless to add that we had the matter out
+with her before she left, and that the consequences were
+unpleasant for all parties; they added to the troubles in which
+we were already involved as to our prayers, and were indirectly
+among the earliest causes which led my brother to look with
+scepticism upon religion.</p>
+<p>For a while, however, all went on as though nothing had
+happened.&nbsp; An effect of distrust, indeed, remained after the
+cause had been forgotten, but my brother was still too young to
+oppose anything that my mother told him, and to all outward
+appearance he grew in grace no less rapidly than in stature.</p>
+<p>For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by
+the one great sorrow of our father&rsquo;s death.&nbsp; Shortly
+after this we were sent to a day school in Bloomsbury.&nbsp; We
+were neither of us very happy there, but my brother, who always
+took kindly to his books, picked up a fair knowledge of Latin and
+Greek; he also learned to draw, and to exercise himself a little
+in English composition.&nbsp; When I was about fourteen my mother
+capitalised a part of her income and started me off to America,
+where she had friends who could give me a helping hand; by their
+kindness I was enabled, after an absence of twenty years, to
+return with a handsome income, but not, alas, before the death of
+my mother.</p>
+<p>Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the
+Bible with us and explain it.&nbsp; She had become deeply
+impressed with the millenarian fervour which laid hold of so many
+some twenty-five or thirty years ago.&nbsp; The Apocalypse was
+perhaps her favourite book in the Bible, and she was imbued with
+the fullest conviction that all the threatened horrors with which
+it teems were upon the eve of their accomplishment.&nbsp; The
+year eighteen hundred and forty-eight was to be (as indeed it
+was) a time of general bloodshed and confusion, while in 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 Man
+with 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 them that were alive, would be caught up with other saints
+into the air, and would possibly receive while rising some
+distinguishing token of confidence and approbation which should
+fall with due impressiveness upon the surrounding multitude; then
+would come the consummation of all things, and she would be ever
+with the Lord.&nbsp; She died peaceably in her bed before she
+could know that a commercial panic was the nearest approach to
+the fulfilment of prophecy which the year eighteen hundred and
+sixty-six brought forth.</p>
+<p>These opinions of my mother&rsquo;s were positively
+disastrous&mdash;injuring her naturally healthy and vigorous mind
+by leading her to indulge in all manner of dreamy and fanciful
+interpretations of Scripture, which any but the most narrow
+literalist would feel at once to be untenable.&nbsp; Thus several
+times she expressed to us her conviction that my brother and
+myself were to be the two witnesses mentioned in the eleventh
+chapter of the Book of Revelation, and dilated upon the
+gratification she should experience upon finding that we had
+indeed been reserved for a position of such distinction.&nbsp; We
+were as yet mere children, and naturally took all for granted
+that our mother told us; we therefore made a careful examination
+of the passage which threw light upon our future; but on finding
+that the prospect was gloomy and full of bloodshed we protested
+against the honours which were intended for us, more especially
+when we reflected that the mother of the two witnesses was not
+menaced in Scripture with any particular discomfort.&nbsp; If we
+were to be martyrs, my mother ought to wish to be a martyr too,
+whereas nothing was farther from her intention.&nbsp; Her notion
+clearly was that we were to be massacred somewhere in the streets
+of London, in consequence of the anti-Christian machinations of
+the Pope; that after lying about unburied for 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.</p>
+<p>She was not herself indeed to share either our martyrdom or
+our glorification, but was to survive us many years on earth,
+living in an odour of great sanctity and reflected splendour, as
+the central and most august figure in a select society.&nbsp; She
+would perhaps be able indirectly, through her sons&rsquo;
+influence with the Almighty, to have a voice in most of the
+arrangements both of this world and of the next.&nbsp; If all
+this were to come true (and things seemed very like it), those
+friends who had neglected us in our adversity would not find it
+too easy to be restored to favour, however greatly they might
+desire it&mdash;that is to say, they would not have found it too
+easy in the case of one less magnanimous and spiritually-minded
+than herself.&nbsp; My mother said but little of the above
+directly, but the fragments which occasionally escaped her were
+pregnant, and on looking back it is easy to perceive that she
+must have been building one of the most stupendous aerial fabrics
+that have ever been reared.</p>
+<p>I have given the above in its more amusing aspect, and am half
+afraid that I may appear to be making a jest of weakness on the
+part of one of the most devotedly unselfish mothers who have ever
+existed.&nbsp; But one can love while smiling, and the very
+wildness of my mother&rsquo;s dream serves to show how entirely
+her whole soul was occupied with the things which are
+above.&nbsp; To her, religion was all in all; the earth was but a
+place of pilgrimage&mdash;only so far important as it was a
+possible road to heaven.&nbsp; She impressed this upon both of us
+by every word and action&mdash;instant in season and out of
+season, so that she might fill us more deeply with a sense of
+God.&nbsp; But the inevitable consequences happened; my mother
+had aimed too high and had overshot her mark.&nbsp; The influence
+indeed of her guileless and unworldly nature remained impressed
+upon my brother even during the time of his extremest unbelief
+(perhaps his ultimate safety is in the main referable to this
+cause, and to the happy memories of my father, which had
+predisposed him to love God), but my mother had insisted on the
+most minute verbal accuracy of every part of the Bible; she had
+also dwelt upon the duty of independent research, and on the
+necessity of giving up everything rather than assent to things
+which our conscience did not assent to.&nbsp; No one could have
+more effectually taught us to try <i>to think</i> the truth, and
+we had taken her at her word because our hearts told us that she
+was right.&nbsp; But she required three incompatible
+things.&nbsp; When my brother grew older he came to feel that
+independent and unflinching examination, with a determination to
+abide by the results, would lead him to reject the point which to
+my mother was more important than any other&mdash;I mean the
+absolute accuracy of the Gospel records.&nbsp; My mother was
+inexpressibly shocked at hearing my brother doubt the
+authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and then, as it
+appeared to him, she tried to make him violate the duties of
+examination and candour which he had learnt too thoroughly to
+unlearn.&nbsp; Thereon came pain and an estrangement which was
+none the less profound for being mutually concealed.</p>
+<p>This estrangement was the gradual work of some five or six
+years, during which my brother was between eleven and seventeen
+years old.&nbsp; At seventeen, I am told that he was remarkably
+well informed and clever.&nbsp; His manners were, like my
+father&rsquo;s, singularly genial, and his appearance very
+prepossessing.&nbsp; He had as yet no doubt concerning the
+soundness of any fundamental Christian doctrine, but his mind was
+too active to allow of his being contented with my mother&rsquo;s
+child-like faith.&nbsp; There were points on which he did not
+indeed doubt, but which it would none the less be interesting to
+consider; such for example as the perfectibility of the
+regenerate Christian, and the meaning of the mysterious central
+chapters of the Epistle to the Romans.&nbsp; He was engaged in
+these researches though still only a boy, when an event occurred
+which gave the first real shock to his faith.</p>
+<p>He was accustomed to teach in a school for the poorest
+children every Sunday afternoon, a task for which his patience
+and good temper well fitted him.&nbsp; On one occasion, however,
+while he was explaining the effect of baptism to one of his
+favourite pupils, he discovered to his great surprise that the
+boy had never been baptised.&nbsp; He pushed his inquiries
+further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in his class only
+five had been baptised, and, not only so, but that no difference
+in disposition or conduct could be discovered between the
+regenerate boys and the unregenerate.&nbsp; The good and bad boys
+were distributed in proportions equal to the respective numbers
+of the baptised and unbaptised.&nbsp; In spite of a certain
+impetuosity of natural character, he was also of a matter-of-fact
+and experimental turn of mind; he therefore went through the
+whole school, which numbered about a hundred boys, and found out
+who had been baptised and who had not.&nbsp; The same results
+appeared.&nbsp; The majority had not been baptised; yet the good
+and bad dispositions were so distributed as to preclude all
+possibility of maintaining that the baptised boys were better
+than the unbaptised.</p>
+<p>The reader may smile at the idea of any one&rsquo;s faith
+being troubled by a fact of which the explanation is so obvious,
+but in truth my brother was seriously and painfully
+shocked.&nbsp; The teacher to whom he applied for a solution of
+the difficulty was not a man of any real power, and reported my
+brother to the rector for having disturbed the school by his
+inquiries.&nbsp; The rector was old and self-opinionated; the
+difficulty, indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to
+my brother, but instead of saying so at once, and referring to
+any recognised theological authority, he tried to put him off
+with words which seemed intended to silence him rather than to
+satisfy him; finally he lost his temper, and my brother fell
+under suspicion of unorthodoxy.</p>
+<p>This kind of treatment might answer with some people, but not
+with my brother.&nbsp; He alludes to it resentfully in the
+introductory chapter of his book.&nbsp; He became suspicious that
+a preconceived opinion was being defended at the expense of
+honest scrutiny, and was thus driven upon his own unaided
+investigation.&nbsp; The result may be guessed: he began to go
+astray, and strayed further and further.&nbsp; The children of
+God, he reasoned, the members of Christ and inheritors of the
+kingdom of Heaven, were no more spiritually minded than the
+children of the world and the devil.&nbsp; Was then the grace of
+God a gift which left no trace whatever upon those who were
+possessed of it&mdash;a thing the presence or absence of which
+might be ascertained by consulting the parish registry, but was
+not discernible in conduct?&nbsp; The grace of man was more
+clearly perceptible than this.&nbsp; Assuredly there must be a
+screw loose somewhere, which, for aught he knew, might be
+jeopardising the salvation of all Christendom.&nbsp; Where then
+was this loose screw to be found?</p>
+<p>He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief
+was caused by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism.&nbsp;
+He therefore, to my mother&rsquo;s inexpressible grief, joined
+the Baptists and was immersed in a pond near Dorking.&nbsp; With
+the Baptists he remained quiet about three months, and then began
+to quarrel with his instructors as to their doctrine of
+predestination.&nbsp; Shortly afterwards he came accidentally
+upon a fascinating stranger who was no less struck with my
+brother than my brother with him, and this gentleman, who turned
+out to be a Roman Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church
+of Rome, where he felt sure that he had now found rest for his
+soul.&nbsp; But here, too, he was mistaken; after about two years
+he rebelled against the stifling of all free inquiry; on this
+rebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and he was
+soon battling with unbelief.&nbsp; He then fell in with one who
+was a pure Deist, and was shorn of every shred of dogma which he
+had ever held, except a belief in the personality and providence
+of the Creator.</p>
+<p>On reviewing his letters written to me about this time, I am
+painfully struck with the manner in which they show that all
+these pitiable vagaries were to be traced to a single
+cause&mdash;a cause which still exists to the misleading of
+hundreds of thousands, and which, I fear, seems likely to
+continue in full force for many a year to come&mdash;I mean, to a
+false system of training which teaches people to regard
+Christianity as a thing one and indivisible, to be accepted
+entirely in the strictest reading of the letter, or to be
+rejected as absolutely untrue.&nbsp; The fact is, that all
+permanent truth is as one of those coal measures, a seam of which
+lies near the surface, and even crops up above the ground, but
+which is generally of an inferior quality and soon worked out;
+beneath it there comes a layer of sand and clay, and then at last
+the true seam of precious quality and in virtually inexhaustible
+supply.&nbsp; The truth which is on the surface is rarely the
+whole truth.&nbsp; It is seldom until this has been worked out
+and done with&mdash;as in the case of the apparent flatness of
+the earth&mdash;that unchangeable truth is discovered.&nbsp; It
+is the glory of the Lord to conceal a matter: it is the glory of
+the king to find it out.&nbsp; If my brother, from whom I have
+taken the above illustration, had had some judicious and
+wide-minded friend to correct and supplement the mainly admirable
+principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, 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 as
+literal and unspiritual as the other&mdash;each impressed with
+one aspect of religious truth, and with one only.&nbsp; In the
+end he became perhaps the widest-minded and most original thinker
+whom I have ever met; but no one from his early manhood could
+have augured this result; on the contrary, he shewed every sign
+of being likely to develop into one of those 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 mental vision.&nbsp;
+In after life, he often met with mere lads who seemed to him to
+be years and years in advance of what he had been at their age,
+and would say, smiling, &ldquo;With a great sum obtained I this
+freedom; but thou wast free-born.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Yet when one comes to think of it, a late development and
+laborious growth are generally more fruitful than those which are
+over-early luxuriant.&nbsp; Drawing an illustration from the art
+of painting, with which he was well acquainted, my brother used
+to say that all the greatest painters had begun with a hard and
+precise manner from which they had only broken after several
+years of effort; and that in like manner all the early schools
+were founded upon definiteness of outline to the exclusion of
+truth of effect.&nbsp; This may be true; but in my
+brother&rsquo;s case there was something even more unpromising
+than this; there was a commonness, so to speak, of mental
+execution, from which no one could have foreseen his
+after-emancipation.&nbsp; Yet in the course of time he was indeed
+emancipated to the very uttermost, while his bonds will, I firmly
+trust, be found to have been of inestimable service to the whole
+human race.</p>
+<p>For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see
+the Christian scheme <i>as a whole</i>, or even to conceive the
+idea that there was any whole at all, other than each one of the
+stages of opinion through which he was at the time passing; yet
+when the idea was at length presented to him by one whom I must
+not name, the discarded fragments of his faith assumed shape, and
+formed themselves into a consistently organised scheme.&nbsp;
+Then became apparent the value of his knowledge of the details of
+so many different sides of Christian verity.&nbsp; Buried in the
+details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that they were only the
+unessential developments of certain component parts.&nbsp;
+Awakening to the perception of the whole after an intimate
+acquaintance with the details, he was able to realise the
+position and meaning of all that he had hitherto experienced in a
+way which has been vouchsafed to few, if any others.</p>
+<p>Thus he became truly a broad Churchman.&nbsp; Not broad in the
+ordinary and ill-considered use of the term (for the broad
+Churchman is as little able to sympathise with Romanists, extreme
+High Churchmen and Dissenters, as these are with himself&mdash;he
+is only one of a sect which is called by the name broad, though
+it is no broader than its own base), but in the true sense of
+being able to believe in the naturalness, legitimacy, and truth
+<i>qu&acirc;</i> Christianity even of those doctrines which seem
+to stand most widely and irreconcilably asunder.</p>
+<h3>Chapter II</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">But</span> it was impossible that a mind
+of such activity should have gone over so much ground, and yet in
+the end returned to the same position as that from which it
+started.</p>
+<p>So far was this from being the case that the Christianity of
+his maturer life would be considered dangerously heterodox by
+those who belong to any of the more definite or precise schools
+of theological thought.&nbsp; He was as one who has made the
+circuit of a mountain, and yet been ascending during the whole
+time of his doing so: such a person finds himself upon the same
+side as at first, but upon a greatly higher level.&nbsp; The
+peaks which had seemed the most important when he was in the
+valley were now dwarfed to their true proportions by colossal
+cloud-capped masses whose very existence could not have been
+suspected from beneath: and again, other points which had seemed
+among the lowest turned out to be the very highest of
+all&mdash;as the Finster-Aarhorn, which hides itself away in the
+centre of the Bernese Alps, is never seen to be the greatest till
+one is high and far off.</p>
+<p>Thus he felt no sort of fear or repugnance in admitting that
+the New Testament writings, as we now have them, are not by any
+means accurate records of the events which they profess to
+chronicle.&nbsp; This, which few English Churchmen would be
+prepared to admit, was to him so much of an axiom that he
+despaired of seeing any sound theological structure raised until
+it was universally recognised.</p>
+<p>And here he would probably meet with sympathy from the more
+advanced thinkers within the body of the Church, but so far as I
+know, he stood alone as recognising the wisdom of the Divine
+counsels in having ordained the wide and apparently
+irreconcilable divergencies of doctrine and character which we
+find assigned to Christ in the Gospels, and as finding his faith
+confirmed, not by the supposition that both the portraits drawn
+of Christ are objectively true, but <i>that both are objectively
+inaccurate</i>, <i>and that the Almighty intended they should be
+inaccurate</i>, inasmuch as the true spiritual conception in the
+mind of man could be indirectly more certainly engendered by a
+strife, a warring, a clashing, so to speak, of versions, all of
+them distorting slightly some one or other of the features of the
+original, than directly by the most absolutely correct impression
+which human language could convey.&nbsp; Even the most perfect
+human speech, as has been often pointed out, is a very gross and
+imperfect vehicle of thought.&nbsp; I remember once hearing him
+say that it was not till he was nearly thirty that he discovered
+&ldquo;what thick and sticky fluids were air and water,&rdquo;
+how crass and dull in comparison with other more subtle fluids;
+he added that speech had no less deceived him, seeming, as it
+did, to be such a perfect messenger of thought, and being after
+all nothing but a shuffler and a loiterer.</p>
+<p>With most men the Gospels are true in spite of their
+discrepancies and inconsistencies; with him Christianity, as
+distinguished from a bare belief in the objectively historical
+character of each part of the Gospels, was true because of these
+very discrepancies; as his conceptions of the Divine manner of
+working became wider, the very forces which had at one time
+shaken his faith to its foundations established it anew upon a
+firmer and broader base.&nbsp; He was gradually led to feel that
+the ideal presented by the life and death of our Saviour could
+never have been accepted by Jews at all, if its whole purport had
+been made intelligible during the Redeemer&rsquo;s life-time;
+that in order to insure its acceptance by a nucleus of followers
+it must have been endowed with a more local aspect than it was
+intended afterwards to wear; yet that, for the sake of its
+subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local
+complexion was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable
+from <i>viv&acirc; voce</i> communication and imperfect education
+were the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the
+ideal, and give it that breadth which could not be otherwise
+obtainable&mdash;and that thus the value of the ideal was
+indefinitely enhanced, and <i>designedly enhanced</i>, alike by
+the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain
+by a certain amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder to
+fill in the details according to his own spiritual needs, and
+that no ideal can be truly universal and permanents unless it
+have an elasticity which will allow of this process in the minds
+of those who contemplate it; that it cannot become thus elastic
+unless by the loss of no inconsiderable amount of detail, and
+that thus the half, as Dr. Arnold used to say, &ldquo;becomes
+greater than the whole,&rdquo; the sketch more preciously
+suggestive than the photograph.&nbsp; Hence far from deploring
+the fragmentary, confused, and contradictory condition of the
+Gospel records, he saw in this condition the means whereby alone
+the human mind could have been enabled to conceive&mdash;not the
+precise nature of Christ&mdash;but <i>the highest ideal of which
+each individual Christian soul was capable</i>.&nbsp; As soon as
+he had grasped these conceptions, which will be found more fully
+developed in one of the later chapters of his book, the spell of
+unbelief was broken.</p>
+<p>But, once broken, it was dissolved utterly and entirely; he
+could allow himself to contemplate fearlessly all sorts of issues
+from which one whose experiences had been less varied would have
+shrunk.&nbsp; He was free of the enemy&rsquo;s camp, and could go
+hither and thither whithersoever he would.&nbsp; The very points
+which to others were insuperable difficulties were to him
+foundation-stones of faith.&nbsp; For example, to the objection
+that if in the present state of the records no clear conception
+of the nature of Christ&rsquo;s life and teaching could be
+formed, we should be compelled to take one for our model of whom
+we knew little or nothing certain, I have heard him answer,
+&ldquo;And so much the better for us all.&nbsp; The truth, if
+read by the light of man&rsquo;s imperfect understanding, would
+have been falser to him than any falsehood.&nbsp; It would have
+been truth no longer.&nbsp; <i>Better be led aright by an error
+which is so adjusted as to compensate for the errors in
+man&rsquo;s powers of understanding</i>, <i>than be misled by a
+truth which can never be translated from objectivity to
+subjectivity</i>.&nbsp; In such a case, it is the error which is
+the truth and the truth the error.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Fearless himself, he could not understand the fears felt by
+others; and this was perhaps his greatest sympathetic
+weakness.&nbsp; He was impatient of the subterfuges with which
+untenable interpretations of Scripture were defended, and of the
+disingenuousness of certain harmonists; indeed, the mention of
+the word harmony was enough to kindle an outbreak of righteous
+anger, which would sometimes go to the utmost limit of
+righteousness.&nbsp; &ldquo;Harmonies!&rdquo; he would exclaim,
+&ldquo;the sweetest harmonies are those which are most full of
+discords, and the discords of one generation of musicians become
+heavenly music in the hands of their successors.&nbsp; Which of
+the great musicians has not enriched his art not only by the
+discovery of new harmonies, but by proving that sounds which are
+actually inharmonious are nevertheless essentially and eternally
+delightful?&nbsp; What an outcry has there not always been
+against the &lsquo;unwarrantable licence&rsquo; with the rules of
+harmony whenever a Beethoven or a Mozart has broken through any
+of the trammels which have been regarded as the safeguards of the
+art, instead of in their true light of fetters, and how
+gratefully have succeeding musicians acquiesced in and adopted
+the innovation.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then would follow a tirade with
+illustration upon illustration, comparison of this passage with
+that, and an exhaustive demonstration that one or other, or both,
+could have had no sort of possible foundation in fact; he could
+only see that the persons from whom he differed were defending
+something which was untrue and which they ought to have known to
+be untrue, but he could not see that people ought to know many
+things which they do not know.</p>
+<p>Had he himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see
+from his own standpoints?&nbsp; Can any of us do so?&nbsp; The
+force of early bias and education, the force of intellectual
+surroundings, the force of natural timidity, the force of
+dulness, were things which he could appreciate and make allowance
+for in any other age, and among any other people than his own;
+but as belonging to England and the Nineteenth Century they had
+no place in his theory of Nature; they were inconceivable,
+unnatural, unpardonable, whenever they came into contact with the
+subject of Christian evidences.&nbsp; Deplorable, indeed, they
+are, but this was just the sort of word to which he could not
+confine himself.&nbsp; The criticisms upon the late Dean
+Alford&rsquo;s notes, which will be given in the sequel, display
+this sort of temper; they are not entirely his own, but he
+adopted them and endorsed them with a warmth which we cannot but
+feel to be unnecessary, not to say more.&nbsp; Yet I am free to
+confess that whatever editorial licence I could venture to take
+has been taken in the direction of lenity.</p>
+<p>On the whole, however, he valued Dean Alford&rsquo;s work very
+highly, giving him great praise for the candour with which he not
+unfrequently set the harmonists aside.&nbsp; For example, in his
+notes upon the discrepancies between St. Luke&rsquo;s and St.
+Matthew&rsquo;s accounts of the early life of our Lord, the Dean
+openly avows that it is quite beyond his purpose to attempt to
+reconcile the two.&nbsp; &ldquo;This part of the Gospel
+history,&rdquo; he writes, &ldquo;is one where the harmonists, by
+their arbitrary reconcilement of the two accounts, have given
+great advantage to the enemies of the faith.&nbsp; <i>As the two
+accounts now stand</i>, it is wholly impossible to suggest any
+satisfactory method of <i>uniting them</i>, every one who has
+attempted it has in some part or other of his hypothesis violated
+probability and common sense,&rdquo; but in spite of this, the
+Dean had no hesitation in accepting both the accounts.&nbsp; With
+reference to this the author of <i>The Jesus of History</i>
+(Williams and Norgate, 1866)&mdash;a work to which my brother
+admitted himself to be under very great obligations, and which he
+greatly admired, in spite of his utter dissent from the main
+conclusion arrived at, has the following note:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dean Alford, N.T. for English readers, admits that the
+narratives as they stand are contradictory, but he believes
+both.&nbsp; He is even severe upon the harmonists who attempt to
+frame schemes of reconciliation between the two, on account of
+the triumph they thus furnish to the &lsquo;enemies of the
+faith,&rsquo; a phrase which seems to imply all who believe less
+than he does.&nbsp; The Dean, however, forgets that the faith
+which can believe two (apparently) contradictory propositions in
+matters of fact is a very rare gift, and that for one who is so
+endowed there are thousands who can be satisfied with a plausible
+though demonstrably false explanation.&nbsp; To the latter class
+the despised harmonists render a real service.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Upon this note my brother was very severe.&nbsp; In a letter,
+dated Dec. 18, 1866, addressed to a friend who had alluded to it,
+and expressed his concurrence with it as in the main just, my
+brother wrote: &ldquo;You are wrong about the note in <i>The
+Jesus of History</i>, there is more of the Christianity of the
+future in Dean Alford&rsquo;s indifference to the harmony between
+the discordant accounts of Luke and Matthew than there would have
+been <i>even in the most convincing and satisfactory</i>
+explanation of the way in which they came to differ.&nbsp; No
+such explanation is possible; both the Dean and the author of
+<i>The Jesus of History</i> were very well aware of this, but the
+latter is unjust in assuming that his opponent was not alive to
+the absurdity of appearing to believe two contradictory
+propositions at one and the same time.&nbsp; The Dean takes very
+good care that he shall not appear to do this, for it is
+perfectly plain to any careful reader that he must really believe
+that one or both narratives are inaccurate, inasmuch as the
+differences between them are too great to allow of reconciliation
+by a supposed suppression of detail.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This, though not said so clearly as it should have
+been, is yet virtually implied in the admission that no sort of
+fact which could by any possibility be admitted as reconciling
+them had ever occurred to human ingenuity; what, then, Dean
+Alford must have really felt was that the spiritual value of each
+account was no less precious for not being in strict accordance
+with the other; that the objective truth lies somewhere between
+them, and is of very little importance, being long dead and
+buried, and living in its results only, in comparison with the
+subjective truth conveyed by both the narratives, which lives in
+our hearts independently of precise knowledge concerning the
+actual facts.&nbsp; Moreover, that though both accounts may
+perhaps be inaccurate, yet that <i>a very little</i> natural
+inaccuracy on the part of each writer would throw them apparently
+very wide asunder, that such inaccuracies are easily to be
+accounted for, and would, in fact, be inevitable in the sixty
+years of oral communication which elapsed between 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 that the details of
+the facts connected with the conception, birth, genealogy, and
+earliest history of our Saviour are irrecoverable&mdash;a general
+impression being alone possible, or indeed desirable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It might perhaps have been more satisfactory if Dean
+Alford had expressed the above more plainly; but if he had done
+this, who would have read his book?&nbsp; Where would have been
+that influence in the direction of truly liberal Christianity
+which has been so potent during the last twenty years?&nbsp; As
+it was, the freedom with which the Dean wrote was the cause of no
+inconsiderable scandal.&nbsp; Or, again, he may not have been
+fully conscious of his own position: few men are; he had taken
+the right one, but more perhaps by spiritual instinct than by
+conscious and deliberate exercise of his intellectual
+faculties.&nbsp; Finally, compromise is not a matter of good
+policy only, it is a solemn duty in the interests of Christian
+peace, and this not in minor matters only&mdash;we can all do
+this much&mdash;but in those concerning which we feel most
+strongly, for here the sacrifice is greatest and most acceptable
+to God.&nbsp; There are, of course, limits to this, and Dean
+Alford may have carried compromise too far in the present
+instance, but it is very transparent.&nbsp; The narrowness which
+leads the author of <i>The Jesus of History</i> to strain at such
+a gnat is the secret of his inability to accept the divinity and
+miracles of our Lord, and has marred the most exhaustively
+critical exegesis of the life and death of our Saviour with an
+impotent conclusion.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It is strange that one who could write thus should
+occasionally have shown himself so little able to apply his own
+principles.&nbsp; He seems to have been alternately under the
+influence of two conflicting spirits&mdash;at one time writing as
+though there were nothing precious under the sun except logic,
+consistency, and precision, and breathing fire and smoke against
+even very trifling deviations from the path of exact
+criticism&mdash;at another, leading the reader almost to believe
+that he disregarded the value of any objective truth, and
+speaking of endeavour after accuracy in terms that are positively
+contemptuous.&nbsp; Whenever he was in the one mood he seemed to
+forget the possibility of any other; so much so that I have
+sometimes thought that he did this deliberately and for the same
+reasons as those which led Adam Smith to exclude one set of
+premises in his <i>Theory of Moral Sentiments</i> and another in
+his <i>Wealth of Nations</i>.&nbsp; I believe, however, that the
+explanation lies in the fact that my brother was inclined to
+underrate the importance of belief in the objective truth of any
+other individual features in the life of our Lord than his
+Resurrection and Ascension.&nbsp; All else seemed dwarfed by the
+side of these events.&nbsp; His whole soul was so concentrated
+upon the centre of the circle that he forgot the circumference,
+or left it out of sight.&nbsp; Nothing less than the strictest
+objective truth as to the main facts of the Resurrection and
+Ascension would content him; the other miracles and the life and
+teaching of our Lord might then be left open; whatever view was
+taken of them by each individual Christian was probably the one
+most desirable for the spiritual wellbeing of each.</p>
+<p>Even as regards the Resurrection and Ascension, he did not
+greatly value the detail.&nbsp; Provided these facts were so
+established that they could never henceforth be controverted, he
+thought that the less detail the broader and more universally
+acceptable would be the effect.&nbsp; Hence, when Dean
+Alford&rsquo;s notes seemed to jeopardise the evidences for these
+things, he could brook no trifling; for unless Christ actually
+died and actually came to life again, he saw no escape from an
+utter denial of any but natural religion.&nbsp; Christ would have
+been no more to him than Socrates or Shakespeare, except in so
+far as his teaching was more spiritual.&nbsp; The triune nature
+of the Deity&mdash;the Resurrection from the dead&mdash;the hope
+of Heaven and salutary fear of Hell&mdash;all would go but for
+the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ; nothing would
+remain except a sense of the Divine as a substitute for God, and
+the current feeling of one&rsquo;s peers as the chief moral check
+upon misconduct.&nbsp; Indeed, we have seen this view openly
+advocated by a recent writer, and set forth in the very plainest
+terms.&nbsp; My brother did not live to see it, but if he had, he
+would have recognised the fulfilment of his own prophecies as to
+what must be the inevitable sequel of a denial of our
+Lord&rsquo;s Resurrection.</p>
+<p>It will be seen therefore that he was in no danger of being
+carried away by a &ldquo;pet theory.&rdquo;&nbsp; Where light and
+definition were essential, he would sacrifice nothing of either;
+but he was jealous for his highest light, and felt &ldquo;that
+the whole effect of the Christian scheme was indefinitely
+heightened by keeping all other lights
+subordinate&rdquo;&mdash;this at least was the illustration which
+he often used concerning it.&nbsp; But as there were limits to
+the value of light and &ldquo;finding&rdquo;&mdash;limits which
+had been far exceeded, with the result of an unnatural forcing of
+the lights, and an effect of garishness and unreality&mdash;so
+there were limits to the as yet unrecognised preciousness of
+&ldquo;losing&rdquo; and obscurity; these limits he placed at the
+objectivity of our Lord&rsquo;s Resurrection and Ascension.&nbsp;
+Let there be light enough to show these things, and the rest
+would gain by being in half-tone and shadow.</p>
+<p>His facility of illustration was simply marvellous.&nbsp; From
+his conversation any one would have thought that he was
+acquainted with all manner of arts and sciences of which he knew
+little or nothing.&nbsp; It is true, as has been said already,
+that he had had some practice in the art of painting, and was an
+enthusiastic admirer of the masterpieces of Raphael, Titian,
+Guido, Domenichino, and others; but he could never have been
+called a painter; for music he had considerable feeling; I think
+he must have known thorough-bass, but it was hard to say what he
+did or did not know.&nbsp; Of science he was almost entirely
+ignorant, yet he had assimilated a quantity of stray facts, and
+whatever he assimilated seemed to agree with him and nourish his
+mental being.&nbsp; But though his acquaintance with any one art
+or science must be allowed to have been superficial only, he had
+an astonishing perception of the relative bearings of facts which
+seemed at first sight to be quite beyond the range of one
+another, and of the relations between the sciences generally; it
+was this which gave him his felicity and fecundity of
+illustration&mdash;a gift which he never abused.&nbsp; He
+delighted in its use for the purpose of carrying a clear
+impression of his meaning to the mind of another, but I never
+remember to have heard him mistake illustration for argument, nor
+endeavour to mislead an adversary by a fascinating but irrelevant
+simile.&nbsp; The subtlety of his mind was a more serious source
+of danger to him, though I do not know that he greatly lost by it
+in comparison with what he gained; his sense, however, of
+distinctions was so fine that it would sometimes distract his
+attention from points of infinitely greater importance in
+connection with his subject than the particular distinction which
+he was trying to establish at the moment.</p>
+<p>The reader may be glad to know what my brother felt about
+retaining the unhistoric passages of Scripture.&nbsp; Would he
+wish to see them sought for and sifted out?&nbsp; Or, again, what
+would he propose concerning such of the parables as are
+acknowledged by every liberal Churchman to be immoral, as, for
+instance, the story of Dives and Lazarus and the Unjust
+Steward&mdash;parables which can never have been spoken by our
+Lord, at any rate not in their present shape?&nbsp; And here we
+have a remarkable instance of his moderation and truly English
+good sense.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do not touch one word of them,&rdquo;
+was his often-repeated exclamation.&nbsp; &ldquo;If not directly
+inspired by the mouth of God they have been indirectly inspired
+by the force of events, and the force of events is the power and
+manifestation of God; they could not have been allowed to come
+into their present position if they had not been recognised in
+the counsels of the Almighty as being of indirect service to
+mankind; there is a subjective truth conveyed even by these
+parables to the minds of many, that enables them to lay hold of
+other and objective truths which they could not else have
+grasped.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There can be no question that the communistic
+utterances of the third gospel, as distinguished from St.
+Matthew&rsquo;s more spiritual and doubtless more historic
+rendering of the same teaching, have been of inestimable service
+to Christianity.&nbsp; Christ is not for the whole only, but also
+for them that are sick, for the ill-instructed and what we are
+pleased to call &lsquo;dangerous&rsquo; classes, as well as for
+the more sober thinkers.&nbsp; To how many do the words,
+&lsquo;Blessed be ye poor: for your&rsquo;s is the kingdom of
+Heaven&rsquo; (Luke vi., 20), carry a comfort which could never
+be given by the &lsquo;Blessed are the poor in spirit&rsquo; of
+Matthew v., 3.&nbsp; In Matthew we find, &lsquo;Blessed are the
+poor in spirit: for their&rsquo;s is the kingdom of Heaven.&nbsp;
+Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.&nbsp;
+Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.&nbsp;
+Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness:
+for they shall be filled.&nbsp; Blessed are the merciful: for
+they shall obtain mercy.&nbsp; Blessed are the pure in heart: for
+they shall see God.&nbsp; Blessed are the peacemakers: for they
+shall be called the children of God.&nbsp; Blessed are they which
+are persecuted for righteousness&rsquo; sake: for their&rsquo;s
+is the kingdom of heaven.&nbsp; Blessed are ye, when men shall
+revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil
+against you falsely, for my sake.&nbsp; Rejoice, and be exceeding
+glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they
+the prophets which were before you.&rsquo;&nbsp; In Luke we read,
+&lsquo;Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be
+filled.&nbsp; Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. .
+. .&nbsp; But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received
+your consolation.&nbsp; Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall
+hunger.&nbsp; Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and
+weep.&nbsp; Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you!
+for so did <i>their</i> fathers to the false prophets,&rsquo;
+where even the grammar of the last sentence, independently of the
+substance, is such as it is impossible to ascribe to our Lord
+himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The &lsquo;upper&rsquo; classes naturally turn to the
+version of Matthew, but the &lsquo;lower,&rsquo; no less
+naturally to that of Luke, nor is it likely that the ideal of
+Christ would be one-tenth part so dear to them had not this
+provision for them been made, not by the direct teaching of the
+Saviour, but by the indirect inspiration of such events as were
+seen by the Almighty to be necessary for the full development of
+the highest ideal of which mankind was capable.&nbsp; All that we
+have in the New Testament is the inspired word, directly or
+indirectly, of God, the unhistoric no less than the historic; it
+is for us to take spiritual sustenance from whatever meats we
+find prepared for us, not to order the removal of this or that
+dish; the coarser meats are for the coarser natures; as they grow
+in grace they will turn from these to the finer: let us ourselves
+partake of that which we find best suited to us, but do not let
+us grudge to others the provision that God has set before
+them.&nbsp; There are many things which though not objectively
+true are nevertheless subjectively true to those who can receive
+them; and subjective truth is universally felt to be even higher
+than objective, as may be shown by the acknowledged duty of
+obeying our consciences (which is the right <i>to us</i>) rather
+than any dictate of man however much more objectively true.&nbsp;
+It is that which is true <i>to us</i> that we are bound each one
+of us to seek and follow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Having heard him thus far, and being unable to understand,
+much less to sympathise with teaching so utterly foreign to
+anything which I had heard elsewhere, I said to him,
+&ldquo;Either our Lord did say the words assigned to him by St.
+Luke or he did not.&nbsp; If he did, as they stand they are bad,
+and any one who heard them for the first time would say that they
+were bad; if he did not, then we ought not to allow them to
+remain in our Bibles to the misleading of people who will thus
+believe that God is telling them what he never did tell
+them&mdash;to the misleading of the poor, whom even in low
+self-interest we are bound to instruct as fully and truthfully as
+we can.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled and answered, &ldquo;That is the Peter Bell view of
+the matter.&nbsp; I thought so once, as, indeed, no one can know
+better than yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The expression upon his face as he said this was sufficient to
+show the clearness of his present perception, nevertheless I was
+anxious to get to the root of the matter, and said that if our
+Lord never uttered these words their being attributed to him must
+be due to fraud; to pious fraud, but still to fraud.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not so,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;it is due to the
+weakness of man&rsquo;s powers of memory and communication, and
+perhaps in some measure to unconscious inspiration.&nbsp;
+Moreover, even though wrong of some sort may have had its share
+in the origin of certain of the sayings ascribed to our Saviour,
+yet their removal now that they have been consecrated by time
+would be a still greater wrong.&nbsp; Would you defend the
+spoliation of the monasteries, or the confiscation of the abbey
+lands?&nbsp; I take it no&mdash;still less would you restore the
+monasteries or take back the lands; a consecrated change becomes
+a new departure; accept it and turn it to the best
+advantage.&nbsp; These are things to which the theory of the
+Church concerning lay baptism is strictly applicable.&nbsp;
+<i>Fieri non debet</i>, <i>factum valet</i>.&nbsp; If in our
+narrow and unsympathetic strivings after precision we should
+remove the hallowed imperfections whereby time has set the glory
+of his seal upon the gospels as well as upon all other aged
+things, not for twenty generations will they resume that
+ineffable and inviolable aspect which our fussy meddlesomeness
+will have disturbed.&nbsp; Let them alone.&nbsp; It is as they
+stand that they have saved the world.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No change is good unless it is imperatively called
+for.&nbsp; Not even the Reformation was good; it is good now; I
+acquiesce in it, as I do in anything which in itself not vital
+has received the sanction of many generations of my
+countrymen.&nbsp; It is sanction which sanctifieth in matters of
+this kind.&nbsp; I would no more undo the Reformation now than I
+would have helped it forward in the sixteenth century.&nbsp;
+Leave the historic, the unhistoric, and the doubtful to grow
+together until the harvest: that which is not vital will perish
+and rot unnoticed when it has ceased to have vitality; it is
+living till it has done this.&nbsp; Note how the very passages
+which you would condemn have died out of the regard of any but
+the poor.&nbsp; Who quotes them?&nbsp; Who appeals to them?&nbsp;
+Who believes in them?&nbsp; Who indeed except the poorest of the
+poor attaches the smallest weight to them whatever?&nbsp; To us
+they are dead, and other passages will die to us in like manner,
+noiselessly and almost imperceptibly, as the services for the
+fifth of November died out of the Prayer Book.&nbsp; One day the
+fruit will be hanging upon the tree, as it has hung for months,
+the next it will be lying upon the ground.&nbsp; It is not ripe
+until it has fallen of itself, or with the gentlest shaking; use
+no violence towards it, confident that you cannot hurry the
+ripening, and that if shaken down unripe the fruit will be
+worthless.&nbsp; Christianity must have contained the seeds of
+growth within itself, even to the shedding of many of its present
+dogmas.&nbsp; If the dogmas fall quietly in their maturity, the
+precious seed of truth (which will be found in the heart of every
+dogma that has been able to take living hold upon the
+world&rsquo;s imagination) will quicken and spring up in its own
+time: strike at the fruit too soon and the seed will
+die.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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 I have here recorded.&nbsp; I have given it
+in my capacity of editor and in some sort biographer, but am far
+from being prepared to maintain that it is likely, or indeed
+ought, to meet with the approval of any considerable number of
+Christians.&nbsp; But, surely, in these days of
+self-mystification it is refreshing to see the boldness with
+which my brother thought, and the freedom with which he
+contemplated all sorts of issues which are too generally
+avoided.&nbsp; What temptation would have been felt by many to
+soften down the inconsistencies and contradictions of the
+Gospels.&nbsp; How few are those who will venture to follow the
+lead of scientific criticism, and admit what every scholar must
+well know to be indisputable.&nbsp; Yet if a man will not do
+this, he shows that he has greater faith in falsehood than in
+truth.</p>
+<h3>Chapter III</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">On</span> my brother&rsquo;s death I came
+into possession of several of his early commonplace books filled
+with sketches for articles; some of these are more developed than
+others, but they are all of them fragmentary.&nbsp; I do not
+think that the reader will fail to be interested with the insight
+into my brother&rsquo;s spiritual and intellectual progress which
+a few 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.&nbsp; They are too exaggerated to be dangerous, being so
+obviously unfair as to carry their own antidote.&nbsp; The reader
+will not fail to notice the growth not only in thought but also
+in literary style which is displayed by my brother&rsquo;s later
+writings.</p>
+<p>In reference to the very subject of the parables above alluded
+to, he had written during his time of unbelief:&mdash;&ldquo;Why
+are we to interpret so literally all passages about the guilt of
+unbelief, and insist upon the historical character of every
+miraculous account, while we are indignant if any one demands an
+equally literal rendering of the precepts concerning human
+conduct?&nbsp; He that hath two coats is not to give to him that
+hath none: this would be &lsquo;visionary,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;utopian,&rsquo; &lsquo;wholly unpractical,&rsquo; and so
+forth.&nbsp; Or, again, he that is smitten on the one cheek is
+not to turn the other to the smiter, but to hand the offender
+over to the law; nor are the commands relative to indifference as
+to the morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence to be taken as
+they stand; nor yet the warnings against praying in public; nor
+can the parables, any one of them, be interpreted strictly with
+advantage to human welfare, except perhaps that of the Good
+Samaritan; nor the Sermon on the Mount, save in such passages as
+were already the common property of mankind before the coming of
+Christ.&nbsp; The parables which every one praises are in reality
+very bad: the Unjust Steward, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the
+Prodigal Son, Dives and Lazarus, the Sower and the Seed, the Wise
+and Foolish Virgins, the Marriage Garment, the Man who planted a
+Vineyard, are all either grossly immoral, or tend to engender a
+very low estimate of the character of God&mdash;an estimate far
+below the standard of the best earthly kings; where they are not
+immoral, or do not tend to degrade the character of God, they are
+the merest commonplaces imaginable, such as one is astonished to
+see people accept as having been first taught by Christ.&nbsp;
+Such maxims as those which inculcate conciliation and a
+forgiveness of injuries (wherever practicable) are certainly
+good, but the world does not owe their discovery to Christ, and
+they have had little place in the practice of his followers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is impossible to say that as a matter of fact the
+English people forgive their enemies more freely now than the
+Romans did, we will say in the time of Augustus.&nbsp; The value
+of generosity and magnanimity was perfectly well known among the
+ancients, nor do these qualities assume any nobler guise in the
+teaching of Christ than they did in that of the ancient heathen
+philosophers.&nbsp; On the contrary, they have no direct
+equivalent in Christian thought or phraseology.&nbsp; They are
+heathen words drawn from a heathen language, and instinct with
+the same heathen ideas of high spirit and good birth as belonged
+to them in the Latin language; they are no part or parcel of
+Christianity, and are not only independent of it, but savour
+distinctly of the flesh as opposed to the spirit, and are hence
+more or less antagonistic to it, until they have undergone a
+certain modification and transformation&mdash;until, that is to
+say, they have been mulcted of their more frank and genial
+elements.&nbsp; The nearest approach to them in Christian phrase
+is &lsquo;self-denial,&rsquo; but the sound of this word kindles
+no smile of pleasure like that kindled by the ideas of generosity
+and nobility of conduct.&nbsp; At the thought of self-denial we
+feel good, but uncomfortable, and as though on the point of
+performing some disagreeable duty which we think we ought to
+pretend to like, but which we do not like.&nbsp; At the thought
+of generosity, we feel as one who is going to share in a
+delightfully exhilarating but arduous pastime&mdash;full of the
+most pleasurable excitement.&nbsp; On the mention of the word
+generosity we feel as if we were going out hunting; at the word
+&lsquo;self-denial,&rsquo; as if we were getting ready to go to
+church.&nbsp; Generosity turns well-doing into a pleasure,
+self-denial into a duty, as of a servant under compulsion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are people who will deny this, but there are
+people who will deny anything.&nbsp; There are some who will say
+that St. Paul would not have condemned the Falstaff plays,
+<i>Twelfth Night</i>, <i>The Tempest</i>, <i>A Midsummer
+Night&rsquo;s Dream</i>, and almost everything that Shakspeare
+ever wrote; but there is no arguing against this.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Every man,&rsquo; said Dr. Johnson, &lsquo;has a right to
+his own opinion, and every one else has a right to knock him down
+for it.&rsquo;&nbsp; But even granting that generosity and high
+spirit have made some progress since the days of Christ,
+allowance must be made for the lapse of two thousand years,
+during which time it is only reasonable to suppose that an
+advance would have been made in civilisation&mdash;and hence in
+the direction of clemency and forbearance&mdash;whether
+Christianity had been preached or not, but no one can show that
+the modern English, if superior to the ancients in these
+respects, show any greater superiority than may be ascribed
+justly to centuries of established order and good
+government.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Again, as to the ideal presented by the character of
+Christ, about which so much has been written; is it one which
+would meet with all this admiration if it were presented to us
+now for the first time?&nbsp; Surely it offers but a peevish view
+of life and things in comparison with that offered by other
+highest ideals&mdash;the old Roman and Greek ideals, the Italian
+ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As with the parables so with the Sermon on the
+Mount&mdash;where it is not commonplace it is immoral, and
+<i>vice vers&acirc;</i>; the admiration which is so freely
+lavished upon the teachings of Jesus Christ turns out to be but
+of the same kind as that bestowed upon certain modern writers,
+who have made great reputations by telling people what they
+perfectly well knew; and were in no particular danger of
+forgetting.&nbsp; There is, however, this excuse for those who
+have been carried away with such musical but untruthful sentences
+as &lsquo;Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be
+comforted,&rsquo; namely, that they have not come to the subject
+with unbiassed minds.&nbsp; It is one thing to see no merit in a
+picture, and another to see no merit in a picture when one is
+told that it is by Raphael; we are few of us able to stand
+against the <i>prestige</i> of a great name; our self-love is
+alarmed lest we should be deficient in taste, or, worse still,
+lest we should be considered to be so; as if it could matter to
+any right-minded person whether the world considered him to be of
+good taste or not, in comparison with the keeping of his own soul
+truthful to itself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But if this holds good about things which are purely
+matters of taste, how much more does it do so concerning those
+who make a distinct claim upon us for moral approbation or the
+reverse?&nbsp; Such a claim is most imperatively made by the
+teaching of Jesus Christ: are we then content to answer in the
+words of others&mdash;words to which we have no title of our
+own&mdash;or shall we strip ourselves of preconceived opinion,
+and come to the question with minds that are truly candid?&nbsp;
+Whoever shrinks from this is a liar to his own self, and as such,
+the worst and most dangerous of liars.&nbsp; He is as one who
+sits in an impregnable citadel and trembles in a time of
+peace&mdash;so great a coward as not even to feel safe when he is
+in his own keeping.&nbsp; How loose of soul if he knows that his
+own keeping is worthless, how aspen-hearted if he fears lest
+others should find him out and hurt him for communing truthfully
+with himself!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That a man should lie to others if he hopes to gain
+something considerable&mdash;this is reckoned cheating, robbing,
+fraudulent dealing, or whatever it may be; but it is an
+intelligible offence in comparison with the allowing oneself to
+be deceived.&nbsp; So in like manner with being bored.&nbsp; The
+man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the
+bore.&nbsp; He who puts up with shoddy pictures, shoddy music,
+shoddy morality, shoddy society, is more despicable than he who
+is the prime agent in any of these things.&nbsp; He has less to
+gain, and probably deceives himself more; so that he commits the
+greater crime for the less reward.&nbsp; And I say emphatically
+that the morality which most men profess to hold as a Divine
+revelation was a shoddy morality, which would neither wash nor
+wear, but was woven together from a tissue of dreams and
+blunders, and steeped in blood more virulent than the blood of
+Nessus.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh! if men would but leave off lying to
+themselves!&nbsp; If they would but learn the sacredness of their
+own likes and dislikes, and exercise their moral discrimination,
+making it clear to themselves what it is that they really love
+and venerate.&nbsp; There is no such enemy to mankind as moral
+cowardice.&nbsp; A downright vulgar self-interested and
+unblushing liar is a higher being than the moral cur whose likes
+and dislikes are at the beck and call of bullies that stand
+between him and his own soul; such a creature gives up the most
+sacred of all his rights for something more unsubstantial than a
+mess of pottage&mdash;a mental serf too abject even to know that
+he is being wronged.&nbsp; Wretched emasculator of his own
+reason, whose jejune timidity and want of vitality are thus
+omnipresent in the most secret chambers of his heart!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided
+we feel that he was under strong temptation and well knew that he
+was deceiving.&nbsp; He has done wrong&mdash;still we can
+understand it, and he may yet have some useful stuff about
+him&mdash;but what can we feel towards one who for a small motive
+tells lies even to himself, and does not know that he is
+lying?&nbsp; What useless rotten fig-wood lumber must not such a
+thing be made of, and what lies will there not come out of it,
+falling in every direction upon all who come within its
+reach.&nbsp; The common self-deceiver of modern society is a more
+dangerous and contemptible object than almost any ordinary felon,
+a matter upon which those who do not deceive themselves need no
+enlightenment.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But why insist so strongly on the literal
+interpretation of one part of the sayings of Christ, and be so
+elastic about that of the passages which inculcate more than
+those ordinary precepts which all had agreed upon as early as the
+days of Solomon and probably earlier?&nbsp; We have cut down
+Christianity so as to make it appear to sanction our own
+conventions; but we have not altered our conventions so as to
+bring them into harmony with Christianity.&nbsp; We do not give
+to him that asketh; we take good care to avoid him; yet if the
+precept meant only that we should be liberal in assisting
+others&mdash;it wanted no enforcing: the probability is that it
+had been enforced too much rather than too little already; the
+more literally it has been followed the more terrible has the
+mischief been; the saying only becomes harmless when regarded as
+a mere convention.&nbsp; So with most parts of Christ&rsquo;s
+teaching.&nbsp; It is only conventional Christianity which will
+stand a man in good stead to live by; true Christianity will
+never do so.&nbsp; Men have tried it and found it fail; or,
+rather, its inevitable failure was so obvious that no age or
+country has ever been mad enough to carry it out in such a manner
+as would have satisfied its founders.&nbsp; So said Dean Swift in
+his <i>Argument against abolishing Christianity</i>.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I hope,&rsquo; he writes, &lsquo;no reader imagines me so
+weak as to stand up in defence of real Christianity, such as used
+in primitive times&rsquo; (if we may believe the authors of those
+ages) &lsquo;to have an influence upon men&rsquo;s beliefs and
+actions.&nbsp; To offer at the restoring of that would be,
+indeed, a wild project; it would be to dig up foundations, to
+destroy at one blow all the wit and half the learning of the
+kingdom, to break the entire frame and constitution of things, to
+ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the professors of
+them; in short, to turn our courts of exchange and shops into
+deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal of Horace
+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 of
+cure for the corruption of their manners.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Therefore, I think this caution was in itself
+altogether unnecessary (which I have inserted only to prevent all
+possibility of cavilling), since every candid reader will easily
+understand my discourse to be intended only in defence of nominal
+Christianity, the other having been for some time wholly laid
+aside by general consent as utterly inconsistent with our present
+schemes of wealth and power.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yet but for these schemes of wealth and power the world
+would relapse into barbarianism; it is they and not Christianity
+which have created and preserved civilisation.&nbsp; And what if
+some unhappy wretch, with a serious turn of mind and no sense of
+the ridiculous, takes all this talk about Christianity in sober
+earnest, and tries to act upon it?&nbsp; Into what misery may he
+not easily fall, and with what life-long errors may he not
+embitter the lives of his children!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Again, we do not cut off our right hand nor pluck out
+our eyes if they offend us; we conventionalise our
+interpretations of these sayings at our will and pleasure; we do
+take heed for the morrow, and should be inconceivably wicked and
+foolish were we not to do so; we do gather up riches, and indeed
+we do most things which the experience of mankind has taught us
+to be to our advantage, quite irrespectively of any precept of
+Christianity for or against.&nbsp; But why say that it is
+Christianity which is our chief guide, when the words of Christ
+point in such a very different direction from that which we have
+seen fit to take?&nbsp; Perhaps it is in order to compensate for
+our laxity of interpretation upon these points that we are so
+rigid in stickling for accuracy upon those which make no demand
+upon our comfort or convenience?&nbsp; Thus, though we
+conventionalise practice, we never conventionalise dogma.&nbsp;
+Here, indeed, we stickle for the letter most inflexibly; yet one
+would have thought that we might have had greater licence to
+modify the latter than the former.&nbsp; If we say that the
+teaching of Christ is not to be taken according to its
+import&mdash;why give it so much importance?&nbsp; Teaching by
+exaggeration is not a satisfactory method, nor one worthy of a
+being higher than man; it might have been well once, and in the
+East, but it is not well now.&nbsp; It induces more and more of
+that jarring and straining of our moral faculties, of which much
+is unavoidable in the existing complex condition of affairs, but
+of which the less the better.&nbsp; At present the tug of
+professed principles in one direction, and of necessary practice
+in the other, causes the same sort of wear and tear in our moral
+gear as is caused to a steam-engine by continually reversing it
+when it is going it at full speed.&nbsp; No mechanism can stand
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The above extracts (written when he was about twenty-three
+years old) may serve to show how utter was the subversion of his
+faith.&nbsp; His mind was indeed in darkness!&nbsp; Who could
+have hoped that so brilliant a day should have succeeded to the
+gloom of such mistrust?&nbsp; Yet as upon a winter&rsquo;s
+morning in November when the sun rises red through the smoke, and
+presently the fog spreads its curtain of thick darkness over the
+city, and then there comes a single breath of wind from some more
+generous quarter, whereupon the blessed sun shines again, and the
+gloom is gone; or, again, as when the warm south-west wind comes
+up breathing kindness from the sea, unheralded, suspected, when
+the earth is in her saddest frost, and on the instant all the
+lands are thawed and opened to the genial influences of a sweet
+springful whisper&mdash;so thawed his heart, and the seed which
+had lain dormant in its fertile soil sprang up, grew, ripened,
+and brought forth an abundant harvest.</p>
+<p>Indeed now that the result has been made plain we can perhaps
+feel that his scepticism was precisely of that nature which
+should have given the greatest ground for hope.&nbsp; He was a
+genuine lover of truth in so far as he could see it.</p>
+<p>His lights were dim, but such as they were he walked according
+to them, and hence they burnt ever more and more clearly, till in
+later life they served to show him what is vouchsafed to such men
+and to such only&mdash;the enormity of his own mistakes.&nbsp;
+Better that a man should feel the divergence between Christian
+theory and Christian practice, that he should be shocked at
+it&mdash;even to the breaking away utterly from the theory until
+he has arrived at a wider comprehension of its scope&mdash;than
+that he should be indifferent to the divergence and make no
+effort to bring his principles and practice into harmony with one
+another.&nbsp; A true lover of consistency, it was intolerable to
+him to say one thing with his lips and another with his
+actions.&nbsp; As long as this is true concerning any man, his
+friends may feel sure that the hand of the Lord is with him,
+though the signs thereof be hidden from mortal eyesight.</p>
+<h3>Chapter IV</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">During</span> the dark and unhappy time
+when he had, as it seems to me, bullied himself, or been bullied
+into infidelity, he had been utterly unable to realise the
+importance even of such a self-evident fact as that our Lord
+addressing an Eastern people would speak in such a way as Eastern
+people would best understand; it took him years to appreciate
+this.&nbsp; He could not see that modes of thought are as much
+part of a language as the grammar and words which compose it, and
+that before a passage can be said to be translated from one
+language into another it is often not the words only which must
+be rendered, but the thought itself which must be transformed; to
+a people habituated to exaggeration a saying which was not
+exaggerated would have been pointless&mdash;so weak as to arrest
+the attention of no one; in order to translate it into such words
+as should carry precisely the same meaning to colder and more
+temperate minds, the words would often have to be left out of
+sight altogether, and a new sentence or perhaps even simile or
+metaphor substituted; this is plainly out of the question, and
+therefore the best course is that which has been taken,
+<i>i.e.</i>, to render the words as accurately as possible, and
+leave the reader to modify the meaning.&nbsp; But it was years
+before my brother could be got to feel this, nor did he ever do
+so fully, simple and obvious though it must appear to most
+people, until he had learned to recognise the value of a certain
+amount of inaccuracy and inconsistency in everything which is not
+comprehended in mechanics or the exact sciences.&nbsp; &ldquo;It
+is this,&rdquo; he used to say, &ldquo;which gives artistic or
+spiritual value as contrasted with mechanical
+precision.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In inaccuracy and inconsistency, therefore (within certain
+limits), my brother saw the means whereby our minds are kept from
+regarding things as rigidly and immutably fixed which are not yet
+fully understood, and perhaps may never be so while we are in our
+present state of probation.&nbsp; Life is not one of the exact
+sciences, living is essentially an art and not a science.&nbsp;
+Every thing addressed to human minds at all must be more or less
+of a compromise; thus, to take a very old illustration, even the
+definitions of a point and a line&mdash;the fundamental things in
+the most exact of the sciences&mdash;are mere compromises.&nbsp;
+A point is supposed to have neither length, breadth, nor
+thickness&mdash;this in theory, but in practice unless a point
+have a little of all these things there is nothing there.&nbsp;
+So with a line; a line is supposed to have length, but no
+breadth, yet in practice we never saw a line which had not
+breadth.&nbsp; What inconsistency is there here, in requiring us
+to conceive something which we cannot conceive, and which can
+have no existence, before we go on to the investigation of the
+laws whereby the earth can alone be measured and the orbits of
+the planets determined.&nbsp; I do not think that this
+illustration was presented to my brother&rsquo;s mind while he
+was young, but I am sure that if it had been it would have made
+him miserable.&nbsp; He would have had no confidence in
+mathematics, and would very likely have made a furious attack
+upon Newton and Galileo, and been firmly convinced that he was
+discomfiting them.&nbsp; Indeed I cannot forget a certain look of
+bewilderment which came over his face when the idea was put
+before him, I imagine, for the first time.&nbsp; Fortunately he
+had so grown that the right inference was now in no danger of
+being missed.&nbsp; He did not conclude that because the
+evidences for mathematics were founded upon compromises and
+definitions which are inaccurate&mdash;therefore that mathematics
+were false, or that there were no mathematics, but he learnt to
+feel that there might be other things which were no less
+indisputable than mathematics, and which might also be founded on
+facts for which the evidences were not wholly free from
+inconsistencies and inaccuracies.</p>
+<p>To some he might appear to be approaching too nearly to the
+&ldquo;Sed tu vera puta&rdquo; argument of Juvenal.&nbsp; I
+greatly fear that an attempt may be made to misrepresent him as
+taking this line; that is to say, as accepting Christianity on
+the ground of the excellence of its moral teaching, and looking
+upon it as, indeed, a superstition, but salutary for women and
+young people.&nbsp; Hardly anything would have shocked him more
+profoundly.&nbsp; This doctrine with its plausible show of
+morality appeared to him to be, perhaps, the most gross of all
+immoralities, inasmuch as it cuts the ground from under the feet
+of truth, luring the world farther and farther from the only true
+salvation&mdash;the careful study of facts and of the safest
+inferences that may be drawn from them.&nbsp; Every fact was to
+him a part of nature, a thing sacred, pregnant with Divine
+teaching of some sort, as being the expression of Divine
+will.&nbsp; It was through facts that he saw God; to tamper with
+facts was, in his view, to deface the countenance of the
+Almighty.&nbsp; To say that such and such was so and so, when the
+speaker did not believe it, was to lead people to worship a false
+God instead of a true one; an
+&epsilon;&iota;&delta;&omega;&lambda;&omicron;&nu;; setting them,
+to quote the words of the Psalmist, &ldquo;a-whoring after their
+own imaginations.&rdquo;&nbsp; He saw the Divine presence in
+everything&mdash;the evil as well as the good; the evil being the
+expression of the Divine will that such and such courses should
+not go unpunished, but bring pain and misery which should deter
+others from following them, and the good being his sign of
+approbation.&nbsp; There was nothing good for man to know which
+could not be deduced from facts.&nbsp; This was the only sound
+basis of knowledge, and to found things upon fiction which could
+be made to stand upon facts was to try and build upon a
+quicksand.</p>
+<p>He, therefore, loathed the reasoning of Juvenal with all the
+intensity of his nature.&nbsp; It was because he believed that
+the Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord were just as much
+matters of actual history as the assassination of Julius
+C&aelig;sar, and that they happened precisely in the same way as
+every daily event happens at present&mdash;that he accepted the
+Christian scheme in its essentials.&nbsp; Then came the
+details.&nbsp; Were these also objectively true?&nbsp; He
+answered, &ldquo;Certainly not in every case.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
+would not for the world have had any one believe that he so
+considered them; but having made it perfectly clear that he was
+not going to deceive himself, he set himself to derive whatever
+spiritual comfort he could from them, just as he would from any
+noble fiction or work of art, which, while not professing to be
+historical, was instinct with the soul of genius.&nbsp; That
+there were unhistorical passages in the New Testament was to him
+a fact; therefore it was to be studied as an expression of the
+Divine will.&nbsp; What could be the meaning of it?&nbsp; That we
+should consider them as true?&nbsp; Assuredly not this.&nbsp;
+Then what else?&nbsp; This&mdash;that we should accept as
+subjectively true whatever we found spiritually precious, and be
+at liberty to leave all the rest alone&mdash;the unhistoric
+element having been introduced purposely for the sake of giving
+greater scope and latitude to the value of the ideal.</p>
+<p>Of course one who was so firmly persuaded of the objective
+truth of the Resurrection and Ascension could be in no sort of
+danger of relapsing into infidelity as long as his reason
+remained.&nbsp; During the years of his illness his mind was
+clearly impaired, and no longer under his own control; but while
+his senses were his own it was absolutely impossible that he
+could be shaken by discrepancies and inconsistencies in the
+gospels.&nbsp; What small and trifling things are such
+discrepancies by the side of the great central miracle of the
+Resurrection!&nbsp; Nevertheless their existence was
+indisputable, and was no less indisputably a cause of stumbling
+to many, as it had been to himself.&nbsp; His experience of his
+own sufferings as an unbeliever gave him a keener sympathy with
+those who were in that distressing condition than could be felt
+by any one who had not so suffered, and fitted him, perhaps, more
+than any one who has yet lived to be the interpreter of
+Christianity to the Rationalist, and of Rationalism to the
+Christian.&nbsp; This, accordingly, was the task to which he set
+himself, having been singularly adapted for it by Nature, and as
+singularly disciplined by events.</p>
+<p>It seemed to him that the first thing was to make the two
+parties understand one another&mdash;a thing which had never yet
+been done, but which was not at all impossible.&nbsp; For
+Protestantism is raised essentially upon a Rationalistic
+base.&nbsp; When we come to a definition of Rationalism nothing
+can be plainer than that it demands no scepticism from any one
+which an English Protestant would not approve of.&nbsp; It is
+another matter with the Church of Rome.&nbsp; That Church openly
+declares it as an axiom that religion and reason have nothing to
+do with one another, and that religion, though in flat
+contradiction to reason, should yet be accepted from the hands of
+a certain order as an act of unquestioning faith.&nbsp; The line
+of separation therefore between the Romanist and the Rationalist
+is clear, and definitely bars any possibility of arrangement
+between the two.&nbsp; Not so with the Protestant, who as
+heartily as the Rationalist admits that nothing is required to be
+believed by man except such things as can be reasonably
+proved&mdash;i.e., proved to the satisfaction of the
+reason.&nbsp; No Protestant would say that the Christian scheme
+ought to be accepted in spite of its being contrary to reason; we
+say that Christianity is to be believed because it can be shewn
+to follow as the necessary consequence of using our reason
+rightly.&nbsp; We should be shocked at being supposed to maintain
+otherwise.&nbsp; Yet this is pure Rationalism.&nbsp; The
+Rationalist would require nothing more; he demurs to Christianity
+because he maintains that if we bring our reason to bear upon the
+evidences which are brought forward in support of it, we are
+compelled to reject it; but he would accept it without hesitation
+if he believed that it could be sustained by arguments which
+ought to carry conviction to the reason.&nbsp; Thus both are
+agreed in principle that if the evidences of Christianity satisfy
+human reason, then Christianity should be received, but that on
+any other supposition it should be rejected.</p>
+<p>Here then, he said, we have a common starting-point and the
+main principle of Rationalism turns out to be nothing but what we
+all readily admit, and with which we and our fathers have been as
+familiar for centuries as with the air we breathe.&nbsp; Every
+Protestant is a Rationalist, or else he ought to be ashamed of
+himself.&nbsp; Does he want to be called an
+&ldquo;Irrationalist&rdquo;?&nbsp; Hardly&mdash;yet if he is not
+a Rationalist what else can he be?&nbsp; No: the difference
+between us is one of detail, not of principle.&nbsp; This is a
+great step gained.</p>
+<p>The next thing therefore was to make each party understand the
+view which the other took concerning the position which they had
+agreed to hold in common.&nbsp; There was no work, so far as he
+knew, which would be accepted both by Christians and unbelievers
+as containing a fair statement of the arguments of the two
+contending parties: every book which he had yet seen upon either
+side seemed written with the view of maintaining that its own
+side could hold no wrong, and the other no right: neither party
+seemed to think that they had anything to learn from the other,
+and neither that any considerable addition to their knowledge of
+the truth was either possible or desirable.&nbsp; Each was in
+possession of truth already, and all who did not see and feel
+this must be either wilfully blinded, or intensely stupid, or
+hypocrites.</p>
+<p>So long as people carried on a discussion thus, what agreement
+was possible between them?&nbsp; Yet where, upon the Christian
+side, was the attempt to grapple with the real difficulties now
+felt by unbelievers?&nbsp; Simply nowhere.&nbsp; All that had
+been done hitherto was antiquated.&nbsp; Modern Christianity
+seemed to shrink from grappling with modern Rationalism, and
+displayed a timidity which could not be accounted for except by
+the supposition of secret misgiving that certain things were
+being defended which could not be defended fairly.&nbsp; This was
+quite intolerable; a misgiving was a warning voice from God,
+which should be attended to as a man valued his soul.&nbsp; On
+the other hand, the conviction reasonably entertained by
+unbelievers that they were right on many not inconsiderable
+details of the dispute, and that so-called orthodox Christians in
+their hearts knew it but would not own it&mdash;or that if they
+did not know it, they were only in ignorance because it suited
+their purpose to be so&mdash;this conviction gave an overweening
+self-confidence to infidels, as though they must be right in the
+whole because they were so in part; they therefore blinded
+themselves to all the more fundamental arguments in support of
+Christianity, because certain shallow ones had been put forward
+in the front rank, and been far too obstinately defended.&nbsp;
+They thus regarded the question too superficially, and had erred
+even more through pride of intellect and conceit than their
+opponents through timidity.</p>
+<p>What then was to be done?&nbsp; Surely this; to explain the
+two contending parties to one another; to show to Rationalists
+that Christians are right upon Rationalistic principles in all
+the more important of their allegations; that is to say, to
+establish the Resurrection and Ascension of the Redeemer upon a
+basis which should satisfy the most imperious demands of modern
+criticism.&nbsp; This would form the first and most important
+part of the task.&nbsp; Then should follow a no less convincing
+proof that Rationalists are right in demurring to the historical
+accuracy of much which has been too obstinately defended by
+so-called orthodox writers.&nbsp; This would be the second
+part.&nbsp; Was there not reason to hope that when this was done
+the two parties might understand one another, and meet in a
+common Christianity?&nbsp; He believed that there was, and that
+the ground had been already cleared for such mutual compromise as
+might be accepted by both sides, not from policy but
+conviction.&nbsp; Therefore he began writing the book which it
+has devolved upon myself to edit, and which must now speak for
+itself.&nbsp; For him it was to suffer and to labour; almost on
+the very instant of his having done enough to express his meaning
+he was removed from all further power of usefulness.</p>
+<p>The happy change from unbelief to faith had already taken
+place some three or four years before my return from
+America.&nbsp; With it had also come that sudden development of
+intellectual and spiritual power which so greatly astonished even
+those who had known him best.&nbsp; The whole man seemed
+changed&mdash;to have become possessed of an unusually capacious
+mind, instead of one which was acute, but acute only.&nbsp; On
+looking over the earlier letters which I received from him when I
+was in America, I can hardly believe that they should have been
+written by the same person as the one to whom, in spite of not a
+few great mental defects, I afterwards owed more spiritual
+enrichment than I have owed to any other person.&nbsp; Yet so it
+was.&nbsp; It came upon me imperceptibly that I had been very
+stupid in not discovering that my brother was a genius; but
+hardly had I made the discovery, and hardly had the fragment
+which follows this memoir received its present shape, when his
+overworked brain gave way and he fell into a state little better
+than idiocy.&nbsp; His originally cheerful spirits left him, and
+were succeeded by a religious melancholy which nothing could
+disturb.&nbsp; He became incapable either of mental or physical
+exertion, and was pronounced by the best physicians to be
+suffering from some obscure disease of the brain brought on by
+excitement and undue mental tension: in this state he continued
+for about four years, and died peacefully, but still as one in
+the profoundest melancholy, on the 15th of March, 1872, aged
+40.</p>
+<p>Always hopeful that his health would one day be restored, I
+never ventured to propose that I should edit his book during his
+own life-time.&nbsp; On his death I found his papers in the most
+deplorable confusion.&nbsp; The following chapters had alone
+received anything like a presentable shape&mdash;and these
+providentially are the most essential.</p>
+<p>A dream is a dream only, yet sometimes there follows a
+fulfilment which bears a strange resemblance to the thing dreamt
+of.&nbsp; No one now believes that the Book of Revelation is to
+be taken as foretelling events which will happen in the same way
+as the massacre, for instance, of St. Bartholomew, indeed it is
+doubtful how far the whole is not to be interpreted as an
+allegory, descriptive of spiritual revolutions; yet surely my
+mother&rsquo;s dream as to the future of one, at least, of her
+sons has been strangely verified, and it is believed that the
+reader when he lays down this volume will feel that there have
+been few more potent witnesses to the truth of Christ than John
+Pickard Owen.</p>
+<h2><a name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 61</span>The
+Fair Haven</h2>
+<h3>Chapter I<br />
+Introduction</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is to be feared that there is no
+work upon the evidences of our faith, which is as satisfactory in
+its completeness and convincing power as we have a right to
+expect when we consider the paramount importance of the subject
+and the activity of our enemies.&nbsp; Otherwise why should there
+be no sign of yielding on the part of so many sincere and eminent
+men who have heard all that has been said upon the Christian side
+and are yet not convinced by it?&nbsp; We cannot think that the
+many philosophers who make no secret of their opposition to the
+Christian religion are unacquainted with the works of Butler and
+Paley&mdash;of Mansel and Liddon.&nbsp; This cannot be: they must
+be acquainted with them, and find them fail.</p>
+<p>Now, granting readily that in some minds there is a certain
+wilful and prejudiced self-blindness which no reasoning can
+overcome, and granting also that men very much preoccupied with
+any one pursuit (more especially a scientific one) will be apt to
+give but scant and divided attention to arguments upon other
+subjects such as religion or politics, nevertheless we have so
+many opponents who profess to have made a serious study of
+Christian evidences, and against whose opinion no exception can
+be fairly taken, that it seems as though we were bound either to
+admit that our demonstrations require rearrangement and
+reconsideration, or to take the Roman position, and maintain that
+revelation is no fit subject for evidence but is to be accepted
+upon authority.&nbsp; This last position will be rejected at once
+by nine-tenths of Englishmen.&nbsp; But upon rejecting it we look
+in vain for a work which shall appear to have any such success in
+arresting infidelity as attended the works of Butler and Paley in
+the last century.&nbsp; In their own day these two great men
+stemmed the current of infidelity: but no modern writers have
+succeeded in doing so, and it will scarcely be said that either
+Butler or Paley set at rest the many serious and inevitable
+questions in connection with Christianity which have arisen
+during the last fifty years.&nbsp; We could hardly expect one of
+the more intelligent students at Oxford or Cambridge to find his
+mind set once and for ever free from all rising doubt either by
+the <i>Analogy</i> or the <i>Evidences</i>.&nbsp; Suppose, for
+example, that he has been misled by the German writers of the
+T&uuml;bingen school, how will either of the above-named writers
+help him?&nbsp; On the contrary, they will do him harm, for they
+will not meet the requirements of the case, and the inference is
+too readily drawn that nothing else can do so.&nbsp; It need
+hardly be insisted upon that this inference is a most unfair one,
+but surely the blame of its being drawn rests in some measure at
+the door of those whose want of thoroughness has left people
+under the impression that no more can be said than what has been
+said already.</p>
+<p>It is the object, therefore, of this book to contribute
+towards establishing Christian evidences upon a more secure and
+self-evident base 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 of Christian evidence can tend towards so
+great a consummation.&nbsp; In spite of the narrow limits within
+which I have resolved to keep my treatment of the subject, I
+trust that I may be able to produce such an effect upon the minds
+of those who are in doubt concerning the evidences for the hope
+that is in them, that henceforward they shall never doubt
+again.&nbsp; I am not sanguine enough to suppose that I shall be
+able to induce certain eminent naturalists and philosophers to
+reopen a question which they have probably long laid aside as
+settled; unfortunately it is not in any but the very noblest
+Christian natures to do this, nevertheless, could they be
+persuaded to read these pages I believe that they would find so
+much which would be new to them, that their prejudices would be
+greatly shaken.&nbsp; To the younger band of scientific
+investigators I appeal more hopefully.</p>
+<p>It may be asked why not have undertaken the whole subject and
+devoted a life-time to writing an exhaustive work?&nbsp; The
+answer suggests itself that the believer is in no want of such a
+book, while the unbeliever would be repelled by its size.&nbsp;
+Assuredly there can be no doubt as to the value of a great work
+which should meet objections derived from certain recent
+scientific theories, and confute opponents who have arisen since
+the death of our two great apologists, but as a preliminary to
+this a smaller and more elementary book seems called for, which
+shall give the main outlines of our position with such boldness
+and effectiveness as to arrest the attention of any unbeliever
+into whose hands it may fall, and induce him to look further into
+what else may be urged upon the Christian side.&nbsp; We are
+bound to adapt our means to our ends, and shall have a better
+chance of gaining the ear of our adversaries if we can offer them
+a short and pregnant book than if we come to them with a long one
+from which whole chapters might be pruned.&nbsp; We have to bring
+the Christian religion to men who will look at no book which
+cannot be read in a railway train or in an arm-chair; it is most
+deplorable that 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 in bringing about a better state of
+things.&nbsp; And let me add that never yet was there a time when
+it so much behoved all who are impressed with the vital power of
+religion to bestir themselves; for the symptoms of a general
+indifference, not to say hostility, must be admitted to be widely
+diffused, in spite of an imposing array of facts which can be
+brought forward to the contrary; and not only this, but the
+stream of infidelity seems making more havoc yearly, as it might
+naturally be expected to do, when met by no new works of any real
+strength or permanence.</p>
+<p>Bearing in mind, therefore, the necessity for prompt action,
+it seemed best to take the most overwhelming of all
+miracles&mdash;the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
+show that it can be so substantiated that no reasonable man
+should doubt it.&nbsp; This I have therefore attempted, and I
+humbly trust that the reader will feel that I have not only
+attempted it, but done it, once and for all so clearly and
+satisfactorily and with such an unflinching examination of the
+most advanced arguments of unbelievers, that the question can
+never be raised hereafter by any candid mind, or at any rate not
+until science has been made to rest on different grounds from
+those on which she rests at present.</p>
+<p>But the truth of our Lord&rsquo;s resurrection having been
+once established, what need to encumber this book with further
+evidences of the miraculous element in his ministry?&nbsp; The
+other miracles can be no insuperable difficulty to one who
+accepts the Resurrection.&nbsp; It is true that as Christians we
+cannot dwell too minutely upon every act and incident in the life
+of the Redeemer, but unhappily we have to deal with those who are
+not Christians, and must consider rather what we can get them to
+take than what we should like to give them: &ldquo;Be ye wise as
+serpents and harmless as doves,&rdquo; saith the Saviour.&nbsp; A
+single miracle is as good as twenty, provided that it be well
+established, and can be shewn to be so: it is here that even the
+ablest of our apologists have too often failed; they have
+professed to substantiate the historical accuracy of all the
+recorded miracles and sayings of our Lord, with a result which is
+in some instances feeble and conventional, and occasionally even
+unfair (oh! what suicidal folly is there in even the remotest
+semblance of unfairness), instead of devoting themselves to
+throwing a flood of brilliancy upon the most important features
+and leaving the others to shine out in the light reflected from
+these.&nbsp; Even granting that some of the miracles recorded of
+our Lord are apocryphal, what of that?&nbsp; We do not rest upon
+them: we have enough and more than enough without them, and can
+afford to take the line of saying to the unbeliever,
+&ldquo;Disbelieve this miracle or that if you find that you
+cannot accept it, but believe in the Resurrection, of which we
+will put forward such ample proofs that no healthy reason can
+withstand them, and, having accepted the Resurrection, admit it
+as the manifestation of supernatural power, the existence of
+which can thus no longer be denied.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Does not the reader feel that there is a ring of truth and
+candour about this which must carry more weight with an opponent
+than any strained defence of such a doubtful miracle as the
+healing of the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda?&nbsp; We
+weight ourselves as against our opponents by trying to defend too
+much; no matter how sound and able the defence of one part of the
+Christian scheme may have been, its effect is often marred by
+contiguity with argument which the writer himself must have
+suspected, or even known, to be ingenious rather than sound: the
+moment that this is felt in any book its value with an opponent
+is at an end, for he must be continually in doubt whether the
+spirit which he has detected here or there may not be existing
+and at work in a hundred other places where he has not detected
+it.&nbsp; What carries weight with an antagonist is the feeling
+that his position has been mastered and his difficulties grasped
+with thoroughness and candour.</p>
+<p>On this point I am qualified to speak from long and bitter
+experience.&nbsp; I say that want of candour and the failure to
+grasp the position occupied, however untenably, by unbelievers is
+the chief cause of the continuance of unbelief.&nbsp; When this
+cause has been removed unbelief will die a natural death.&nbsp;
+For years I was myself a believer in nothing beyond the
+personality and providence of God: yet I feel (not without a
+certain sense of bitterness, which I know that I should not feel
+but cannot utterly subdue) that if my first doubts had been met
+with patient endeavour to understand their nature and if I had
+felt that the one in whom I confided had been ready to go to the
+root of the matter, and even to yield up the convictions of a
+life-time could it be shewn that they were unsafely founded, my
+doubts would have been resolved in an hour or two&rsquo;s quiet
+conversation, and would at once have had the effect, which they
+have only had after long suffering and unrest, of confirming me
+in my allegiance to Christ.&nbsp; But I was met with anger and
+impatience.&nbsp; There was an instinct which told me that my
+opponent had never heard a syllable against his own convictions,
+and was determined not to hear one: on this I assumed rashly that
+he must have good reason for his resolution; and doubt ripened
+into unbelief.&nbsp; Oh! what years of heart-burning and utter
+drifting followed.&nbsp; Yet when I was at last brought within
+the influence of one who not only believed all that my first
+opponent did, but who also knew that the more light was thrown
+upon it the more clearly would its truth be made apparent&mdash;a
+man who talked with me as though he was anxious that I should
+convince him if he were in error, not as though bent on making me
+believe whatever habit and circumstances had imposed as a formula
+upon himself&mdash;my heart softened at once, and the dry places
+of my soul were watered.</p>
+<p>The above may seem too purely personal to warrant its
+introduction here, yet the experience is one which should not be
+without its value to others.&nbsp; Its effect upon myself has
+been to give me an unutterable longing to save others from
+sufferings like my own; I know so well where it is that, to use a
+homely metaphor, the shoe pinches.&nbsp; And it is chiefly
+here&mdash;in the fact that the unbeliever does not feel as
+though we really wanted to understand him.&nbsp; This feeling is
+in many cases lamentably well founded.&nbsp; No one likes hearing
+doubt thrown upon anything which he regards as settled beyond
+dispute, and this, happily, is what most men feel concerning
+Christianity.&nbsp; Again, indolence or impotence of mind
+indisposes many to intellectual effort; others are pained by
+coming into contact with anything which derogates from the glory
+due to the great sacrifice of Christ, or to his Divine nature,
+and lastly not a few are withheld by moral cowardice from daring
+to bestow the pains upon the unbeliever which his condition
+requires.&nbsp; But from whichever of these sources the
+disinclination to understand him comes, its effect is equally
+disastrous to the unbeliever.&nbsp; People do not mind a
+difference of opinion, if they feel that the one who differs from
+them has got a firm grasp of their position; or again, if they
+feel that he is trying to understand them but fails from some
+defect either of intellect or education, even in this case they
+are not pained by opposition.&nbsp; What injures their moral
+nature and hardens their hearts is the conviction that another
+could understand them if he chose, but does not choose, and yet
+none the less condemns them.&nbsp; On this they become imbued
+with that bitterness against Christianity which is noticeable in
+so many free-thinkers.</p>
+<p>Can we greatly wonder?&nbsp; For, sad though the admission be,
+it is only justice to admit that we Christians have been too
+often contented to accept our faith without knowing its grounds,
+in which case it is more by luck than by cunning that we are
+Christians at all, and our faith will be in continual
+danger.&nbsp; The greater number even of those who have
+undertaken to defend the Christian faith have been sadly inclined
+to avoid a difficulty rather than to face it, unless it is so
+easy as to be no real difficulty at all.&nbsp; I do not say that
+this is unnatural, for the Christian writer must be deeply
+impressed with the sinfulness of unbelief, and will therefore be
+anxious to avoid raising doubts which will probably never yet
+have occurred to his reader, and might possibly never do so; nor
+does there at first sight appear to be much advantage in raising
+difficulties for the sole purpose of removing them; nevertheless
+I cannot think that if either Butler or Paley could have foreseen
+the continuance of unbelief, and the ruin of so many souls whom
+Christ died to save, they would have been contented to act so
+almost entirely upon the defensive.</p>
+<p>Yet it is impossible not to feel that we in their place should
+have done as they did.&nbsp; Infidelity was still in its infancy:
+the nature of the disease was hardly yet understood; and there
+seemed reason to fear lest it might be aggravated by the very
+means taken to cure it; it seemed safer therefore in the first
+instance to confine attention to the matter actually in debate,
+and leave it to time to suggest a more active treatment should
+the course first tried prove unsatisfactory.&nbsp; Who can be
+surprised that the earlier apologists should have felt thus in
+the presence of an enemy whose novelty made him appear more
+portentous than he can ever seem to ourselves?&nbsp; They were
+bound to venture nothing rashly; what they did they did, for
+their own age, thoroughly; we owe it to their cautious pioneering
+that we so know the weakness of our opponents and our own
+strength as to be able to do fearlessly what may well have seemed
+perilous to our forefathers: nevertheless it is easy to be wise
+after the event, and to regret that a bolder course was not taken
+at the outset.&nbsp; If Butler and Paley had fought as men eager
+for the fray, as men who smelt the battle from afar, it is
+impossible to believe that infidelity could have lasted as long
+as it has.&nbsp; What can be done now could have been done just
+as effectively then, and though we cannot be surprised at the
+caution shewn at first, we are bound to deplore it as
+short-sighted.</p>
+<p>The question, however, for ourselves is not what dead men
+might have done better long ago, but what living men and women
+can do most wisely now; and in answer to it I would say that
+there is no policy so unwise as fear in a good cause: the bold
+course is also the wise one; it consists in being on the lookout
+for objections, in finding the very best that can be found and
+stating them in their most intelligible form, in shewing what are
+the logical consequences of unbelief, and thus carrying the war
+into the enemy&rsquo;s country; in fighting with the most
+chivalrous generosity and a determination to take no advantage
+which is not according to the rules of war most strictly
+interpreted against ourselves, but within such an interpretation
+showing no quarter.&nbsp; This is the bold course and the true
+course: it will beget a confidence which can never be felt in the
+wariness, however well-intentioned, of the old defenders.</p>
+<p>Let me, therefore, beg the reader to follow me patiently while
+I do my best to put before him the main difficulties felt by
+unbelievers.&nbsp; When he is once acquainted with these he will
+run in no danger of confirming doubt through his fear in turning
+away from it in the first instance.&nbsp; How many die hardened
+unbelievers through the treatment which they have received from
+those to whom their Christianity has been a matter of
+circumstances and habit only?&nbsp; Hell is no fiction.&nbsp;
+Who, without bitter sorrow, can reflect upon the agonies even of
+a single soul as being due to the selfishness or cowardice of
+others?&nbsp; Awful thought!&nbsp; Yet it is one which is daily
+realised in the case of thousands.</p>
+<p>In the commonest justice to brethren, however sinful, each one
+of us who tries to lead them to the Saviour is bound not only to
+shew them the whole strength of our own arguments, but to make
+them see that we understand the whole strength of theirs; for men
+will not seriously listen to those whom they believe to know one
+side of a question only.&nbsp; It is this which makes the
+educated infidel so hard to deal with; he knows very well that an
+intelligent apprehension of the position held by an opponent is
+indispensable for profitable discussion; but he very rarely meets
+with this in the case of those Christians who try to argue with
+him; he therefore soon acquires a habit of avoiding the subject
+of religion, and can seldom be induced to enter upon an argument
+which he is convinced can lead to nothing.</p>
+<p>He who would cure a disease must first know what it is, and he
+who would convert an infidel must know what it is that he is to
+be converted from, as well as what he is to be led to; nothing
+can be laid hold of unless its whereabouts is known.&nbsp; It is
+deplorable that such commonplaces should be wanted; but, alas! it
+is impossible to do without them.&nbsp; People have taken a panic
+on the subject of infidelity as though it were so infectious that
+the very nurses and doctors should run away from those afflicted
+with it; but such conduct is no less absurd than cruel and
+disgraceful.&nbsp; <i>Infidelity is only infectious when it is
+not understood</i>.&nbsp; The smallest reflection should suffice
+to remind us that a faith which has satisfied the most brilliant
+and profound of human intellects for nearly two thousand years
+must have had very sure foundations, and that any digging about
+them for the purpose of demonstrating their depth and solidity,
+will result, not in their disturbance, but in its being made
+clear to every eye that they are laid upon a rock which nothing
+can shake&mdash;that they do indeed satisfy every demand of human
+reason, which suffers violence not from those who accept the
+scheme of the Christian redemption, but from those who reject
+it.</p>
+<p>This being the case, and that it is so will, I believe, appear
+with great clearness in the following pages, what need to shrink
+from the just and charitable course of understanding the nature
+of what is urged by those who differ from us?&nbsp; How can we
+hope to bring them to be of one mind in Christ Jesus with
+ourselves, unless we can resolve their difficulties and explain
+them?&nbsp; And how can we resolve their difficulties until we
+know what they are?&nbsp; Infidelity is as a reeking fever den,
+which none can enter safely without due precautions, but the
+taking these precautions is within our own power; we can all rely
+upon the blessed promises of the Saviour that he will not desert
+us in our hour of need if we will only truly seek him; there is
+more infidelity in this shrinking and fear of investigation than
+in almost any open denial of Christ; the one who refuses to
+examine the doubts felt by another, and is prevented from making
+any effort to remove them through fear lest he should come to
+share them, shews either that he has no faith in the power of
+Christianity to stand examination, or that he has no faith in the
+promises of God to guide him into all truth.&nbsp; In either case
+he is hardly less an unbeliever than those whom he condemns.</p>
+<p>Let the reader therefore understand that he will here find no
+attempt to conceal the full strength of the arguments relied on
+by unbelievers.&nbsp; This manner of substantiating the truth of
+Christianity has unhappily been tried already; it has been tried
+and has failed as it was bound to fail.&nbsp; Infidelity lives
+upon concealment.&nbsp; Shew it in broad daylight, hold it up
+before the world and make its hideousness manifest to
+all&mdash;then, and not till then, will the hours of unbelief be
+numbered.&nbsp; <i>We</i> have been the mainstay of unbelief
+through our timidity.&nbsp; Far be it from me, therefore, that I
+should help any unbeliever by concealing his case for him.&nbsp;
+This were the most cruel kindness.&nbsp; On the contrary, I shall
+insist upon all his arguments and state them, if I may say so
+without presumption, more clearly than they have ever been stated
+within the same limits.&nbsp; No one knows what they are better
+than I do.&nbsp; No one was at one time more firmly persuaded
+that they were sound.&nbsp; May it be found that no one has so
+well known how also to refute them.</p>
+<p>The reader must not therefore expect to find fictitious
+difficulties in the way of accepting Christianity set up with one
+hand in order to be knocked down again with the other: he will
+find the most powerful arguments against all that he holds most
+sacred insisted on with the same clearness as those on his own
+side; it is only by placing the two contending opinions side by
+side in their utmost development that the strength of our own can
+be made apparent.&nbsp; Those who wish to cry peace, peace, when
+there is no peace, those who would take their faith by fashion as
+the take their clothes, those who doubt the strength of their own
+cause and do not in their heart of heart believe that
+Christianity will stand investigation, those, again, who care not
+who may go to Hell provided they are comfortably sure of going to
+Heaven themselves, such persons may complain of the line which I
+am about to take.&nbsp; They on the other hand whose faith is
+such that it knows no fear of criticism, and they whose love for
+Christ leads them to regard the bringing of lost souls into his
+flock as the highest earthly happiness&mdash;such will admit
+gladly that I have been right in tearing aside the veil from
+infidelity and displaying it uncloaked by the side of faith
+itself.</p>
+<p>At the same time I am bound to confess that I never should
+have been able to see the expediency, not to say the absolute
+necessity for such a course, unless I had been myself for many
+years an unbeliever.&nbsp; It is this experience, so bitterly
+painful, that has made me feel so strongly as to the only manner
+in which others can be brought from darkness into light.&nbsp;
+The wisdom of the Almighty recognised that if man was to be saved
+it must be done by the assumption of man&rsquo;s nature on the
+part of the Deity.&nbsp; God must make himself man, or man could
+never learn the nature and attributes of God.&nbsp; Let us then
+follow the sublime example of the incarnation, and make ourselves
+as unbelievers that we may teach unbelievers to believe.&nbsp; If
+Paley and Butler had only been <i>real infidels</i> for a single
+year, instead of taking the thoughts and reasonings of their
+opponents at second-hand, what a difference should we not have
+seen in the nature of their work.&nbsp; Alas! their clear and
+powerful intellects had been trained early in the severest
+exercises; they could not be misled by any of the sophistries of
+their opponents; but, on the other hand, never having been misled
+they knew not the thread of the labyrinth as one who has been
+shut up therein.</p>
+<p>I should also warn the reader of another matter.&nbsp; He must
+not expect to find that I can maintain everything which he could
+perhaps desire to see maintained.&nbsp; I can prove, to such a
+high degree of presumption as shall amount virtually to
+demonstration, that our Lord died upon the cross, rose again from
+the dead upon the third day, and ascended into Heaven: but I
+cannot prove that none of the accounts of these events which have
+come down to us have suffered from the hand of time: on the
+contrary, I must own that the reasons which led me to conclude
+that there must be confusion in some of the accounts of the
+Resurrection continue in full force with me even now.&nbsp; I see
+no way of escaping from this conclusion: but it seems equally
+strange that the Christian should have such an indomitable
+repugnance to accept it, and that the unbeliever should conceive
+that it inflicts any damage whatever upon the Christian
+evidences.&nbsp; Perhaps the error of each confirms that of the
+other, as will appear hereafter.</p>
+<p>I have spoken hitherto as though I were writing only for men,
+but the help of good women can never be so precious as in the
+salvation of human souls; if there is one work for which women
+are better fitted than another, it is that of arresting the
+progress of unbelief.&nbsp; Can there be a nobler one?&nbsp;
+Their superior tact and quickness give them a great advantage
+over men; men will listen to them when they would turn away from
+one of their own sex; and though I am well aware that courtesy is
+no argument, yet the natural politeness shewn by a man to a woman
+will compel attention to what falls from her lips, and will thus
+perhaps be the means of bringing him into contact with Divine
+truths which would never otherwise have reached him.&nbsp; Yet
+this is a work from which too many women recoil in
+horror&mdash;they know that they can do nothing unless they are
+intimately acquainted with the opinions of those from whom they
+differ, and from such an intimacy they believe that they are
+right in shrinking.</p>
+<p>Oh, my sisters, my sisters, ye who go into the foulest dens of
+disease and vice, fearless of the pestilence and of man&rsquo;s
+brutality, ye whose whole lives bear witness to the cross of
+Christ and the efficacy of the Divine love, did one of you ever
+fear being corrupted by the vice with which you came in
+contact?&nbsp; Is there one of you who fears to examine why it is
+that even the most specious form of vice is vicious?&nbsp; You
+fear not infection here, for you know that you are on sure
+ground, and that there is no form of vice of which the
+viciousness is not clearly provable; but can you doubt that the
+foundation of your faith is sure also, and can you not see that
+your cowardice in not daring to examine the foul and
+soul-destroying den of infidelity is a stumbling-block to those
+who have not yet known their Saviour?&nbsp; Your fear is as the
+fear of children who dare not go in the dark; but alas! the
+unbeliever does not understand it thus.&nbsp; He says that your
+fear is not of the darkness but of the light, and that you dare
+not search lest you should find that which would make against
+you.&nbsp; Hideous blasphemy against the Lord!&nbsp; But is not
+the sin to be laid partly at the door of those whose cowardice
+has given occasion for it?</p>
+<p>Is there none of you who knows that as to the pure all things
+are pure, so to the true and loyal heart all things will confirm
+its faith?&nbsp; You shrink from this last trial of your
+allegiance, partly from the pain of even seeing the wounds of
+your Redeemer laid open&mdash;of even hearing the words of those
+enemies who have traduced him and crucified him afresh&mdash;but
+you lose the last and highest of the prizes, for great as is your
+faith now, be very sure that from this crowning proof of your
+devotion you would emerge with greater still.</p>
+<p>Has none of you seen a savage dog barking and tearing at the
+end of his chain as though he were longing to devour you, and yet
+if you have gone bravely up to him and bade him be still, he is
+cowed and never barks again?&nbsp; Such is the genius of
+infidelity; it loves to threaten those who retreat, yet it
+shrinks daunted back from those who meet it boldly; it is the
+lack of boldness on the part of the Christian which gives it all
+its power; when Christians are strong in the strength of their
+own cause infidels will know their impotence, but as long as
+there are cowards there will be those who prey upon cowardice,
+and as long as those who should defend the cross of Christ hide
+themselves behind battlements, so long will the enemy come up to
+the very walls of the defence and trouble them that are
+within.&nbsp; The above words must have sounded harsh and will I
+fear have given pain to many a tender heart which is conscious of
+the depth of its own love for the Redeemer, and would be shocked
+at the thought that anything had been neglected in his service,
+but has not the voice of such a heart returned answer to itself
+that what I have written is just?</p>
+<p>Again, I have been told by some that they have been aware of
+the necessity of doing their best towards putting a stop to
+infidelity, and that they have been unceasing in their prayers
+for friends or husbands or relations who know not Christ, but
+that with prayers their efforts have ended.&nbsp; Now, there can
+be no one in the whole world who has had more signal proofs of
+the efficacy of prayer than the writer of these pages, but he
+would lie if he were to say that prayer was ever answered when it
+was only another name for idleness, a cloak for the avoidance of
+obvious duty.&nbsp; God is no helper of the indolent and the
+coward; if this were so, what need to work at all?&nbsp; Why not
+sit still, and trust in prayer for everything?&nbsp; No; to the
+women who have prayed, and prayed only, the answer is ready at
+hand, that work without prayer is bad, but prayer without work
+worse.&nbsp; Let them do their own utmost in the way of sowing,
+planting, and watering, and then let them pray to God that he
+will vouchsafe them the increase; but they can no more expect the
+increase to be of God&rsquo;s free gift without the toil of
+sowing than did the blessed Apostle St. Paul.&nbsp; If God did
+not convert the heathen for Paul and Apollos in answer to their
+prayers alone, how can we expect that he will convert the infidel
+for ourselves, unless we have first followed in the footsteps of
+the Apostles?&nbsp; The sin of infidelity will rest upon us and
+our children until we have done our best to shake it off; and
+this not timidly and disingenuously as those who fear for the
+result, but with the certainty that it is the infidel and not the
+Christian who need fear investigation, if the investigation only
+goes deep enough.&nbsp; Herein has lain our error, we have feared
+to allow the unbeliever to put forth all his strength lest it
+should prove stronger than we thought it was, when in truth the
+world would only have known the sooner of its weakness; and this
+shall now at last be abundantly shewn, for, as I said above, I
+will help no infidel by concealing his case; it shall appear in
+full, and as nearly in his own words as the limits at my disposal
+will allow.&nbsp; Out of his own mouth shall he be condemned, and
+yet, I trust, not condemned alone; but converted as I myself, and
+by the same irresistible chain of purest reason; one thing only
+is wanted on the part of the reader, it is this, the desire to
+attain truth regardless of past prejudices.</p>
+<p>If an unbeliever has made up his mind that we must be wrong,
+without having heard our side, and if he presumes to neglect the
+most ordinary precaution against error&mdash;that of
+understanding the position of an opponent&mdash;I can do nothing
+with him or for him.&nbsp; No man can make another see, if the
+other persists in shutting his eyes and bandaging them: if it is
+a victory to be able to say that they cannot see the truth under
+these circumstances, the victory is with our opponents; but for
+those who can lay their hands upon their heart and say truly
+before God and man that they care nothing for the maintenance of
+their own opinions, but only that they may come to know the
+truth, for such I can do much.&nbsp; I can put the matter before
+them in so clear a light that they shall never doubt
+hereafter.</p>
+<p>Never was there a time when such an exposition was wanted so
+much as now.&nbsp; The specious plausibilities of a
+pseudo-science have led hundreds of thousands into error; the
+misapplication of geology has ensnared a host of victims, and a
+still greater misapplication of natural history seems likely to
+devour those whom the perversion of geology has spared.&nbsp; Not
+that I have a word to say against <i>true</i> science: true
+science can never be an enemy of the Bible, which is the
+text-book of the science of the salvation of human souls as
+written by the great Creator and Redeemer of the soul itself, but
+the Enemy of Mankind is never idle, and no sooner does God
+vouchsafe to us any clearer illumination of his purposes and
+manner of working, than the Evil One sets himself to consider how
+he can turn the blessing into a curse; and by the all-wise
+dispensation of Providence he is allowed so much triumph as that
+he shall sift the wise from the foolish, the faithful from the
+traitors.&nbsp; God knoweth his own.&nbsp; Still there is no
+surer mark that one is among the number of those whom he hath
+chosen than the desire to bring all to share in the gracious
+promises which he has vouchsafed to those that will take
+advantage of them; and there are few more certain signs of
+reprobation than indifference as to the existence of unbelief,
+and faint-heartedness in trying to remove it.&nbsp; It is the
+duty of all those who love Christ to lead their brethren to love
+him also; but how can they hope to succeed in this until they
+understand the grounds on which he is rejected?</p>
+<p>For there <i>are</i> grounds, insufficient ones, untenable
+ones, grounds which a little loving patience and, if I may be
+allowed the word, ingenuity, will shew to be utterly rotten; but
+as long as their rottenness is only to be asserted and not
+proved, so long will deluded people build upon them in fancied
+security.&nbsp; As yet the proof has never been made sufficiently
+clear.&nbsp; If displayed sufficiently for one age it has been
+necessary to do the work again for the next.&nbsp; As soon as the
+errors of one set of people have been made apparent, another set
+has arisen with fresh objections, or the old fallacies have
+reappeared in another shape.&nbsp; It is not too much to say that
+it has never yet been so clearly proved that Christ rose again
+from the dead, that a jury of educated Englishmen should be
+compelled to assent to it, even though they had never before
+heard of Christianity.&nbsp; This therefore it is my object to do
+once and for ever now.</p>
+<p>It is not for me to pry into the motives of the Almighty, nor
+to inquire why it is that for nearly two thousand years the
+perfection of proof should never have been duly produced, but if
+I dare hazard an opinion I should say that such proof was never
+necessary until now, but that it has lain ready to be produced at
+a moment&rsquo;s notice on the arrival of the fitting time.&nbsp;
+In the early stages of the Church the <i>viv&acirc; voce</i>
+testimony of the Apostles was still so near that its force was in
+no way spent; from those times until recently the universality of
+belief was such that proof was hardly needed; it is only for a
+hundred years or so (which in the sight of God are but as
+yesterday) that infidelity has made real progress.&nbsp; Then God
+raised his hand in wrath; revolution taught men to see the nature
+of unbelief and the world shrank back in horror; the time of fear
+passed by; unbelief has again raised itself; whereon we can see
+that other and even more fearful revolutions <a
+name="citation82"></a><a href="#footnote82"
+class="citation">[82]</a> are daily threatening.&nbsp; What
+country is safe?&nbsp; In what part of the world do not men feel
+an uneasy foreboding of the wrath which will surely come if they
+do not repent and turn unto the Lord their God?&nbsp; Go where we
+will we are conscious of that heaviness and oppression which is
+the precursor of the hurricane and the earthquake; none escape
+it: an all-pervading sense of rottenness and fearful waiting upon
+judgment is upon the hearts of all men.&nbsp; May it not be that
+this awe and silence have been ordained in order that the still
+small voice of the Lord may be the more clearly heard and
+welcomed as salvation?&nbsp; Is it not possible that the infinite
+mercy of God is determined to give mankind one last chance,
+before the day of that coming which no creature may abide?&nbsp;
+I dare not answer: yet I know well that the fire burneth within
+me, and that night and day I take no rest but am consumed until
+the work committed to me is done, that I may be clear from the
+blood of all men.</p>
+<h3><a name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+83</span>Chapter II<br />
+Strauss and the Hallucination Theory</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> has been well established by
+Paley, and indeed has seldom been denied, that within a very few
+years of Christ&rsquo;s crucifixion a large number of people
+believed that he had risen from the dead.&nbsp; They believed
+that after having suffered actual death he rose to actual life,
+as a man who could eat and drink and talk, who could be seen and
+handled.&nbsp; Some who held this were near relations of Christ,
+some had known him intimately for a considerable time before his
+crucifixion, many must have known him well by sight, but all were
+unanimous in their assertion that they had seen him alive after
+he had been dead, and in consequence of this belief they adopted
+a new mode of life, abandoning in many cases every other earthly
+consideration save that of bearing witness to what they had known
+and seen.&nbsp; I have not thought it worth while to waste time
+and space by introducing actual proof of the above.&nbsp; This
+will be found in Paley&rsquo;s opening chapters, to which the
+reader is referred.</p>
+<p>How then did this intensity of conviction come about?&nbsp;
+Differ as they might and did upon many of the questions arising
+out of the main fact which they taught, as to the fact itself
+they differed not in the least degree.&nbsp; In their own
+life-time and in that of those who could confute them their story
+gained the adherence of a very large and ever increasing
+number.&nbsp; If it could be shewn that the belief in
+Christ&rsquo;s reappearance did not arise until after the death
+of those who were said to have seen him, when actions and
+teachings might have been imputed to them which were not theirs,
+the case would then be different; but this cannot be done; there
+is nothing in history better established than that the men who
+said that they had seen Christ alive after he had been dead, were
+themselves the first to lay aside all else in order to maintain
+their assertion.&nbsp; If it could be maintained that they taught
+what they did in order to sanction laxity of morals, the case
+would again be changed.&nbsp; But this too is impossible.&nbsp;
+They taught what they did because of the intensity of their own
+conviction and from no other motive whatsoever.</p>
+<p>What then can that thing have been which made these men so
+beyond all measure and one-mindedly certain?&nbsp; Were they thus
+before the Crucifixion?&nbsp; Far otherwise.&nbsp; Yet the men
+who fled in the hour of their master&rsquo;s peril betrayed no
+signs of flinching when their own was no less imminent.&nbsp; How
+came it that the cowardice and fretfulness of the Gospels should
+be transformed into the lion-hearted steadfastness of the
+Acts?</p>
+<p>The Crucifixion had intervened.&nbsp; Yes, but surely
+something more than the Crucifixion.&nbsp; Can we believe that if
+their experience of Christ had ended with the Cross, the Apostles
+would have been in that state of mind which should compel them to
+leave all else for the sake of preaching what he had taught
+them?&nbsp; It is a hard thing for a man to change the scheme of
+his life; yet this is not a case of one man but of many, who
+became changed as if struck with an enchanter&rsquo;s wand, and
+who, though many, were as one in the vehemence with which they
+protested that their master had reappeared to them alive.&nbsp;
+Their converse with Christ did not probably last above a year or
+two, and was interrupted by frequent absence.&nbsp; If Christ had
+died once and for all upon the Cross, Christianity must have died
+with him; but it did not die; nay, it did not begin to live with
+full energy until after its founder had been crucified.&nbsp; We
+must ask again, what could that thing have been which turned
+these querulous and faint-hearted followers into the most earnest
+and successful body of propagandists which the world has ever
+seen, if it was not that which they said it was&mdash;namely,
+that Christ had reappeared to them alive after they had
+themselves known him to be dead?&nbsp; This would account for the
+change in them, but is there anything else that will?</p>
+<p>They had such ample opportunities of knowing the truth that
+the supposition of mistake is fraught with the greatest
+difficulties; they gave such guarantees of sincerity as that none
+have given greater; their unanimity is perfect; there is not the
+faintest trace of any difference of opinion amongst them as to
+the main fact of the Resurrection.&nbsp; These are things which
+never have been and never can be denied, but if they do not form
+strong <i>prim&acirc; facie</i> ground for believing in the truth
+and actuality of Christ&rsquo;s Resurrection, what is there which
+will amount to a <i>prim&acirc; facie</i> case for anything
+whatever?</p>
+<p>Nevertheless the matter does not rest here.&nbsp; While there
+exists the faintest possibility of mistake we may be sure that we
+shall deal most wisely by examining its character and
+value.&nbsp; Let us inquire therefore whether there are any
+circumstances which seem to indicate that the early Christians
+might have been mistaken, and been firmly persuaded that they had
+seen Christ alive, although in point of fact they had not really
+seen him?&nbsp; Men have been very positive and very sincere
+about things wherein we should have conceived mistake impossible,
+and yet they have been utterly mistaken.&nbsp; A strong
+predisposition, a rare coincidence, an unwonted natural
+phenomenon, a hundred other causes, may turn sound judgments
+awry, and we dare not assume forthwith that the first disciples
+of Christ were superior to influences which have misled many who
+have had better chances of withstanding them.&nbsp; Visions and
+hallucinations are not uncommon even now.&nbsp; How easily belief
+in a supernatural occurrence obtains among the peasantry of
+Italy, Ireland, Belgium, France, and Spain; and how much more
+easily would it do so among Jews in the days of Christ, when
+belief in supernatural interferences with this world&rsquo;s
+economy was, so to speak, omnipresent.&nbsp; Means of
+communication, that is to say of verification, were few, and the
+tone of men&rsquo;s minds as regards accuracy 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; few could read and fewer
+write, so that a story could seldom be confined to its original
+limits; error, therefore, had much chance and truth little as
+compared with our own times.&nbsp; What more is needed to make us
+feel how possible it was for the purest and most honest of men to
+become parents of all fallacy?</p>
+<p>Strauss believes this to have been the case.&nbsp; He supposes
+that the earliest Christians were under hallucination when they
+thought that they had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion; in
+other words, that they never saw him at all, but only thought
+that they had done so.&nbsp; He does not imagine that they
+conceived this idea at once, but that it grew up gradually in the
+course of a few years, and that those who came under its
+influence antedated it unconsciously afterwards.&nbsp; He appears
+to believe that within a few months of the Crucifixion, and in
+consequence of some unexplained combination of internal and
+external causes, some one of the Apostles came to be impressed
+with the notion that he had seen Christ alive; the impression,
+however made, was exceedingly strong, and was communicated as
+soon as might be to some other or others of the Apostles: the
+idea was welcome&mdash;as giving life to a hope which had been
+fondly cherished; each inflamed the imagination of the other,
+until the original basis of the conception slipped unconsciously
+from recollection, while the intensity of the conviction itself
+became stronger and stronger the more often the story was
+repeated.&nbsp; Strauss supposes that on seeing the firm
+conviction of two or three who had hitherto been leaders among
+them, the other Apostles took heart, and that thus the body grew
+together again perhaps within a twelve-month of the
+Crucifixion.&nbsp; According to him, the idea of the Resurrection
+having been once started, and having once taken root, the soil
+was so congenial that it grew apace; the rest of the Apostles,
+perhaps assembled together in a high state of mental enthusiasm
+and excitement, conceived that they saw Christ enter the room in
+which they were sitting and afford some manifest proof of life
+and identity; or some one else may have enlarged a less
+extraordinary story to these dimensions, so that in a short time
+it passed current everywhere (there have been instances of
+delusions quite as extraordinary gaining a foothold among men
+whose sincerity is not to be disputed), and finally they
+conceived that these appearances of their master had commenced a
+few months&mdash;and what is a few months?&mdash;earlier than
+they actually had, so that the first appearance was soon looked
+upon as having been vouchsafed within three days of the
+Crucifixion.</p>
+<p>The above is not in Strauss&rsquo;s words, but it is a careful
+<i>r&eacute;sum&eacute;</i> of what I gather to be his conception
+of the origin of the belief in the Resurrection of Christ.&nbsp;
+The belief, and the intensity of the belief, need explanation;
+the supernatural explanation, as we should ourselves readily
+admit, cannot be accepted unless all others are found wanting; he
+therefore, if I understand him rightly, puts forward the above as
+being a reasonable and natural solution of the
+difficulty&mdash;the only solution which does not fail upon
+examination, and therefore the one which should be
+accepted.&nbsp; It is founded upon the affection which the
+Apostles had borne towards their master, and their unwillingness
+to give up their hope that they had been chosen, as the favoured
+lieutenants of the promised Messiah.</p>
+<p>No man would be willing to give up such hope easily; all men
+would readily welcome its renewal; it was easy in the then
+intellectual condition of Palestine for hallucination to
+originate, and still easier for it to spread; the story touched
+the hearts of men too nearly to render its propagation
+difficult.&nbsp; Men and women like believing in the marvellous,
+for it brings the chance of good fortune nearer to their own
+doors; but how much more so when they are themselves closely
+connected with the central figure of the marvel, and when it
+appears to give a clue to the solution of that mystery which all
+would pry into if they could&mdash;our future after death?&nbsp;
+There can be no great cause for wonder that an hallucination
+which arose under such conditions as these should have gained
+ground and conquered all opposition, even though its origin may
+be traced to the brain of but a single person.</p>
+<p>He would be a bold man who should say that this was
+impossible; nevertheless it cannot be accepted.&nbsp; For, in the
+first place, we collect most certainly from the Gospel records
+that the Apostles were <i>not</i> a compact and devoted body of
+adherents at the time of the Crucifixion; yet it is hard to see
+how Strauss&rsquo;s hallucination theory can be accepted, unless
+this was the case.&nbsp; If Strauss believed the earliest
+followers of Christ to have been already immovably fixed in their
+belief that he was the Son of God&mdash;the promised Messiah, of
+whom they were themselves the especially chosen
+ministers&mdash;if he considered that they believed in their
+master as the worker of innumerable miracles which they had
+themselves witnessed; as one whom they had seen raise others from
+death to life, and whom, therefore, death could not be expected
+to control&mdash;if he held the followers of Christ to have been
+in this frame of mind at the time of the Crucifixion, it might be
+intelligible that he should suppose the strength of their faith
+to have engendered an imaginary reappearance in order to save
+them from the conclusion that their hopes had been without
+foundation; that, in point of fact, they should have accepted a
+new delusion in order to prop up an old one; but we know very
+well that Strauss does not accept this position.&nbsp; He denies
+that the Apostles had seen any miracles; independently therefore
+of the many and unmistakable traces of their having been but
+partial and wavering adherents, which have made it a matter of
+common belief among those who have studied the New Testament that
+the faith of the Apostles was unsteadfast before the Crucifixion,
+he must have other and stronger reasons for thinking that this
+was so, inasmuch as he does not look upon them as men who had
+seen our Lord raise any one from the dead, nor restore the eyes
+of the blind.</p>
+<p>According to him, they may have seen Christ exercise unusual
+power over the insane, and temporary alleviations of sickness,
+due perhaps to mental excitement, may have taken place in their
+presence and passed for miracles; he would doubt how far they had
+even seen this much, for he would insist on many passages in the
+Gospels which would point in the direction of our Lord&rsquo;s
+never having professed to work a single miracle; but even though
+he granted that they had seen certain extraordinary cases of
+healing, there is no amount of testimony which would for a moment
+satisfy him of their having seen more.&nbsp; <i>We</i> see the
+Apostles as men who before the Crucifixion had seen Lazarus
+raised from death to life after the corruption of the grave had
+begun its work, and who had seen sight given to one that had been
+born sightless; as men who had seen miracle after miracle, with
+every loophole for escape from a belief in the miraculous
+carefully excluded; who had seen their master walking upon the
+sea, and bidding the winds be still; our difficulty therefore is
+to understand the incredulity of the Apostles as displayed
+abundantly in the Gospels; but Strauss can have none such; for he
+must see them as men over whom the influence of their master had
+been purely personal, and due to nothing more than to a strength
+and beauty of character which his followers very imperfectly
+understood.&nbsp; <i>He</i> does not believe that Lazarus was
+raised at all, or that the man who had been born blind ever
+existed; he considers the fourth gospel, which alone records
+these events, to be the work of a later age, and not to be
+depended on for facts, save here and there; certainly not where
+the facts recorded are miraculous.&nbsp; He must therefore be
+even more ready than we are to admit that the faith of the
+Apostles was weak before the Crucifixion; but whether he is or
+not, we have it on the highest authority that their faith was not
+strong enough to maintain them at the very first approach of
+danger, nor to have given them any hope whatever that our Lord
+should rise again; whereas for Strauss&rsquo;s theory to hold
+good, it must already have been in a white heat of
+enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>But even granting that this was so&mdash;in the face of all
+the evidence we can reach&mdash;men so honest and sincere as the
+Apostles proved themselves to be, would have taken other ground
+than the assertion that their master had reappeared to them
+alive, unless some very extraordinary occurrences had led them to
+believe that they had indeed seen him.&nbsp; If their faith was
+glowing and intense at the time of the Crucifixion&mdash;so
+intense that they believed in Christ as much, or nearly as much,
+after the Crucifixion as before it (and unless this were so the
+hallucinations could never have arisen at all, or at any rate
+could never have been so unanimously accepted)&mdash;it would
+have been so intense as to stand in no need of a
+reappearance.&nbsp; In this case, if they had found that their
+master did not return to them, the Apostles would probably have
+accepted the position that he had, contrary to their expectation,
+been put to a violent death; they would, perhaps, have come
+sooner or later to the conclusion that he was immediately on
+death received into Heaven, and was sitting on the right hand of
+God; while some extraordinary dream might have been construed
+into a revelation of the fact with the manner of its occurrence,
+and been soon generally believed; but the idea of our
+Lord&rsquo;s return to earth in a gross material body whereon the
+wounds were still unhealed, was perhaps the last thing that would
+have suggested itself to them by way of hallucination.&nbsp; If
+their faith had been great enough, and their spirits high enough
+to have allowed hallucination to originate at all, their
+imagination would have presented them at once with a glorious
+throne, and the splendours of the highest Heaven as appearing
+through the opened firmament; it would not surely have rested
+satisfied with a man whose hands and side were wounded, and who
+could eat of a piece of broiled fish and of an honeycomb.&nbsp; A
+fabric so utterly baseless as the reappearances of our Lord (on
+the supposition of their being unhistoric) would have been built
+of gaudier materials.&nbsp; To repeat, it seems impossible that
+the Apostles should have attempted to connect their
+hallucinations circumstantially and historically with the events
+which had immediately preceded them.&nbsp; Hallucination would
+have been conscious of a hiatus and not have tried to bridge it
+over.&nbsp; It would not have developed the idea of our
+Lord&rsquo;s return to this grovelling and unworthy earth prior
+to his assumption into glory, unless those who were under its
+influence had either seen other resurrections from the
+dead&mdash;in which case there is no difficulty attaching to the
+Resurrection of our Lord himself&mdash;or been forced into
+believing it by the evidence of their own senses; this, on the
+supposition that the devotion of the first disciples was intense
+before the Crucifixion; but if, on the other hand, they were at
+that time anything but steadfast, as both <i>a priori</i> and
+<i>a posteriori</i> evidence would seem to indicate, if they were
+few and wavering, and if what little faith they had was shaken to
+its foundations and apparently at an end for ever with the death
+of Christ, it becomes indeed difficult to see how the idea of his
+return to earth alive could have ever struck even a single one of
+them, much less that hallucinations which could have had no
+origin but in the disordered brain of some one member of the
+Apostolic body, should in a short time have been accepted by all
+as by one man without a shadow of dissension, and been strong
+enough to convert them, as was said above, into the most earnest
+and successful body of propagandists that the world has ever
+seen.</p>
+<p>Truly this is not too much to say of them; and yet we are
+asked to believe that this faith, so intensely energetic, grew
+out of one which can hardly be called a faith at all, in
+consequence of day-dreams whose existence presupposes a faith
+hardly if any less intense than that which it is supposed to have
+engendered.&nbsp; Are we not warranted in asserting that a
+movement which is confined to a few wavering followers, and which
+receives any very decisive check, which scatters and demoralises
+the few who have already joined it, will be absolutely sure to
+die a speedy natural death unless something utterly strange and
+new occurs to give it a fresh impetus?&nbsp; Such a resuscitating
+influence would have been given to the Christian religion by the
+reappearance of Christ alive.&nbsp; This would meet the
+requirements of the case, for we can all feel that if we had
+already half believed in some gifted friend as a messenger from
+God, and if we had seen that friend put to death before our eyes,
+and yet found that the grave had no power over him, but that he
+could burst its bonds and show himself to us again unmistakably
+alive, we should from that moment yield ourselves absolutely his;
+but our faith would die with him unless it had been utter before
+his death.</p>
+<p>The devotion of the Apostles is explained by their belief in
+the Resurrection, but their belief in the Resurrection is not
+explained by a supposed hallucination; for their minds were not
+in that state in which alone such a delusion could establish
+itself firmly, and unless it were established firmly by the most
+apparently irrefragable evidence of many persons, it would have
+had no living energy.&nbsp; How an hallucination could occur in
+the requisite strength to the requisite number of people is
+neither explained nor explicable, except upon the supposition
+that the Apostles were in a very different frame of mind at the
+time of Christ&rsquo;s Crucifixion from that which all the
+evidence we can get would seem to indicate.&nbsp; If Strauss had
+first made this point clear we could follow him.&nbsp; But he has
+not done so.</p>
+<p>Strauss says, the conception that Christ&rsquo;s body had been
+reawakened and changed, &ldquo;a double miracle, exceeding far
+what had occurred in the case of Enoch and Elijah, could only be
+credible to one who saw in him a prophet far superior to
+them&rdquo;&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, to one who notwithstanding his
+death was persuaded that he was the Messiah: &ldquo;this
+conviction&rdquo; (that a double miracle had been performed)
+&ldquo;was the first to which the Apostles had to attain in the
+days of their humiliation after the Crucifixion.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Yes&mdash;but how were they to attain to it, being now utterly
+broken down and disillusioned?&nbsp; Strauss admits that before
+they could have come to hold what he supposes them to have held,
+they must have seen in Christ even after his Crucifixion a
+prophet far greater than either Moses or Elias; whereas in point
+of fact it is very doubtful whether they ever believed this much
+of their master even before the Crucifixion, and hardly
+questionable that after it they disbelieved in him almost
+entirely, until he shewed himself to them alive.&nbsp; Is it
+possible that from the dead embers of so weak a faith, so vast a
+conflagration should have been kindled?</p>
+<p>I submit, therefore, that independently of any direct evidence
+as to the when and where of Christ&rsquo;s reappearances, the
+fact that the Apostles before the Crucifixion were irresolute,
+and after it unspeakably resolute, affords strong ground for
+believing that they must have seen something, or come to know
+something, which to their minds was utterly overwhelming in its
+convincing power: when we find the earliest and most trustworthy
+records unanimously asserting that that something was the
+reappearance of Christ alive, we feel that such a reappearance
+was an adequate cause for the result actually produced; and when
+we think over the condition of mind which both probability and
+evidence assign to the Apostles, we also feel that no other
+circumstance would have been adequate, nor even this unless the
+proof had been such as none could reasonably escape from.</p>
+<p>Again, Strauss&rsquo;s supposition that the Apostles antedated
+their hallucinations suggests no less difficulty.&nbsp; Suppose
+that, after all, Strauss is right, and that there was no actual
+reappearance; whatever it was that led the Apostles to believe in
+such reappearance must have been, judging by its effect, intense
+and memorable: it must have been as a shock obliterating
+everything save the memory of itself and the things connected
+with it: the time and manner of such a shock could never have
+been forgotten, nor misplaced without deliberate intention to
+deceive, and no one will impute any such intention to the
+Apostles.</p>
+<p>It may be said that if they were capable of believing in the
+reality of their visions they would be also capable of antedating
+them; this is true; but the double supposition of self-delusion,
+first in seeing the visions at all, and then in unconsciously
+antedating them, reduces the Apostles to such an exceedingly low
+level of intelligence and trustworthiness, that no good and
+permanent work could come from such persons; the men who could be
+weak enough, and crazed enough, if the reader will pardon the
+expression, to do as Strauss suggests, could never have carried
+their work through in the way they did.&nbsp; Such men would have
+wrecked their undertaking a hundred times over in the perils
+which awaited it upon every side; they would have become victims
+of their own fancies and desires, with little or no other grounds
+than these for any opinions they might hold or teach: from such a
+condition of mind they must have gone on to one still worse; and
+their tenets would have perished with them, if not sooner.</p>
+<p>Again, as regards this antedating; unless the visions happened
+at once, it is inconceivable that they should have happened at
+all.&nbsp; Strauss believes that the disciples fled in their
+first terror to their homes: that when there, &ldquo;outside the
+range to which the power of the enemies and murderers of their
+master extended, the spell of terror and consternation which had
+been laid upon their minds gave way,&rdquo; and that under the
+circumstances a reaction up to the point at which they might have
+visions of Christ is capable of explanation.&nbsp; The answer to
+this is that it is indeed likely that the spell of terror would
+give way when they found themselves safe at home, but that it is
+not at all likely that any reaction would take place in favour of
+one to whom their allegiance had never been thorough, and whom
+they supposed to have met with a violent and accursed end.&nbsp;
+It might be easy to imagine such a reaction if we did not also
+attempt to imagine the circumstances that must have preceded it;
+the moment we try to do this, we find it to be an
+impossibility.&nbsp; If once the Apostles had been dispersed, and
+had returned home to their former avocations without having seen
+or heard anything of their master&rsquo;s return to earth, all
+their expectations would have been ended; they would have
+remained peaceable fishermen for the rest of their lives, and
+been cured once and for ever of their enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>Can we believe that the disciples, returning to Galilee in
+fear, and bereaved of that master mind which had kept them from
+falling out with one another, would have remained a united and
+enthusiastic body?&nbsp; Strauss admits that their enthusiasm was
+for the time ended.&nbsp; Is it then likely that they would have
+remained in any sense united, or is it not much more likely that
+they would have shunned each other and disliked allusions to the
+past?&nbsp; What but Christ&rsquo;s actual reappearance could
+rekindle this dead enthusiasm, and fan it to such a burning
+heat?&nbsp; Suppose that one or two disciples recovered faith and
+courage, the majority would never do so.&nbsp; If Christ himself
+with the magic of his presence could not weld them into a devoted
+and harmonious company, would the rumour arising at a later time
+that some one had seen him after death, be acceptable enough to
+make the others believe that they too had actually seen and
+handled him?&nbsp; Perhaps&mdash;if the rumour was
+believed.&nbsp; But <i>would</i> it have been believed?&nbsp; Or
+at any rate have been believed so utterly?</p>
+<p>We cannot think it.&nbsp; For the belief and assertion are
+absolutely without trace of dissent within the Christian body,
+and that body was in the first instance composed entirely of the
+very persons who had known and followed Christ before the
+Crucifixion.&nbsp; If some of the original twelve had remained
+aloof and disputed the reappearances of Christ, is it possible
+that no trace of such dissension should appear in the Epistles of
+St. Paul?&nbsp; Paul differed widely enough from those who were
+Apostles before him, and his language concerning them is
+occasionally that of ill-concealed contempt and hatred rather
+than of affection; but is there a word or hint which would seem
+to indicate that a single one of those who had the best means of
+knowing doubted the Resurrection?&nbsp; There is nothing of the
+kind; on the contrary, whatever we find is such as to make us
+feel perfectly sure that none of them <i>did</i> doubt it.&nbsp;
+Is it then possible that this unanimity should have sprung from
+the original hallucinations of a small minority?&nbsp;
+True&mdash;it is plain from the Epistle to the Corinthians that
+there were some of Paul&rsquo;s contemporaries who denied the
+Resurrection.&nbsp; But who were they?&nbsp; We should expect
+that many among the more educated Gentile converts would throw
+doubt upon so stupendous a miracle, but is there anything which
+would point in the direction of these doubts having been held
+within the original body of those who said that they had seen
+Christ alive?&nbsp; By the eleven, or by the five hundred who saw
+him at once?&nbsp; There is not one single syllable.&nbsp; Those
+who heard the story second-hand would doubtless some of them
+attempt to explain away its miraculous character, but if it had
+been founded on hallucination it is not from these alone that the
+doubts would have come.</p>
+<p>Something is imperatively demanded in order to account for the
+intensity of conviction manifested by the earliest Christians
+shortly after the Crucifixion; for until that time they were far
+from being firmly convinced, and the Crucifixion was the very
+last thing to have convinced them.&nbsp; Given (to speak of our
+Lord as he must probably appear to Strauss) an unusually gifted
+teacher of a noble and beautiful character: given also, a small
+body of adherents who were inclined to adopt him as their master
+and to regard him as the coming liberator, but who were
+nevertheless far from settled in their conviction: given such a
+man and such followers: the teacher is put to a shameful death
+about two years after they had first known him, and the followers
+forsake him instantly: surely without his reappearing in some way
+upon the scene they would have concluded that their doubts had
+been right and their hopes without foundation: but if he
+reappeared, their faith would, for the first time, become
+intense, all-absorbing.&nbsp; Surely also they might be trusted
+to know whether they had really seen their master return to them
+or not, and not to sacrifice themselves in every way, and spend
+their whole lives in bearing testimony to pure hallucination?</p>
+<p>There is one other point on which a few words will be
+necessary, before we proceed to the arguments in favour of the
+objective character of Christ&rsquo;s Resurrection as derivable
+from the conversion and testimony of St. Paul.&nbsp; It is
+this.&nbsp; Strauss and those who agree with him will perhaps
+maintain that the Apostles were in truth wholly devoted to Christ
+before the Crucifixion, but that the Evangelists have represented
+them as being only half-hearted, in order to heighten the effect
+of their subsequent intense devotion.&nbsp; But this looks like
+falling into the very error which Rationalists condemn most
+loudly when it comes from so-called orthodox writers.&nbsp; They
+complain, and with too much justice, that our apologists have
+made &ldquo;anything out of anything.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet if the
+Apostles were not unsteadfast, and did not desert their master in
+his hour of peril, and if all the accounts of Christ&rsquo;s
+reappearances are the creations of disordered fancy, we may as
+well at once declare the Evangelists to be worthless as
+historians, and had better give up all attempt at the
+construction of history with their assistance.&nbsp; We cannot
+take whatever we wish, and leave whatever we wish, and alter
+whatever we wish.&nbsp; If we admit that upon the whole the
+Gospel writings or at any rate the first three Gospels, contain a
+considerable amount of historic matter, we should also arrive at
+some general principles by which we will consistently abide in
+separating the historic from the unhistoric.&nbsp; We cannot deal
+with them arbitrarily, accepting whatever fits in with our
+fancies, and rejecting whatever is at variance with them.</p>
+<p>Now can it be maintained that the Evangelists would be so
+likely to overrate the half-heartedness of the Apostles, that we
+should look with suspicion upon the many and very plain
+indications of their having been only half-hearted?&nbsp;
+Certainly not.&nbsp; If there was any likelihood of a tendency
+one way or the other it would be in the direction of overrating
+their faith.&nbsp; Would not the unbelief of the Apostles in the
+face of all the recorded miracles be a most damaging thing in the
+eyes of the unconverted?&nbsp; Would not the Apostles themselves,
+after they were once firmly convinced, be inclined to think that
+they had from the first believed more firmly than they really had
+done?&nbsp; This at least would be in accordance with the natural
+promptings of human instinct: we are all of us apt to be wise
+after the event, and are far more prone to dwell upon things
+which seem to give some colour to a pretence of prescience, than
+upon those which force from us a confession of our own
+stupidity.&nbsp; It might seem a damaging thing that the Apostles
+should have doubted as much as long as they clearly did; would
+then the Evangelists go out of their way to introduce more signs
+of hesitation?&nbsp; Would any one suggest that the signs of
+doubt and wavering had been overrated, unless there were some
+theory or other to be supported, in order to account for which
+this overrating was necessary?&nbsp; Would the opinion that the
+want of faith had been exaggerated arise prior to the formation
+of a theory, or subsequently?&nbsp; This is the fairest test; let
+the reader apply it for himself.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, there are many reasons which should incline
+us to believe that, before the Resurrection, the Apostles were
+less convinced than is generally supposed, but it would be
+dangerous to depart either to the right hand or to the left of
+that which we find actually recorded, namely, that in the main
+the Apostles were prepared to accept Christ before the
+Crucifixion, but that they were by no means resolute and devoted
+followers.&nbsp; I submit that this is a fair rendering of the
+spirit of what we find in the Gospels.&nbsp; It is just because
+Strauss has chosen to depart from it that he has found himself
+involved in the maze of self-contradiction through which we have
+been trying to follow him.&nbsp; There is no position so absurd
+that it cannot be easily made to look plausible, if the strictly
+scientific method of investigation is once departed from.</p>
+<p>But if I had been in Strauss&rsquo;s place, and had wished to
+make out a case against Christianity without much heed of facts,
+I should not have done it by a theory of hallucinations.&nbsp; A
+much prettier, more novel and more sensational opening for such
+an attempt is afforded by an attack upon the Crucifixion
+itself.&nbsp; A very neat theory might be made, that there may
+have been some disturbance at one of the Jewish passovers, during
+which some persons were crucified as an example by the 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 he
+had been absent during the tumult, little by little worked
+themselves up into the belief that on his reappearance they had
+seen wounds upon him, and that the details of the Crucifixion
+were afterwards revealed in a vision to some favoured believer,
+until in the course of a few years the narrative assumed its
+present shape: that then the reappearance of Christ was denied
+among the Jews, while the Crucifixion as attaching disgrace to
+him was not disputed, and that it thus became so generally
+accepted as to find its way into Pliny and Josephus.&nbsp; This
+tissue of absurdity may serve as an example of what the
+unlicensed indulgence of theory might lead to; but truly it would
+be found quite as easy of belief as that the early Christian
+faith in the Resurrection was due to hallucination only.</p>
+<p>Considering, then, that Christianity was not crushed but
+overran the most civilised portions of the world; that St. Paul
+was undoubtedly early told, in such a manner as for him to be
+thoroughly convinced of the fact, that on some few but sufficient
+occasions Christ was seen alive after he had been crucified; that
+the general belief in the reappearance of our Lord was so strong
+that those who had the best means of judging gave up all else to
+preach it, with a unanimity and singleness of purpose which is
+irreconcilable with hallucination; that all our records most
+definitely insist upon this belief and that there is no trace of
+its ever having been disputed among the Jewish Christians, it
+seems hard to see how we can escape from admitting that Jesus
+Christ was crucified, dead, and buried, and yet that he was
+verily and indeed seen alive again by those who expected nothing
+less, but who, being once convinced, turned the whole world after
+them.</p>
+<p>It is now incumbent upon us to examine the testimony of St.
+Paul, to which I would propose to devote a separate chapter.</p>
+<h3><a name="page105"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+105</span>Chapter III<br />
+The Character and Conversion of St. Paul</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">Setting</span> aside for the present the
+story of St. Paul&rsquo;s conversion as given in the Acts of the
+Apostles&mdash;for I am bound to admit that there are
+circumstances in connection with that account which throw doubt
+upon its historical accuracy&mdash;and looking at the broad facts
+only, we are struck at once with the following obvious
+reflection, namely, that Paul was an able man, a cultivated man,
+and a bitter opponent of Christianity; but that in spite of the
+strength of his original prejudices, he came to see what he
+thought convincing reasons for going over to the camp of his
+enemies.&nbsp; He went over, and with the result we are all
+familiar.</p>
+<p>Now even supposing that the miraculous account of Paul&rsquo;s
+conversion is entirely devoid of foundation, or again, as I
+believe myself, that the story given in the Acts is not correctly
+placed, but refers to the vision alluded to by Paul himself (I.
+Cor. xv.), and to events which happened, not coincidently with
+his conversion, but some years after it&mdash;does not the
+importance of the conversion itself rather gain than lose in
+consequence?&nbsp; A charge of unimportant inaccuracy may be thus
+sustained against one who wrote in a most inaccurate age; but
+what is this in comparison with the testimony borne to the
+strength of the Christian evidences by the supposition that <i>of
+their own weight alone</i>, <i>and without miraculous
+assistance</i>, <i>they succeeded in convincing the most
+bitter</i>, <i>and at the same time the ablest</i>, <i>of their
+opponents</i>?&nbsp; This is very pregnant.&nbsp; No man likes to
+abandon the side which he has once taken.&nbsp; The spectacle of
+a man committing himself deeply to his original party, changing
+without rhyme or reason, and then remaining for the rest of his
+life the most devoted and courageous adherent of all that he had
+opposed, without a single human inducement to make him do so, is
+one which has never been witnessed since man was man.&nbsp; When
+men who have been committed deeply and spontaneously to one
+cause, leave it for another, they do so either because facts have
+come to their knowledge which are new to them and which they
+cannot resist, or because their temporal interests urge them, or
+from caprice: but if they change from caprice in important
+matters and after many pledges given, they will change from
+caprice again: they will not remain for twenty-five or thirty
+years without changing a jot of their capriciously formed
+opinions.&nbsp; We are therefore warranted in assuming that St.
+Paul&rsquo;s conversion to Christianity was not dictated by
+caprice: it was not dictated by self-interest: it must therefore
+have sprung from the weight of certain new facts which overbore
+all the resistance which he could make to them.</p>
+<p>What then could these facts have been?</p>
+<p>Paul&rsquo;s conduct as a Jew was logical and consistent: he
+did what any seriously-minded man who had been strictly brought
+up would have done in his situation.&nbsp; Instead of half
+believing what he had been taught, he believed it wholly.&nbsp;
+Christianity was cutting at the root of what was in his day
+accepted as fundamental: it was therefore perfectly natural that
+he should set himself to attack it.&nbsp; There is nothing
+against him in this beyond the fact of his having done it, as far
+as we can see, with much cruelty.&nbsp; Yet though cruel, he was
+cruel from the best of motives&mdash;the stamping out of an error
+which was harmful to the service of God; and cruelty was not then
+what it is now: the age was not sensitive and the lot of all was
+harder.&nbsp; From the first he proved himself to be a man of
+great strength of character, and like many such, deeply convinced
+of the soundness of his opinions, and deeply impressed with the
+belief that nothing could be good which did not also commend
+itself as good to him.&nbsp; He tested the truth of his earlier
+convictions not by external standards, but by the internal
+standard of their own strength and purity&mdash;a fearful error
+which but for God&rsquo;s mercy towards him would have made him
+no less wicked than well-intentioned.</p>
+<p>Even after having been convinced by a weight of evidence which
+no prejudice could resist, and after thus attaining to a higher
+conception of right and truth and goodness than was possible to
+him as a Jew, there remained not a few traces of the old
+character.&nbsp; Opposition beyond certain limits was a thing
+which to the end of his life he could not brook.&nbsp; It is not
+too much to say that he regarded the other Apostles&mdash;and was
+regarded by them&mdash;with suspicion and dislike; even if an
+angel from Heaven had preached any other doctrine than what Paul
+preached, the angel was to be accursed (Gal. i., 8), and it is
+not probable that he regarded his fellow Apostles as teaching the
+same doctrine as himself, or that he would have allowed them
+greater licence than an angel.&nbsp; It is plain from his
+undoubted Epistles to the Corinthians and Galatians that the
+other Apostles, no less than his converts, exceedingly well knew
+that he was not a man to be trifled with.&nbsp; If the arm of the
+law had been as much on his side after his conversion as before
+it, it would have gone hardly with dissenters; they would have
+been treated with politic tenderness the moment that they
+yielded, but woe betide them if they presumed on having any very
+decided opinions of their own.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, his sagacity is beyond dispute; it is
+certain that his perception of what the Gentile converts could
+and could not bear was the main proximate cause of the spread of
+Christianity.&nbsp; He prevented it from becoming a mere Jewish
+sect, and it has been well said that but for him the Jews would
+now be Christians, and the Gentiles unbelievers.&nbsp; Who can
+doubt his tact and forbearance, where matters not essential were
+concerned?&nbsp; His strength in not yielding a fraction upon
+vital points was matched only by his suppleness and conciliatory
+bearing upon all others.&nbsp; To use his own words, he did
+indeed become &ldquo;all things to all men&rdquo; if by any means
+he could gain some, and the probability is that he pushed this
+principle to its extreme (see Acts xxi., 20&ndash;26).</p>
+<p>Now when we see a man so strong and yet so yielding&mdash;the
+writer moreover of letters which shew an intellect at once very
+vigorous and very subtle (not to say more of them), and when we
+know that there was no amount of hardship, pain, and indignity,
+which he did not bear and count as gain in the service of Jesus
+Christ; when we also remember that he continued thus for all the
+known years of his life after his conversion, can we think that
+that conversion could have been the result of anything even
+approaching to caprice?&nbsp; Or again, is it likely that it
+could have been due to contact with the hallucinations of his
+despised and hated enemies?&nbsp; Paul the Christian appears to
+be the same sort of man in most respects as Paul the Jew, yet can
+we imagine Paul the Christian as being converted from
+Christianity to some other creed, by the infection of
+hallucinations?&nbsp; On the contrary, no man would more quickly
+have come to the bottom of them, and assigned them to diabolical
+agency.&nbsp; What then can that thing have been, which wrenched
+the strong and able man from all that had the greatest hold upon
+him, and fixed him for the rest of his life as the most
+self-sacrificing champion of Christianity?&nbsp; In answer to
+this question we might say, that it is of no great importance how
+the change was made, inasmuch as the fact of its having been made
+at all is sufficiently pregnant.&nbsp; Nevertheless it will be
+interesting to follow Strauss in his remarks upon the account
+given in the Acts, and I am bound to add that I think he has made
+out his case.&nbsp; Strange! that he should have failed to see
+that the evidences in support of the Resurrection are
+incalculably strengthened by his having done so.&nbsp; How
+short-sighted is mere ingenuity!&nbsp; And how weak and cowardly
+are they who shut their eyes to facts because they happen to come
+from an opponent!</p>
+<p>Strauss, however, writes as follows:&mdash;&ldquo;That we are
+not bound to the individual features of the account in the Acts
+is shewn by comparing it with the substance of the statement
+twice repeated in the language of Paul himself: for there we find
+that the author&rsquo;s own account is not accurate, and that he
+attributed no importance to a few variations more or less.&nbsp;
+Not only is it said on one occasion that the attendants stood
+dumb-foundered: on another that they fell with Paul to the
+ground; on one occasion that they heard the voice but saw no one;
+on another that they saw the light but did not hear the voice of
+him who spoke with Paul: but also the speech of Jesus himself, in
+the third repetition, gets the well known addition about
+&ldquo;kicking against the pricks,&rdquo; to say nothing of the
+fact that the appointment to the Apostleship of the Gentiles,
+which according to the two earlier accounts was made partly by
+Ananias, partly on the occasion of a subsequent vision in the
+Temple at Jerusalem, is in this last account incorporated in the
+speech of Jesus.&nbsp; There is no occasion to derive the three
+accounts of this occurrence in the Acts from different sources,
+and even in this case one must suppose that the author of the
+Acts must have remarked and reconciled the discrepancies; that he
+did not do so, or rather that without following his own earlier
+narrative he repeated it in an arbitrary form, proves to us how
+careless the New Testament writers are about details of this
+kind, important as they are to one who strives after strict
+historical accuracy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 the history from the narrative of an eye
+witness.&nbsp; Even if we consider the person who in different
+places comprehends himself and the Apostle Paul under the word
+&lsquo;we&rsquo; or &lsquo;us&rsquo; to have been the composer of
+the whole work, that person was not on the occasion of the
+occurrence before Damascus as yet in the company of the
+Apostle.&nbsp; Into this he did not enter until much later, in
+the Troad, on the Apostle&rsquo;s second missionary journey (Acts
+xvi., 10).&nbsp; But that hypothesis with regard to the author of
+the Acts of the Apostles is, moreover, as we have seen above,
+erroneous.&nbsp; He only worked up into different passages of his
+composition the memoranda of a temporary companion of the Apostle
+about the journeys performed in his company, and we are therefore
+not justified in considering the narrator to have been an eye
+witness in those passages and sections in which the
+&lsquo;we&rsquo; is wanting.&nbsp; Now among these is found the
+very section in which appear the two accounts of his conversion
+which Paul gives, first, to the Jewish people in Jerusalem,
+secondly, to Agrippa and Festus in C&aelig;sarea.&nbsp; The last
+occasion on which the &lsquo;we&rsquo; was found was xxi., 18,
+that of the visit of Paul to James, and it does not appear again
+until xxvii., 1, when the subject is the Apostle&rsquo;s
+embarkation for Italy.&nbsp; Nothing therefore compels us to
+assume that we have in the reports of these speeches the account
+of any one who had been a party to the hearing of them, and, in
+them, Paul&rsquo;s own narrative of the occurrences that took
+place on his conversion.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures having
+been long given up by all who have considered the awful
+consequences which it entails, the Bible records have been opened
+to modern criticism:&mdash;the result has been that their general
+accuracy is amply proved, while at the same time the writers must
+be admitted to have fallen in with the feelings and customs of
+their own times, and must accordingly be allowed to have been
+occasionally guilty of what would in our own age be called
+inaccuracies.&nbsp; There is no dependence to be placed on the
+verbal, or indeed the substantial, accuracy of any ancient
+speeches, except those which we know to have been reported
+<i>verbatim</i>, they were (as with the Herodotean and
+Thucydidean speeches) in most cases the invention of the
+historian himself, as being what seemed most appropriate to be
+said by one in the position of the speaker.&nbsp; Reporting was a
+rare art among the ancients, and was confined to a few great
+centres of intellectual activity; accuracy, moreover, was not
+held to be of the same importance as at the present day.&nbsp;
+Yet without accurate reporting a speech perishes as soon as it is
+uttered, except in so far as it lives in the actions of those who
+hear it.&nbsp; Even a hundred years ago the invention of speeches
+was considered a matter of course, as in the well-known case of
+Dr. Johnson, than whom none could be more conscientious,
+and&mdash;according to his lights&mdash;accurate.&nbsp; I may
+perhaps be pardoned for quoting the passage in full from Boswell,
+who gives it on the authority of Mr. John Nichols; the italics
+are mine.&nbsp; &ldquo;He said that the Parliamentary debates
+were the only part of his writings which then gave him any
+compunction: <i>but that at the time he wrote them he had no
+conception that he was imposing upon the world</i>, <i>though
+they were frequently written from very slender materials</i>,
+<i>and often from none at all&mdash;the mere coinage of his own
+imagination</i>.&nbsp; He never wrote any part of his works with
+equal velocity.&rdquo;&nbsp; (Boswell&rsquo;s <i>Life of
+Johnson</i>, chap. lxxxii.)</p>
+<p>This is an extreme case, yet there can be no question about
+its truth.&nbsp; It is only one among the very many examples
+which could be adduced in order to shew that the appreciation of
+the value of accuracy is a thing of modern date only&mdash;a
+thing which we owe mainly to the chemical and mechanical
+sciences, wherein the inestimable difference between precision
+and inaccuracy became most speedily apparent.&nbsp; If the reader
+will pardon an apparent digression, I would remark that that sort
+of care is wanted on behalf of Christianity with which a cashier
+in a bank counts out the money that he tenders&mdash;counting it
+and recounting it as though he could never be sure enough before
+he allowed it to leave his hands.&nbsp; This caution would have
+saved the wasting of many lives, and the breaking of many
+hearts.</p>
+<p>We, on the other hand, however reckless we may be ourselves,
+are in the habit of assuming that any historian whom we may have
+occasion to consult, and on whose testimony we would fain rely,
+must have himself weighed and re-weighed his words as the cashier
+his money; an error which arises from want of that sympathy which
+should make us bear constantly in mind what lights men had, under
+what influences they wrote, and what we should ourselves have
+done had we been so placed as they.&nbsp; But if any will
+maintain that though the general run of ancient speeches were, as
+those supposed to have been reported by Johnson, pure invention,
+yet that it is not likely that one reporting the words of
+Almighty God should have failed to feel the awful responsibility
+of his position, we can only answer that the writer of the Acts
+did most indisputably so fail, as is shewn by the various reports
+of those words which he has himself given: if he could in the
+innocency of his heart do this, and at one time report the
+Almighty as saying this, and at another that, as though, more or
+less, this or that were a matter of no moment, what certainty can
+we have concerning such a man that inaccuracy shall not elsewhere
+be found in him?&nbsp; None.&nbsp; He is a warped mirror which
+will distort every object that it reflects.</p>
+<p>It follows, then, that from the Acts of the Apostles we have
+no data for arriving at any conclusion as to the manner of
+Paul&rsquo;s change of faith, nor the circumstances connected
+with it.&nbsp; To us the accounts there given should be simply
+non-existent; but this is not easy, for we have heard them too
+often and from too early an age to be able to escape their
+influence; yet we must assuredly ignore them if we are anxious to
+arrive at truth.&nbsp; We cannot let the story told in the Acts
+enter into any judgement which we may form concerning
+Paul&rsquo;s character.&nbsp; The desire to represent him as
+having been converted by miracle was very natural.&nbsp; He
+himself tells us that he saw visions, and received his
+apostleship by revelation&mdash;not necessarily at the time of,
+or immediately after, his conversion, but still at some period or
+other in his life; it would be the most natural thing in the
+world for the writer of the Acts to connect some version of one
+of these visions with the conversion itself: the dramatic effect
+would be heightened by making the change, while the change itself
+would be utterly unimportant in the eyes of such a writer; be
+this however as it may, we are only now concerned with the fact
+that we know nothing about Paul&rsquo;s conversion from the Acts
+of the Apostles, which should make us believe that that
+conversion was wrought in him by any other means, than by such an
+irresistible pressure of evidence as no sane person could
+withstand.</p>
+<p>From the Apostle&rsquo;s own writings we can glean nothing
+about his conversion which would point in the direction of its
+having been sudden or miraculous.&nbsp; It is true that in the
+Epistle to the Galatians he says, &ldquo;After it had pleased God
+to reveal his Son in me,&rdquo; but this expression does not
+preclude the supposition that his conversion may have been led up
+to by a gradual process, the culmination of which (if that) he
+alone regarded as miraculous.&nbsp; Thus we are forced to admit
+that we know nothing from any source concerning the manner and
+circumstances of St. Paul&rsquo;s change from Judaism to
+Christianity, and we can only conclude therefore that he changed
+because he found the weight of the evidence to be greater than he
+could resist.&nbsp; And this, as we have seen, is an exceedingly
+telling fact.&nbsp; The probability is, that coming much into
+contact with Christians through his persecution of them, and
+submitting them to the severest questioning, he found that they
+were in all respects sober plainspoken men, that their conviction
+was intense, their story coherent, and the doctrines which they
+had received simple and ennobling; that these results of many
+inquisitions were so unvarying that he found conviction stealing
+gradually upon him against his will; common honesty compelled him
+to inquire further; the answers pointed invariably in one
+direction only; until at length he found himself utterly unable
+to resist the weight of evidence which he had collected, and
+resolved, perhaps at the last suddenly, to yield himself a
+convert to Christianity.</p>
+<p>Strauss says that, &ldquo;in the presence of the believers in
+Jesus,&rdquo; the conviction that he was a false teacher&mdash;an
+impostor&mdash;&ldquo;must have become every day more doubtful to
+him.&nbsp; They considered it not only publicly honourable to be
+as convinced of his Resurrection as they were of their own
+life&mdash;but they shewed also a state of mind, a quiet peace, a
+tranquil cheerfulness, even under suffering, which put to shame
+the restless and joyless zeal of their persecutor.&nbsp; Could
+<i>he</i> have been a false teacher who had adherents such as
+these?&nbsp; Could that have been a false pretence which gave
+such rest and security? on the one hand, he saw the new sect, in
+spite of all persecutions, nay, in consequence of them, extending
+their influence wider and wider round them; on the other, as
+their persecutor, he felt that inward tranquillity growing less
+and less which he could observe in so many ways in the
+persecuted.&nbsp; We cannot therefore be surprised if in hours of
+inward despondency and unhappiness he put to himself the
+question, &lsquo;Who after all is right, thou, or the crucified
+Galilean about whom these men are so enthusiastic?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And when he had got as far as this, the result, with his bodily
+and mental characteristics, naturally followed in an ecstasy in
+which the very same Christ whom up to this time he had so
+passionately persecuted, appeared to him in all the glory of
+which his adherents spoke so much, shewed him the perversity and
+folly of his conduct, and called him to come over to his
+service.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The above comes simply to this, that Paul in his constant
+contact with Christians found that they had more to say for
+themselves than he could answer, and should, one would have
+thought, have suggested to Strauss what he supposes to have
+occurred to Paul, namely, that it was not likely that these men
+had made a mistake in thinking that they had seen Christ alive
+after his Crucifixion.&nbsp; There can be no doubt about
+Strauss&rsquo;s being right as to the Christian intensity of
+conviction, strenuousness of assertion, and readiness to suffer
+for the sake of their faith in Christ; and these are the main
+points with which we are concerned.&nbsp; We arrive therefore at
+the conclusion that the first Christians were sufficiently
+unanimous, coherent and undaunted to convince the foremost of
+their enemies.&nbsp; They were not so <i>before</i> the
+Crucifixion; they could not certainly have been made so by the
+Crucifixion alone; something beyond the Crucifixion must have
+occurred to give them such a moral ascendancy as should suffice
+to generate a revulsion of feeling in the mind of the persecuting
+Saul.&nbsp; Strauss asks us to believe that this missing
+something is to be found in the hallucinations of two or three
+men whose names have not been recorded and who have left no mark
+of their own.&nbsp; Is there any occasion for answer?</p>
+<p>It is inconceivable that he who could write the Epistle to the
+Romans should not also have been as able as any man who ever
+lived to question the early believers as to their converse with
+Christ, and to report faithfully the substance of what they told
+him.&nbsp; That he knew the other Apostles, that he went up to
+Jerusalem to hold conferences with them, that he abode fifteen
+days with St. Peter&mdash;as he tells us, in order &ldquo;to
+question him&rdquo;&mdash;these things are certain.&nbsp; The
+Greek word
+&iota;&sigma;&tau;&omicron;&rho;&eta;&sigma;&alpha;&iota; is a
+very suggestive one.&nbsp; It is so easy to make too much out of
+anything that I hardly dare to say how strongly the use of the
+verb &iota;&sigma;&tau;&omicron;&rho;&epsilon;&iota;&nu; suggests
+to me &ldquo;getting at the facts of the case,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;questioning as to how things happened,&rdquo; yet such
+would be the most obvious meaning of the word from which our own
+&ldquo;history&rdquo; and &ldquo;story&rdquo; are derived.&nbsp;
+Fifteen days was time enough to give Paul the means of coming to
+an understanding with Peter as to what the value of Peter&rsquo;s
+story was, nor can we believe that Paul should not both receive
+and transmit perfectly all that he was then told.&nbsp; In fact,
+without supposing these men to be so utterly visionary that
+nothing durable could come out of them, there is no escape from
+holding that Peter was justified in firmly believing that he had
+seen Christ alive within a very few days of the Crucifixion, that
+he succeeded also in satisfying Paul that this belief was
+well-founded, and that in the account of Christ&rsquo;s
+reappearances, as given I. Cor. xv., we have a virtually
+<i>verbatim</i> report of what Paul heard from Peter and the
+other Apostles.&nbsp; Of course the possibility remains that Paul
+may have been too easily satisfied, and not have cross-examined
+Peter as closely as he might have done.&nbsp; But then Paul was
+converted <i>before</i> this interview; and this implies that he
+had already found a general consent among the Christians whom he
+had met with, that the story which he afterwards heard from Peter
+(or one to the same effect) was true.&nbsp; Whence then the
+unanimity of this belief?&nbsp; Strauss answers as
+before&mdash;from the hallucinations of an originally small
+minority.&nbsp; We can only again reply that for the reasons
+already given we find it quite impossible to agree with him.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>[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.&nbsp; I
+believe that my brother intended to make a fresh translation from
+the original passages, but he never carried out his intention,
+and in his MS. the page of the English translation with the first
+and last words of each passage are alone given.&nbsp; I could
+hardly venture to undertake the responsibility of making a fresh
+translation myself, and have therefore adhered almost word for
+word to the published English translation&mdash;here and there,
+however, a trifling alteration was really irresistible on the
+scores alike of euphony and clearness.&mdash;W. B. O.]</p>
+<h3><a name="page120"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+120</span>Chapter IV<br />
+Paul&rsquo;s Testimony Considered</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">Enough</span> has perhaps been said to
+cause the reader to agree with the view of St. Paul&rsquo;s
+conversion taken above&mdash;that is to say, to make him regard
+the conversion as mainly, if not entirely, due to the weight of
+evidence afforded by the courage and consistency of the early
+Christians.</p>
+<p>But, the change in Paul&rsquo;s mind being thus referred to
+causes which preclude all possibility of hallucination or ecstasy
+on his own part, it becomes unnecessary to discuss the attempts
+which have been made to explain away the miraculous character of
+the account given in the Acts.&nbsp; I believe that this account
+is founded upon fact, and that it is derived from some
+description furnished by St. Paul himself of the vision
+mentioned, I. Cor. xv., which again is very possibly the same as
+that of II. Cor. xii.&nbsp; For the purposes of the present
+investigation, however, the whole story must be set aside.&nbsp;
+At the same time it should be borne in mind, that any detraction
+from the historical accuracy of the writer of the Acts, is more
+than compensated for, by the additional weight given to the
+conversion of St. Paul, whom we are now able to regard as having
+been converted by evidence which was in itself overpowering, and
+which did not stand in need of any miraculous interference in
+order to confirm it.</p>
+<p>It is important to observe that the testimony of Paul should
+carry more weight with those who are bent upon close critical
+investigation than that even of the Evangelists.&nbsp; St. Paul
+is one whom we know, and know well.&nbsp; No syllable of
+suspicion has ever been breathed, even in Germany, against the
+first four of the Epistles which have been generally assigned to
+him; friends and foes of Christianity are alike agreed to accept
+them as the genuine work of the Apostle.&nbsp; Few figures,
+therefore, in ancient history stand out more clearly revealed to
+us than that of St. Paul, whereas a thick veil of darkness hangs
+over that of each one of the Evangelists.&nbsp; Who St. Matthew
+was, and whether the gospel that we have is an original work, or
+a translation (as would appear from Papias, our highest
+authority), and how far it has been modified in translation, are
+things which we shall never know.&nbsp; The Gospels of St. Mark
+and St. Luke are involved in even greater obscurity.&nbsp; The
+authorship, date, and origin of the fourth Gospel have been, and
+are being, even more hotly contested than those of the other
+three, and all that can be affirmed with certainty concerning it
+is, that no trace of its existence 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&rsquo;s Epistles to have been
+a pillar of Judaism.</p>
+<p>With St. Paul all is changed: we not only know him better than
+we know nine-tenths of our own most eminent countrymen of the
+last century, but we feel a confidence in him which grows greater
+and greater the more we study his character.&nbsp; He combines to
+perfection the qualities that make a good witness&mdash;capacity
+and integrity: add to this that his conclusions were forced upon
+him.&nbsp; We therefore feel that, whereas from a scientific
+point of view, the Gospel narratives can only be considered as
+the testimony of early and sincere writers of whom we know little
+or nothing, yet that in the evidence of St. Paul we find the
+missing link which connects us securely with actual eye-witnesses
+and gives us a confidence in the general accuracy of the Gospels
+which they could never of themselves alone have imparted.&nbsp;
+We could indeed ill spare either the testimony of the Evangelists
+or that of St. Paul, but if we were obliged to content ourselves
+with one only, we should choose the Apostle.</p>
+<p>Turning then to the evidence of St. Paul as derivable from I.
+Cor. xv. we find the following:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which
+I preached unto you, which also ye have received and wherein ye
+stand.&nbsp; By which also ye are saved if ye keep in memory what
+I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.&nbsp; For I
+delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how
+that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures: and
+that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day
+according to the Scriptures; and that He was seen of Cephas, then
+of the twelve: after that He was seen of above five hundred
+brethren at once; of whom the greater portion remain unto this
+present, but some are fallen asleep.&nbsp; After that He was seen
+of James; then of all the Apostles.&nbsp; And last of all He was
+seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the first place we must notice Paul&rsquo;s assertion that
+the Gospel which he was then writing was identical with that
+which he had originally preached.&nbsp; We may assume that each
+of the appearances of Christ here mentioned had in Paul&rsquo;s
+mind a definite time and place, derived from the account which he
+had received and which probably led to his conversion; the words
+&ldquo;that which I also received&rdquo; surely imply &ldquo;that
+which I also received <i>in the first instance</i>&rdquo;: now we
+know from his own mouth (Gal. i., 16, 17) that <i>after</i> his
+conversion he &ldquo;conferred not with flesh and
+blood&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;neither,&rdquo; he continues,
+&ldquo;went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before
+me, but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus:
+then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see
+(&iota;&sigma;&tau;&omicron;&rho;&eta;&sigma;&alpha;&iota;)
+Peter, and abode with him fifteen days, but others of the
+Apostles saw I none, save James the Lord&rsquo;s
+brother.&rdquo;&nbsp; Since, then, he must have heard <i>some</i>
+story concerning Christ&rsquo;s reappearances before his
+conversion and subsequent sojourn in Arabia, and since he had
+heard nothing from eye-witnesses until the time of his going up
+to Jerusalem three years later, it is probable that the account
+quoted above is the substance of what he found persisted in by
+the Christians whom he was persecuting at Damascus, and was at
+length compelled to believe.&nbsp; But this is very unimportant:
+it is more to the point to insist upon the fact that St. Paul
+must have received the account given I. Cor. xv., 3&ndash;8
+within a very few years of the Crucifixion itself, and that it
+was subsequently confirmed to him by Peter, and probably by James
+and John, during his stay of fifteen days in Peter&rsquo;s
+house.</p>
+<p>This account can have been nothing new even then, for it is
+plain that at the time of Paul&rsquo;s conversion the Christian
+Church had spread far: Paul speaks of <i>returning</i> to
+Damascus, as though the writer of the Acts was right as regards
+the place of his conversion; but the fact of there having been a
+church in Damascus of sufficient importance for Paul to go
+thither to persecute it, involves the lapse of considerable time
+since the original promulgation of our Lord&rsquo;s Resurrection,
+and throws back the origin of the belief in that event to a time
+closely consequent upon the Crucifixion itself.</p>
+<p>Now Paul informs us that he was told (we may assume by Peter
+and James) that Christ first reappeared <i>within three days of
+the Crucifixion</i>.&nbsp; There is no sufficient reason for
+doubting this; and one fact of weekly recurrence even to this
+day, affords it striking confirmation&mdash;I refer to the
+institution of Sunday as the Lord&rsquo;s day.&nbsp; We know that
+the observance of this day in commemoration of the Resurrection
+was a very early practice, nor is there anything which would seem
+to throw doubt upon the fact of the first &ldquo;Sunday&rdquo;
+having been also the Sunday of the Resurrection.&nbsp; Another
+confirmation of the early date assigned to the Resurrection by
+St. Paul, is to be found in the fact that every instinct would
+warn the Apostles <i>against</i> the third day as being
+dangerously early, and as opening a door for the denial of the
+completeness of the death.&nbsp; The fortieth day would far more
+naturally have been chosen.</p>
+<p>Turning now from the question of the date of the first
+reappearance to what is told us of the reappearances themselves,
+we find that the earliest was vouchsafed to St. Peter, which is
+at first sight opposed to the Evangelistic records; but this is a
+discrepancy upon which no stress should be laid; St. Paul might
+well be aware that Mary Magdalene was the first to look upon her
+risen Lord, and yet have preferred to dwell upon the more widely
+known names of Peter and his fellow Apostles.&nbsp; The facts are
+probably these, that our Lord first shewed Himself to the women,
+but that Peter was the first of the Apostolic body to see Him; it
+was natural that if our Lord did not choose to show Himself to
+the Apostles without preparation, Peter should have been chosen
+as the one best fitted to prepare them: Peter probably collected
+the other Apostles, and then the Redeemer shewed Himself alive to
+all together.&nbsp; This is what we should gather from St.
+Paul&rsquo;s narrative; a narrative which it would seem arbitrary
+to set aside in the face of St. Paul&rsquo;s character,
+opportunities and antecedent prejudices against
+Christianity&mdash;in the face also of the unanimity of all the
+records we have, as well as of the fact that the Christian
+religion triumphed, and of the endless difficulties attendant on
+the hallucination theory.</p>
+<p>We conclude therefore that Paul was satisfied by sufficient
+evidence that our Lord had appeared to Peter on the third day
+after the Crucifixion, nor can any reasonable doubt be thrown
+upon the other appearances of which he tells us.&nbsp; It is true
+that on the occasion of his visit to Peter he saw none other of
+the Apostles save James&mdash;but there is nothing to lead us to
+suppose that there was any want of unanimity among them: no trace
+of this has come down to us, and would surely have done so if it
+had existed.&nbsp; If any dependence at all is to be placed on
+the writers of the New Testament it did not exist.&nbsp; Stronger
+evidence than this unanimity it would be hard to find.</p>
+<p>Another most noticeable feature is the fewness of the recorded
+appearances of Christ.&nbsp; They commenced according to Paul
+(and this is virtually according to Peter and James) immediately
+after the Crucifixion.&nbsp; Paul mentions only five appearances:
+this does not preclude the supposition that he knew of more, nor
+that the women who came to the sepulchre had also seen Him, but
+it does seem to imply that the reappearances were few in number,
+and that they continued only for a very short time.&nbsp; They
+were sufficient for their purpose: one of preparation to
+Peter&mdash;another to the Apostles&mdash;another to the outside
+world, and then one or two more&mdash;but still not more than
+enough to establish the fact beyond all possibility of
+dispute.&nbsp; The writer of the Acts tells us that Christ was
+seen for a space of forty days&mdash;presumably not every day,
+but from time to time.&nbsp; Now forty days is a mystical period,
+and one which may mean either more or less, within a week or two,
+than the precise time stated; it seems upon the whole most
+reasonable to conclude that the reappearances recorded by Paul,
+and some few others not recorded, extended over a period of one
+or two months after the Crucifixion, and that they then came to
+an end; for there can be no doubt that St. Paul conceived them as
+having ended with the appearance to the assembled Apostles
+mentioned I. Cor. xv., 7, and, though he does not say so
+expressly, there is that in the context which suggests their
+having been confined to a short space of time.</p>
+<p>It is perfectly clear that St. Paul did not believe that any
+one had seen Christ in the interval between the last recorded
+appearance to the eleven, and the vision granted to
+himself.&nbsp; The words &ldquo;and last of all he was seen also
+of me <i>as of one born out of due time</i>&rdquo; point strongly
+in the direction of a lapse of some years between the second
+appearance to the eleven and his own vision.&nbsp; This confirms
+and is confirmed by the writer of the Acts.&nbsp; St. Paul never
+could have used the words quoted above, if he had held that the
+appearances which he records had been spread over a space of
+years intervening between the Crucifixion and his own
+vision.&nbsp; Where would be the force of &ldquo;born out of due
+time&rdquo; unless the time of the previous appearances had long
+passed by?&nbsp; But if, at the time of St. Paul&rsquo;s
+conversion, it was already many years since the last occasion
+upon which Christ had been seen by his disciples, we find
+ourselves driven back to a time closely consequent upon the
+Crucifixion as the only possible date of the reappearances.&nbsp;
+But this is in itself sufficient condemnation of Strauss&rsquo;s
+theory: that theory requires considerable time for the
+development of a perfectly unanimous and harmonious belief in the
+hallucinations, while every particle of evidence which we can get
+points in the direction of the belief in the Resurrection having
+followed very closely upon the Crucifixion.</p>
+<p>To repeat: had the reappearances been due to hallucination
+only, they would neither have been so few in number nor have come
+to an end so soon.&nbsp; When once the mind has begun to run riot
+in hallucination, it is prodigal of its own inventions.&nbsp;
+Favoured believers would have been constantly seeing Christ even
+up to the time of Paul&rsquo;s letter to the Corinthians, and the
+Apostle would have written that even then Christ was still
+occasionally seen of those who trusted in him, and served him
+faithfully.&nbsp; But we meet with nothing of the sort: we are
+told that Christ was seen a few times shortly after the
+Crucifixion, then <i>after a lapse of several years</i> (I am
+surely warranted in saying this) Paul himself saw Him&mdash;but
+no one in the interval, and no one afterwards.&nbsp; This is not
+the manner of the hallucinations of uneducated people.&nbsp; It
+is altogether too sober: the state of mind from which alone so
+baseless a delusion could spring, is one which never could have
+been contented with the results which were evidently all, or
+nearly all, that Paul knew of.&nbsp; St. Paul&rsquo;s words
+cannot be set aside without more cause than Strauss has shewn:
+instead of betraying a tendency towards exaggeration, they
+contain nothing whatever, with the exception of his own vision,
+that is not imperatively demanded in order to account for the
+rise and spread of Christianity.</p>
+<p>Concerning that vision Strauss writes as follows:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With regard to the appearance he (Paul)
+witnessed&mdash;he uses the same word (&omega;&phi;&theta;&eta;)
+as with regard to the others: he places it in the same category
+with them only in the last place, as he names himself the last of
+the Apostles, but in exactly the same rank with the others.&nbsp;
+Thus much, therefore, Paul knew&mdash;or supposed&mdash;that the
+appearances which the elder disciples had seen soon after the
+Resurrection of Jesus had been of the same kind as that which had
+been, only later, vouchsafed to himself.&nbsp; Of what sort then
+was this?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I confess that I am wholly unable to feel the force of the
+above.&nbsp; Strauss says that Paul&rsquo;s vision was
+ecstatic&mdash;subjective and not objective&mdash;that Paul
+thought he saw Christ, although he never really saw him.&nbsp;
+But, says Strauss, he uses the same word for his own vision and
+for the appearances to the earlier Apostles: it is plain
+therefore that he did not suppose the earlier Apostles to have
+seen Christ in the same sort of way in which they saw themselves
+and other people, but to have seen him as Paul himself did,
+<i>i.e.</i>, by supernatural revelation.</p>
+<p>But would it not be more fair to say that Paul&rsquo;s using
+the same word for all the appearances&mdash;his own vision
+included&mdash;implies that he considered this last to have been
+no less real than those vouchsafed earlier, though he may have
+been perfectly well aware that it was different in kind?&nbsp;
+The use of the same word for all the appearances is quite
+compatible with a belief in Paul&rsquo;s mind that the manner in
+which he saw Christ was different from that in which the Apostles
+had seen him: indeed, so long as he believed that he had seen
+Christ no less really than the others, one cannot see why he
+should have used any other word for his own vision than that
+which he had applied to the others: we should even expect that he
+would do so, and should be surprised at his having done
+otherwise.&nbsp; That Paul did believe in the reality of his own
+vision is indisputable, and his use of the word
+&omega;&phi;&theta;&eta; was probably dictated by a desire to
+assert this belief in the strongest possible way, and to place
+his own vision in the same category with others, which were so
+universally known among Christians to have been material and
+objective, that there was no occasion to say so.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless there is that in Paul&rsquo;s words on which Strauss
+does not dwell, but which cannot be passed over without
+notice.&nbsp; Paul does not simply say, &ldquo;and last of all he
+was seen also of me&rdquo;&mdash;but he adds the words &ldquo;as
+of one born out of due time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It is impossible to say decisively that this addition implies
+that Paul recognised a difference in kind between the
+appearances, inasmuch as the words added may only refer to
+time&mdash;still they would explain the possible use of
+[&omega;&phi;&theta;&eta;] in a somewhat different sense, and I
+cannot but think that they will suggest this possibility to the
+reader.&nbsp; They will make him feel, if he does not feel it
+without them, how strained a proceeding it is to bind Paul down
+to a rigorously identical meaning on every occasion on which the
+same word came from his pen, and to maintain that because he once
+uses it on the occasion of an appearance which he held to be
+vouchsafed by revelation, therefore, wherever else he uses it, he
+must have intended to refer to something seen by revelation: the
+words &ldquo;as of one born out of due time&rdquo; imply the
+utterly unlooked for and transcendent nature of the favour, and
+suggest, even though they do not compel, the inference that while
+the other Apostles had seen Christ in the common course of
+nature, as a visible tangible being before their waking eyes, he
+had himself seen Him not less truly, but still only by special
+and unlooked for revelation.&nbsp; If such thoughts were in his
+mind he would not probably have expressed them farther than by
+the touching words which he has added concerning his own
+vision.&nbsp; So much for the objection that the evidence of Paul
+concerning the earlier appearances is impaired by his having used
+the same word for them, and for the appearance to himself.&nbsp;
+It only remains therefore to review in brief the general bearings
+of Paul&rsquo;s testimony as given I. Cor. xv., 1&ndash;8.</p>
+<p>Firstly, there is the early commencement of the reappearances:
+this is incompatible with hallucination, for the hallucination
+must be supposed to have occurred when most easy to refute, and
+when the spell of shame and fear was laid most heavily upon the
+Apostles.&nbsp; Strauss maintains that the appearances were
+unconsciously antedated by Peter; we can only say that the
+circumstances of the case, as entered into more fully above,
+render this very improbable; that if Peter told Paul that he saw
+Christ on the third day after the Crucifixion, he probably firmly
+believed that he did see Him; and that if he believed this, he
+was also probably right in so believing.</p>
+<p>Secondly, there is the fact that the reappearances were few,
+and extended over a short time only.&nbsp; Had they been due to
+hallucination there would have been no limit either to their
+number or duration.&nbsp; Paul seems to have had no idea that
+there ever had been, or ever would be, successors to the five
+hundred brethren who saw Christ at one time.&nbsp; Some were
+fallen asleep&mdash;the rest would in time follow them.&nbsp; It
+is incredible that men should have so lost all count of fact, so
+debauched their perception of external objects, so steeped
+themselves in belief in dreams which had no foundation but in
+their own disordered brains, as to have turned the whole world
+after them by the sheer force of their conviction of the truth of
+their delusions, and yet that suddenly, within a few weeks from
+the commencement of this intoxication, they should have come to a
+dead stop and given no further sign of like extravagance.&nbsp;
+The hallucinations must have been so baseless, and would argue
+such an utter subordination of judgement to imagination, that
+instead of ceasing they must infallibly have ended in riot and
+disorganisation; the fact that they did cease (which cannot be
+denied) and that they were followed by no disorder, but by a
+solemn sober steadfastness of purpose, as of reasonable men in
+deadly earnest about a matter which had come to their knowledge,
+and which they held it vital for all to know&mdash;this fact
+alone would be sufficient to overthrow the hallucination
+theory.&nbsp; Such intemperance could never have begotten such
+temperance: from such a frame of mind as Strauss assigns to the
+Apostles no religion could have come which should satisfy the
+highest spiritual needs of the most civilised nations of the
+earth for nearly two thousand years.</p>
+<p>When, therefore, we look at the want of faith of the Apostles
+before the Crucifixion, and to their subsequent intense devotion;
+at their unanimity at their general sobriety; at the fact that
+they succeeded in convincing the ablest of their enemies and
+ultimately the whole of Europe; at the undeviating consent of all
+the records we have; at the early date at which the reappearances
+commenced,&mdash;at their small number and short
+duration&mdash;things so foreign to the nature of hallucination;
+at the excellent opportunities which Paul had for knowing 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 its truth; at
+the impossibility of accounting for the rise of Christianity
+without the reappearance of its Founder after His Crucifixion;
+when we look at all these things we shall admit that it is
+impossible to avoid the belief that after having died, Christ
+<i>did</i> reappear to his disciples, and that in this fact we
+have the only intelligible explanation of the triumph of
+Christianity.</p>
+<h3><a name="page134"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+134</span>Chapter V<br />
+A Consideration of Certain Ill-Judged<br />
+Methods of Defence</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> reader has now heard the utmost
+that can be said against the historic character of the
+Resurrection by the ablest of its impugners.&nbsp; I know of
+nothing in any of Strauss&rsquo;s works which can be considered
+as doing better justice to his opinions than the passages which I
+have quoted and, I trust, refuted.&nbsp; I have quoted fully, and
+have kept nothing in the background.&nbsp; If I had known of
+anything stronger against the Resurrection from any other source,
+I should certainly have produced it.&nbsp; I have answered in
+outline only, but I do not believe that I have passed any
+difficulty on one side.</p>
+<p>What then does the reader think?&nbsp; Was the attack so
+dangerous, or the defence so far to seek?&nbsp; I believe he will
+agree with me that the combat was one of no great danger when it
+was once fairly entered upon.&nbsp; But the wonder, and, let me
+add, the disgrace, to English divines, is that the battle should
+have been shirked so long.&nbsp; What is it that has made the
+name of Strauss so terrible to the ears of English
+Churchmen?&nbsp; Surely nothing but the ominous silence which has
+been maintained concerning him in almost all quarters of our
+Church.&nbsp; For what can he say or do against the other
+miracles if he be powerless against the Resurrection?&nbsp; He
+can make sentences which sound plausible, but that is no great
+feat.&nbsp; Can he show that there is any <i>a priori</i>
+improbability whatever, in the fact of miracles having been
+wrought by one who died and rose from the dead?&nbsp; If a man
+did this it is a small thing that he should also walk upon the
+waves and command the winds.&nbsp; But if there is no <i>a
+priori</i> difficulty with regard to these miracles, there is
+certainly none other.</p>
+<p>Let this, however, for the present pass, only let me beg of
+the reader to have patience while I follow out the plan which I
+have pursued up to the present point, and proceed to examine
+certain difficulties of another character.&nbsp; I propose to do
+so with the same unflinching examination as heretofore,
+concealing nothing that has been said, or that can be said; going
+out of my way to find arguments for opponents, if I do not think
+that they have put forward all that from their own point of view
+they might have done, and careless how many difficulties I may
+bring before the reader which may never yet have occurred to him,
+provided I feel that I can also shew him how little occasion
+there is to fear them.</p>
+<p>I must, however, maintain two propositions, which may perhaps
+be unfamiliar to some of those who have not as yet given more
+than a conventional and superficial attention to the Scriptural
+records, but which will meet with ready assent from all whose
+studies have been deeper.&nbsp; Fain would I avoid paining even a
+single reader, but I am convinced that the arresting of
+infidelity depends mainly upon the general recognition of two
+broad facts.&nbsp; The first is this&mdash;that the Apostles,
+even after they had received the gift of the Holy Spirit were
+still fallible though holy men; the second&mdash;that there are
+certain passages in each of the Gospels as we now have them,
+which were not originally to be found therein, and others which,
+though genuine, are still not historic.&nbsp; This much of
+concession we must be prepared to make, and we shall find (as in
+the case of the conversion of St. Paul) that our position is
+indefinitely strengthened by doing so.</p>
+<p>When shall we Christians learn that the truest ground is also
+the strongest?&nbsp; We may be sure that until we have done so we
+shall find a host of enemies who will say that truth is not
+ours.&nbsp; It is we who have created infidelity, and who are
+responsible for it.&nbsp; <i>We</i> are the true infidels, for we
+have not sufficient faith in our own creed to believe that it
+will bear the removal of the incrustations of time and
+superstition.&nbsp; When men see our cowardice, what can they
+think but that we must know that we have cause to be
+afraid?&nbsp; We drive men into unbelief in spite of themselves,
+by our tenacious adherence to opinions which every unprejudiced
+person must see at a glance that we cannot rightfully defend, and
+then we pride ourselves upon our love for Christ and our hatred
+of His enemies.&nbsp; If Christ accepts this kind of love He is
+not such as He has declared Himself.</p>
+<p>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 zeal against His enemies.&nbsp; If those to whom the
+unfamiliarity of an opinion or its inconvenience to themselves is
+a test of its hatefulness to Christ, had been born Jews, they
+would have crucified Him whom they imagine that they are now
+serving: if Turks, they would have massacred both Jew and
+Christian; if Papists at the time of the Reformation they would
+have persecuted Protestants: if Protestants, under Elizabeth,
+Papists.&nbsp; Truth is to them an accident of birth and
+training, and the Christian faith is in their eyes true because
+these accidents, as far as they are concerned, have decided in
+its favour.&nbsp; But such persons are not Christians.&nbsp; It
+is they who crucify Christ, who drive men from coming to Him
+whose every instinct would lead them to love and worship Him, but
+who are warned off by observing the crowd of sycophants and
+time-servers who presume to call Him Lord.</p>
+<p>But to look at the matter from another point of view; when
+there is a long sustained contest between two bodies of capable
+and seriously disposed people, (and none can deny that many of
+our adversaries have been both one and the other), and when this
+contest shews no sign of healing, but rather widens from
+generation to generation, and each party accuses the other of
+disingenuousness, obstinacy and other like serious defects of
+mind&mdash;it may be certainly assumed that the truth lies wholly
+with neither side, but that each should make some concessions to
+the other.&nbsp; A third party sees this at a glance, and is
+amazed because neither of the disputants can perceive that his
+opponent must be possessed of some truths, in spite of his trying
+to defend other positions which are indefensible.&nbsp; Strange!
+that a thing which it seems so easy to avoid, should so seldom be
+avoided!&nbsp; Homer said well:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Perish strife, both from among gods and
+men,<br />
+And wrath which maketh even him that is considerate, cruel,<br />
+Which getteth up in the heart of a man like smoke,<br />
+And the taste thereof is sweeter than drops of honey.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>But strife can never cease without concessions upon both
+sides.&nbsp; We agree to this readily in the abstract, but we
+seldom do so when any given concession is in question.&nbsp; We
+are all for concession in the general, but for none in the
+particular, as people who say that they will retrench when they
+are living beyond their income, but will not consent to any
+proposed retrenchment.&nbsp; Thus many shake their heads and say
+that it is impossible to live in the present age and not be aware
+of many difficulties in connection with the Christian religion;
+they have studied the question more deeply than perhaps the
+unbeliever imagines; and having said this much they give
+themselves credit for being wide-minded, liberal and above vulgar
+prejudices: but when pressed as to this or that particular
+difficulty, and asked to own that such and such an objection of
+the infidel&rsquo;s needs explanation, they will have none of it,
+and will in nine cases out of ten betray by their answers that
+they neither know nor want to know what the infidel means, but on
+the contrary that they are resolute to remain in ignorance.&nbsp;
+I know this kind of liberality exceedingly well, and have ever
+found it to harbour more selfishness, idleness, cowardice and
+stupidity than does open bigotry.&nbsp; The bigot is generally
+better than his expressed opinions, these people are invariably
+worse than theirs.</p>
+<p>The above principle has been largely applied in the writings
+of so-called orthodox commentators, not unfrequently even by men
+who might have been assumed to be above condescending to such
+trickery.&nbsp; A great preface concerning candour, with a
+flourish of trumpets in the praise of truth, seems to have
+exhausted every atom of truth and candour from the work that
+follows it.</p>
+<p>It will be said that I ought not to make use of language such
+as this without bringing forward examples.&nbsp; I shall
+therefore adduce them.</p>
+<p>One of the most serious difficulties to the unbeliever is the
+inextricable confusion in which the accounts of the Resurrection
+have reached us: no one can reconcile these accounts with one
+another, not only in minute particulars, but in matters on which
+it is of the highest importance to come to a clear
+understanding.&nbsp; Thus, to omit all notice of many other
+discrepancies, the accounts of Mark, Luke, and John concur in
+stating that when the women came to the tomb of Jesus very early
+on the Sunday morning, they found it <i>already empty</i>: the
+stone was gone when they came there, and, according to John,
+there was not even an angelic vision for some time
+afterwards.&nbsp; There is nothing in any of these three accounts
+to preclude the possibility of the stone&rsquo;s having been
+removed within an hour or two of the body&rsquo;s having been
+laid in the tomb.</p>
+<p>But when we turn to Matthew we find all changed: we are told
+that the stone was gone <i>not</i> when the women came, but that
+on their arrival there was a great earthquake, and that an angel
+came down from Heaven, and rolled away the stone, <i>and sat upon
+it</i>, and that the guard who had been set over the tomb (of
+whom we hear nothing from any of the other evangelists) became as
+dead men while the angel addressed the women.</p>
+<p>Now this is not one of those cases in which the supposition
+can be tolerated that all would be clear if the whole facts of
+the case were known to us.&nbsp; No additional facts can make it
+come about that the tomb should have been sealed and guarded, and
+yet <i>not</i> sealed and guarded; that the same women, at the
+same time and place, should have witnessed an earthquake, and yet
+<i>not</i> witnessed one; have found a stone already gone from a
+tomb, and yet <i>not</i> found it gone; have seen it rolled away,
+and <i>not</i> seen it, and so on; those who say that we should
+find no difficulty if we knew <i>all</i> the facts are still
+careful to abstain from any example (so far as I know) of the
+sort of additional facts which would serve their purpose.&nbsp;
+They cannot give one; any mind which is truly
+candid&mdash;white&mdash;not scrawled and scribbled over till no
+character is decipherable&mdash;will feel at once that the only
+question to be raised is, which is the more correct account of
+the Resurrection&mdash;Matthew&rsquo;s or those given by the
+other three Evangelists?&nbsp; How far is Matthew&rsquo;s account
+true, and how far is it exaggerated?&nbsp; For there must be
+either exaggeration or invention somewhere.&nbsp; It is
+inconceivable that the other writers should have known the story
+told by Matthew, and yet not only made no allusion to it, but
+introduced matter which flatly contradicts it, and it is also
+inconceivable that the story should be true, and yet that the
+other writers should not have known it.</p>
+<p>This is how the difficulty stands&mdash;a difficulty which
+vanishes in a moment if it be rightly dealt with, but which, when
+treated after our unskilful English method, becomes capable of
+doing inconceivable mischief to the Christian religion.&nbsp; Let
+us see then what Dean Alford&mdash;a writer whose professions of
+candour and talk about the duty of unflinching examination leave
+nothing to be desired&mdash;has to say upon this point.&nbsp; I
+will first quote the passage in full from Matthew, and then give
+the Dean&rsquo;s note.&nbsp; I have drawn the greater part of the
+comments that will follow it from an anonymous pamphlet <a
+name="citation141"></a><a href="#footnote141"
+class="citation">[141]</a> upon the Resurrection, dated 1865, but
+without a publisher&rsquo;s name, so that I presume it must have
+been printed for private circulation only.</p>
+<p>St. Matthew&rsquo;s account runs:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Now the next day, that followed the day of
+the preparation, the chief priests and Pharisees came together
+unto Pilate, saying, &lsquo;Sir, we remember that that deceiver
+said, while he was yet alive, &ldquo;After three days I will rise
+again.&rdquo;&nbsp; Command therefore that the sepulchre be made
+sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night and
+steal him away and say unto the people, &ldquo;He is risen from
+the dead:&rdquo; so the last error shall be worse than the
+first.&rsquo;&nbsp; Pilate said unto them, &lsquo;Ye have a
+watch: go your way, make it as sure as ye can.&rsquo;&nbsp; So
+they went and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone and
+setting a watch.&nbsp; In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to
+dawn towards the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and
+the other Mary to see the sepulchre.&nbsp; And, behold, there was
+a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from
+heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat
+upon it.&nbsp; His countenance was like lightning, and his
+raiment white as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake,
+and became as dead men.&nbsp; And the angel answered and said
+unto the women, &lsquo;Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek
+Jesus, which was crucified.&nbsp; He is not here: for he is
+risen, as he said.&nbsp; Come, see the place where the Lord
+lay.&nbsp; And go quickly, 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.&rsquo;&nbsp; And they departed quickly from the sepulchre
+with fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples
+word.&nbsp; And as they went to tell his disciples, Jesus met
+them, saying, &lsquo;All hail.&rsquo;&nbsp; And they came and
+held him by the feet, and worshipped him (<i>cf.</i> John xx.,
+16, 17).&nbsp; Then said Jesus unto them, &lsquo;Be not afraid:
+go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall
+they see me.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now when they were going, behold, some
+of the watch came into the city, and shewed unto the chief
+priests all the things that were done.&nbsp; And when they were
+assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large
+money unto the soldiers, saying, &lsquo;Say ye, His disciples
+came by night, and stole him away while we slept.&nbsp; And if
+this come to the governor&rsquo;s ears, we will persuade him and
+secure you.&rsquo;&nbsp; So they took the money, and did as they
+were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews
+until this day.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Let us turn now to the Dean&rsquo;s note on Matt. xxvii.,
+62&ndash;66.</p>
+<p>With regard to the setting of the watch and sealing of the
+stone, he tells us that the narrative following (<i>i.e.</i>, the
+account of the guard and the earthquake) &ldquo;has been much
+impugned and its historical accuracy very generally given up even
+by the best of the German commentators (Olshausen, Meyer; also De
+Wette, Hase, and others).&nbsp; The chief difficulties found in
+it seem to be: (1) How should the chief priests, &amp;c., <i>know
+of His having said</i> &lsquo;in three days I will rise
+again,&rsquo; when the saying was hid even from His own
+disciples?&nbsp; The answer to this is easy.&nbsp; The
+<i>meaning</i> of the saying may have been, and was hid from the
+disciples; <i>but the fact of its having been said</i> could be
+no secret.&nbsp; Not to lay any stress on John ii., 19 (Jesus
+answered and said unto them, &lsquo;Destroy this temple and in
+three days I will build it up&rsquo;), we have the direct
+prophecy of Matt. xii., 40 (&lsquo;For as Jonah was three days
+and three nights in the whale&rsquo;s belly, so shall the Son of
+Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth):
+besides this there would be a rumour current, through the
+intercourse of the Apostles with others, that He had been in the
+habit of so saying.&nbsp; (From what source can Dean Alford know
+that our Lord <i>was</i> in the habit of so saying?&nbsp; What
+particle of authority is there for this alleged habit of our
+Lord?)&nbsp; As to the <i>understanding</i> of the words we must
+remember that <i>hatred is keener sighted than love</i>: that the
+<i>raising of Lazarus</i> would shew <i>what sort of a thing
+rising from the dead was to be</i>; and the fulfilment of the
+Lord&rsquo;s announcement of his <i>crucifixion</i> would
+naturally lead them to look further to <i>what more</i> he had
+announced. (2) How should the women who were solicitous about the
+<i>removal</i> of the stone not have been still more so about its
+being sealed and a guard set?&nbsp; The answer to this last has
+been given above&mdash;<i>they were not aware of the circumstance
+because the guard was not set till the evening before</i>.&nbsp;
+There would be no need of the application before the <i>approach
+of the third day</i>&mdash;it is only made for a watch,
+&epsilon;&omega;&sigmaf; &tau;&eta;&sigmaf;
+&tau;&rho;&#943;&tau;&eta;&sigmaf;
+&eta;&mu;&#941;&rho;&alpha;&sigmaf; (ver. 64), and it is not
+probable that the circumstance would transpire that
+night&mdash;certainly it 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&ndash;15) had really happened, he need
+not have expressed himself doubtfully (Acts v., 39), but would
+have been certain that this was from God.&nbsp; But, first, it
+does not necessarily follow that <i>every member</i> of the
+Sanhedrim was present, and applied to Pilate, or even had they
+done so, that all bore a part in the act of xxviii., 12&rdquo;
+(the bribing of the guard to silence).&nbsp; &ldquo;One who like
+Joseph had not consented to the deed before&mdash;and we may
+safely say that there were others such&mdash;would naturally
+withdraw himself from further proceedings against the person of
+Jesus. (4) Had this been so the three other Evangelists would not
+have passed over so important a testimony to the
+Resurrection.&nbsp; But surely we cannot argue in this
+way&mdash;for thus every important fact narrated by <i>one
+Evangelist alone</i> must be rejected, e.g. (which stands in much
+the same relation), <i>the satisfaction of Thomas&mdash;another
+such narrations</i>.&nbsp; <i>Till we know more about the
+circumstances under which</i>, <i>and the scope with which</i>,
+<i>each Gospel was compiled</i>, <i>all a priori arguments of
+this kind are good for nothing</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>(The italics in the above, and throughout the notes quoted,
+are the Dean&rsquo;s, unless it is expressly stated
+otherwise.)</p>
+<p>I will now proceed to consider this defence of Matthew&rsquo;s
+accuracy against the objections of the German commentators.</p>
+<p>I.&nbsp; The German commentators maintain that the chief
+priests are not likely to have known of any prophecy of
+Christ&rsquo;s Resurrection when His own disciples had evidently
+heard of nothing to this effect.&nbsp; Dean Alford&rsquo;s answer
+amounts to this:&mdash;</p>
+<p>1.&nbsp; They had heard the words but did not understand their
+meaning; hatred enabled the chief priests to see clearly what
+love did not reveal to the understanding of the Apostles.&nbsp;
+True, according to Matthew, Christ had said that as Jonah was
+three days and three nights in the whale&rsquo;s belly, so the
+Son of Man should be three days and three nights in the heart of
+the earth; but it would be only hatred which would suggest the
+interpretation of so obscure a prophecy: love would not be
+sufficiently keen-sighted to understand it.</p>
+<p>But in the first place I would urge that if the Apostles had
+ever heard any words capable of suggesting the idea that Christ
+should rise, after they had already seen the raising of Lazarus,
+on whom corruption had begun its work, they <i>must</i> have
+expected the Resurrection.&nbsp; After having seen so stupendous
+a miracle, any one would expect anything which was even suggested
+by the One who had performed it.&nbsp; And, secondly, hatred is
+not keener sighted than love.</p>
+<p>2.&nbsp; Dean Alford says that the raising of Lazarus would
+shew the chief priests what sort of a thing the Resurrection from
+the dead was to be, and that the fulfilment of Christ&rsquo;s
+prophecy concerning his Crucifixion would naturally lead them to
+look further to what else he had announced.</p>
+<p>But, if the raising of Lazarus would shew the chief priests
+what sort of thing the Resurrection was to be, it would shew the
+Apostles also; and again if the fulfilment of the prophecy of the
+Crucifixion would lead the chief priests to look further to the
+fulfilment of the prophecy of the Resurrection, so would it lead
+the Apostles; this supposition of one set of men who can see
+everything, and of another with precisely the same opportunities
+and no less interest, who can see nothing, is vastly convenient
+upon the stage, but it is not supported by a reference to Nature;
+self-interest would have opened the eyes of the Apostles.</p>
+<p>II.&nbsp; The German commentators ask how was it possible that
+the women who were solicitous about the removal of the stone,
+should not be still more so about &ldquo;its being sealed and a
+guard set?&rdquo;&nbsp; If the German commentators have asked
+their question in this shape, they have asked it badly, and Dean
+Alford&rsquo;s answer is sufficient: they might have asked, how
+the other three writers could all tell us that the stone was
+already gone when the women got there, and yet Matthew&rsquo;s
+story be true? and how Matthew&rsquo;s story could be true
+without the other writers having known it? and how the other
+writers could have introduced matter contradictory to it, if they
+had known it to be true?</p>
+<p>III.&nbsp; The German commentators say that in the Acts of the
+Apostles we find Gamaliel expressing himself as doubtful whether
+or no Christianity was of God, whereas had he known the facts
+related by Matthew he could have had no doubt at all.&nbsp; He
+must have <i>known</i> that Christianity was of God.</p>
+<p>Dean Alford answers that perhaps Gamaliel was not there.&nbsp;
+To which I would rejoin that though Gamaliel might have had no
+hand in the bribery, supposing it to have taken place, it is
+inconceivable that such a story should have not reached him; the
+matter could never have been kept so quiet but that it must have
+leaked out.&nbsp; Men are not so utterly bad or so utterly
+foolish as Dean Alford seems to imply; and whether Gamaliel was
+or was not present when the guard were bribed, he must have been
+equally aware of the fact before making the speech which is
+assigned to him in the Acts.</p>
+<p>IV.&nbsp; The German commentators argue from the silence of
+the other Evangelists: Dean Alford replies by denying that this
+silence is any argument: but I would answer, that on a matter
+which the other three writers must have known to have been of
+such intense interest, their silence is a conclusive proof either
+of their ignorance or their indolence as historians.&nbsp; Dean
+Alford has well substantiated the independence of the four
+narratives, he has well proved that the writer of the fourth
+Gospel could never have seen the other Gospels, and yet he
+supposes that that writer either did not know the facts related
+by Matthew, or thought it unnecessary to allude to them.&nbsp;
+Neither of these suppositions is tenable: but there would
+nevertheless be a shadow of ground for Dean Alford to stand upon
+if the other Evangelists were simply silent: but why does he omit
+all notice of their introducing matter which is absolutely
+incompatible with Matthew&rsquo;s accuracy?</p>
+<p>There is one other consideration which must suggest itself to
+the reader in connection with this story of the guard.&nbsp; It
+refers to the conduct of the chief priests and the soldiers
+themselves.&nbsp; The conduct assigned to the chief priests in
+bribing the guard to lie against one whom they must by this time
+have known to be under supernatural protection, is contrary to
+human nature.&nbsp; The chief priests (according to Matthew) knew
+that Christ had said he should rise: in spite of their being well
+aware that Christ had raised Lazarus from the dead but very
+recently they did not believe that he <i>would</i> rise, but
+feared (so Matthew says) that the Apostles would steal the body
+and pretend a resurrection: up to this point we admit that the
+story, though very improbable, is still possible: but when we
+read of their bribing the guards to tell a lie under such
+circumstances as those which we are told had just occurred, we
+say that such conduct is impossible: men are too great cowards to
+be capable of it.&nbsp; The same applies to the soldiers: they
+would never dare to run counter to an agency which had nearly
+killed them with fright on that very selfsame morning.&nbsp; Let
+any man put himself in their position: let him remember that
+these soldiers were previously no enemies to Christ, nor, as far
+as we can judge, is it likely that they were a gang of
+double-dyed villains: but even if they were, they would not have
+dared to act as Matthew says they acted.</p>
+<p>And now let us turn to another note of Dean
+Alford&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>Speaking of the independence of the four narratives (in his
+note on Matt. xxviii., 1&ndash;10) and referring to their
+&ldquo;minor discrepancies,&rdquo; the Dean says,
+&ldquo;<i>Supposing us to be acquainted with every thing said and
+done in its order and exactness</i>, <i>we should doubtless be
+able to reconcile</i>, <i>or account for</i>, <i>the present
+forms of the narratives</i>; but not having this key to the
+harmonising of them, all attempts to do so in minute particulars
+must be full of arbitrary assumptions, and carry no certainty
+with them: and I may remark that <i>of all harmonies</i> those of
+the <i>incidents of these chapters</i> are to me the <i>most
+unsatisfactory</i>.&nbsp; Giving their compilers all credit for
+the best intentions, I confess they seem to me to <i>weaken</i>
+instead of strengthening the evidence, which now rests (speaking
+merely <i>objectively</i>) on the unexceptionable testimony of
+three independent narrators, and one who besides was an eye
+witness of much that happened.&nbsp; If we are to compare the
+four and ask which is to be taken as most nearly reporting the
+<i>exact</i> words and incidents, on this there can, I think, be
+no doubt.&nbsp; On internal as well as external ground <i>that of
+John</i> takes the <i>highest place</i>, but not of course to the
+exclusion of those parts of the narrative which he <i>does not
+touch</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Surely the above is a very extraordinary note.&nbsp; The
+difficulty of the irreconcilable differences between the four
+narratives is not met nor attempted to be met: the Dean seems to
+consider the attempt as hopeless: no one, according to him, has
+been as yet successful, neither can he see any prospect of
+succeeding better himself: the expedient therefore which he
+proposes is that the whole should be taken on trust; that it
+should be assumed that no discrepancy which could not be
+accounted for would be found, if the facts were known in the
+exact order in which they occurred.&nbsp; In other words, he
+leaves the difficulty where it was.&nbsp; Yet surely it is a very
+grave one.&nbsp; The same events are recorded by three writers
+(one being professedly an eye-witness, and the others independent
+writers), in a way which is virtually the same, in spite of some
+unimportant variations in the manner of telling it, while a
+fourth gives a totally different and irreconcilable account; the
+matter stands in such confusion at present that even Dean Alford
+admits that any attempt to reconcile the differences leaves them
+in worse confusion than ever; the ablest and most spiritually
+minded of the German commentators suggest a way of escape;
+nevertheless, according to the Dean we are not to profit by it,
+but shall avoid the difficulty better by a simpler
+process&mdash;the process of passing it over.</p>
+<p>A man does well to be angry when he sees so solemn and
+momentous a subject treated thus.&nbsp; What is trifling if this
+is not trifling?&nbsp; What is disingenuousness if not
+this?&nbsp; It involves some trouble and apparent danger to admit
+that the same thing has happened to the Christian records which
+has happened to all others&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, that they have
+suffered&mdash;miraculously little, but still something&mdash;at
+the hands of 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 by all means and at all risks to be
+avoided.&nbsp; Who can doubt that some such feeling as this was
+in Dean Alford&rsquo;s mind when the notes above criticised were
+written?&nbsp; Yet what are the means taken to avoid the
+recognition of obvious truth?&nbsp; They are disingenuous in the
+very highest degree.&nbsp; Can this prosper?&nbsp; Not if Christ
+is true.</p>
+<p>What is the practical result?&nbsp; The loss of many souls who
+would gladly come to the Saviour, but who are frightened off by
+seeing the manner in which his case is defended.&nbsp; And what
+after all is the danger that would follow upon candour?&nbsp;
+None.&nbsp; Not one particle.&nbsp; Nevertheless, danger or no
+danger, we are bound to speak the truth.&nbsp; We have nothing to
+do with consequences and moral tendencies and risk to this or
+that fundamental principle of our belief, nor yet with the
+possibility of lurid lights being thrown here or there.&nbsp;
+What are these things to us?&nbsp; They are not our business or
+concern, but rest with the Being who has required of <i>us</i>
+that we should reverently, patiently, unostentatiously, yet
+resolutely, strive to find out what things are true and what
+false, and that we should give up all, rather than forsake our
+own convictions concerning the truth.</p>
+<p>This is our plain and immediate duty, in pursuance of which we
+proceed to set aside the account of the Resurrection given in St.
+Matthew&rsquo;s Gospel.&nbsp; That account must be looked upon as
+the invention of 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 of the Resurrection were becoming scarce, and
+when it was felt that some more unmistakably miraculous account
+than that given in the other three Gospels would be a comfort and
+encouragement to succeeding generations.&nbsp; We, however, must
+now follow the example of &ldquo;even the best&rdquo; of the
+German commentators, and discard it as soon as possible.&nbsp; On
+having done this the whole difficulty of the confusion of the
+four accounts of the Resurrection vanishes like smoke, and we
+find ourselves with three independent writers whose differences
+are exactly those which we might expect, considering the time and
+circumstances in which they wrote, but which are still so
+trifling as to disturb no man&rsquo;s faith.</p>
+<h3><a name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+153</span>Chapter VI<br />
+More Disingenuousness</h3>
+<p>[Here, perhaps, will be the fittest place for introducing a
+letter to my brother from a gentleman who is well known to the
+public, but who does not authorise me to give his name.&nbsp; I
+found this letter among my brother&rsquo;s papers, endorsed with
+the words &ldquo;this must be attended to,&rdquo; but with
+nothing more.&nbsp; I imagine that my brother would have
+incorporated the substance of his correspondent&rsquo;s letter
+into this or the preceding chapter, but not venturing to do so
+myself, I have thought it best to give the letter and extract in
+full, and thus to let them speak for themselves.&mdash;W. B.
+O.]</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">June 15, 1868.</p>
+<p>My dear Owen,</p>
+<p>Your brother has told me what you are doing, and the general
+line of your argument.&nbsp; I am sorry that you should be doing
+it, for I need not tell you that I do not and cannot sympathise
+with the great and unexpected change in your opinions.&nbsp; You
+are the last man in the world from whom I should have expected
+such a change: but, as you well know, you are also the last man
+in the world whose sincerity in making it I should be inclined to
+question.&nbsp; May you find peace and happiness in whatever
+opinions you adopt, and let me trust also that you will never
+forget the lessons of toleration which you learnt as the disciple
+of what you will perhaps hardly pardon me for calling a freer and
+happier school of thought than the one to which you now believe
+yourself to belong.</p>
+<p>Your brother tells me that you are ill; I need not say that I
+am sorry, and that I should not trouble you with any personal
+matter&mdash;I write solely in reference to the work which I hear
+that you have undertaken, and which I am given to understand
+consists mainly in the endeavour to conquer unbelief, by really
+entering into the difficulties felt by unbelievers.&nbsp; The
+scheme is a good one <i>if thoroughly carried out</i>.&nbsp; We
+imagine that we stand in no danger from any such course as this,
+and should heartily welcome any book which tried to grapple with
+us, even though it were to compel us to admit a great deal more
+than I at present think it likely that even you can extort from
+us.&nbsp; Much more should we welcome a work which made people
+understand us better than they do; this would indeed confer a
+lasting benefit both upon them and us.</p>
+<p>However, I know you wish to do your work thoroughly; I want,
+therefore, to make a trifling suggestion which you will take
+<i>pro tanto</i>: it is this:&mdash;Paley, in his third book,
+professes to give &ldquo;a brief consideration of some popular
+objections,&rdquo; and begins Chap.&nbsp; I. with &ldquo;The
+discrepancies between the several Gospels.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now, I know you have a Paley, but I know also that you are
+ill, and that people who are ill like being saved from small
+exertions.&nbsp; I have, therefore, bought a second-hand Paley
+for a shilling, and have cut out the chapter to which I
+especially want to call your attention.&nbsp; Will you kindly
+read it through from beginning to end?</p>
+<p>Is it fair?&nbsp; Is the statement of our objections anything
+like what we should put forward ourselves?&nbsp; And can you
+believe that Paley with his profoundly critical instinct, and
+really great knowledge of the New Testament, should not have been
+perfectly well aware that he was misrepresenting and ignoring the
+objections which he professed to be removing?</p>
+<p>He must have known very well that the principle of
+confirmation by discrepancy is one of very limited application,
+and that it will not cover anything approaching to such wide
+divergencies as those which are presented to us in the
+Gospels.&nbsp; Besides, how <i>can</i> he talk about
+Matthew&rsquo;s object as he does, and yet omit all allusion to
+the wide and important differences between his account of the
+Resurrection, and those of Mark, Luke, and John?&nbsp; Very few
+know what those differences really are, in spite of their having
+the Bible always open to them.&nbsp; I suppose that Paley felt
+pretty sure that his readers would be aware of no difficulty
+unless he chose to put them up to it, and wisely declined to do
+so.&nbsp; Very prudent, but very (as it seems to me)
+wicked.&nbsp; Now don&rsquo;t do this yourself.&nbsp; If you are
+going to meet us, meet us fairly, and let us have our say.&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t pretend to let us have our say while taking good care
+that we get no chance of saying it.&nbsp; I know you
+won&rsquo;t.</p>
+<p>However, will you point out Paley&rsquo;s unfairness in
+heading this part of his work &ldquo;A brief consideration of
+some popular objections,&rdquo; and then proceeding to give a
+chapter on &ldquo;the discrepancies between the several
+Gospels,&rdquo; without going into the details of any of those
+important discrepancies which can have been known to none better
+than himself?&nbsp; This is the only place, so far as I remember,
+in his whole book, where he even touches upon the discrepancies
+in the Gospels.&nbsp; Does he do so as a man who felt that they
+were unimportant and could be approached with safety, or as one
+who is determined to carry the reader&rsquo;s attention away from
+them, and fix it upon something else by a <i>coup de
+main</i>?</p>
+<p>This chapter alone has always convinced me that Paley did not
+believe in his own book.&nbsp; No one could have rested satisfied
+with it for moment, if he felt that he was on really strong
+ground.&nbsp; Besides, how insufficient for their purpose are his
+examples of discrepancies which do not impair the credibility of
+the main fact recorded!</p>
+<p>How would it have been if Lord Clarendon and three other
+historians had each told us that the Marquis of Argyll <i>came to
+life again after being beheaded</i>, and then set to work to
+contradict each other hopelessly as to the manner of his
+reappearance?&nbsp; How if Burnet, Woodrow, and Heath had given
+an account which was not at all incompatible with a natural
+explanation of the whole matter, while Clarendon gave a
+circumstantial story in flat contradiction to all the others, and
+carefully excluded any but a supernatural explanation?&nbsp;
+Ought we to, or should we, allow the discrepancies to pass
+unchallenged?&nbsp; Not for an hour&mdash;if indeed we did not
+rather order the whole story out of court at once, as too wildly
+improbable to deserve a hearing.</p>
+<p>You will, I know, see all this, and a great deal more, and
+will point it better than I can.&nbsp; Let me as an old friend
+entreat you not to pass this over, but to allow me to continue to
+think of you as I always have thought of you hitherto, namely, as
+the most impartial disputant in the world.&mdash;Yours,
+&amp;c.</p>
+
+<div class="gapshortline">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">(<i>Extract from Paley&rsquo;s</i>
+&ldquo;<i>Evidences</i>.&rdquo;&mdash;<i>Part III.</i>,
+<i>Chapter 1</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>The Discrepancies between the
+Gospels</i>.&rdquo;)</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of
+the understanding, than to reject the substance of a story, by
+reason of some diversity in the circumstances with which it is
+related.&nbsp; The usual character of human testimony is
+substantial truth under circumstantial variety.&nbsp; This is
+what the daily experience of courts of justice teaches.&nbsp;
+When accounts of a transaction come from the mouths of different
+witnesses, it is seldom that it is not possible to pick out
+apparent or real inconsistencies between them.&nbsp; These
+inconsistencies are studiously displayed by an adverse pleader,
+but oftentimes with little impression upon the minds of the
+judges.&nbsp; On the contrary, close and minute agreement induces
+the suspicion of confederacy and fraud.&nbsp; When written
+histories touch upon the same scenes of action, the comparison
+almost always affords ground for a like reflection.&nbsp;
+Numerous and sometimes important variations present themselves;
+not seldom, also, absolute and final contradictions; yet neither
+one nor the other are deemed sufficient to shake the credibility
+of the main fact.&nbsp; The embassy of the Jews to deprecate the
+execution of Claudian&rsquo;s order to place his statue in their
+temple Philo places in harvest, Josephus in seed-time, both
+contemporary writers.&nbsp; No reader is led by this
+inconsistency to doubt whether such an embassy was sent, or
+whether such an order was given.&nbsp; Our own history supplies
+examples of the same kind.&nbsp; In the account of the Marquis of
+Argyll&rsquo;s death in the reign of Charles II., we have a very
+remarkable contradiction.&nbsp; Lord Clarendon relates that he
+was condemned to be hanged, which was performed the same day; on
+the contrary, Burnet, Woodrow, Heath, Echard, concur in stating
+that he was condemned upon the Saturday, and executed upon a
+Monday. <a name="citation158a"></a><a href="#footnote158a"
+class="citation">[158a]</a>&nbsp; Was any reader of English
+history ever sceptic enough to raise from hence a question,
+whether the Marquis of Argyll was executed or not?&nbsp; Yet this
+ought to be left in uncertainty, according to the principles upon
+which the Christian religion has sometimes been attacked.&nbsp;
+Dr. Middleton contended that the different hours of the day
+assigned to the Crucifixion of Christ by John and the other
+Evangelists, did not admit of the reconcilement which learned men
+had proposed; and then concludes the discussion with this hard
+remark: &lsquo;We must be forced, with several of the critics, to
+leave the difficulty just as we found it, chargeable with all the
+consequences of manifest inconsistency.&rsquo; <a
+name="citation158b"></a><a href="#footnote158b"
+class="citation">[158b]</a>&nbsp; But what are these
+consequences?&nbsp; By no means the discrediting of the history
+as to the principal fact, by a repugnancy (even supposing that
+repugnancy not to be resolvable into different modes of
+computation) in the time of the day in which it is said to have
+taken place.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A great deal of the discrepancy observable in the
+Gospels arises from <i>omission</i>; from a fact or a passage of
+Christ&rsquo;s life being noticed by one writer, which is
+unnoticed by another.&nbsp; Now, omission is at all times a very
+uncertain ground of objection.&nbsp; We perceive it not only in
+the comparison of different writers, but even in the same writer,
+when compared with himself.&nbsp; There are a great many
+particulars, and some of them of importance, mentioned by
+Josephus in his Antiquities, which as we should have supposed,
+ought to have been put down by him in their place in the Jewish
+Wars. <a name="citation159a"></a><a href="#footnote159a"
+class="citation">[159a]</a>&nbsp; Suetonius, Tacitus, Dion
+Cassius have all three written of the reign of Tiberius.&nbsp;
+Each has mentioned many things omitted by the rest, <a
+name="citation159b"></a><a href="#footnote159b"
+class="citation">[159b]</a> yet no objection is from thence taken
+to the respective credit of their histories.&nbsp; We have in our
+own times, if there were not something indecorous in the
+comparison, the life of an eminent person, written by three of
+his friends, in which there is very great variety in the
+incidents selected by them, some apparent, and perhaps some real,
+contradictions: yet without any impeachment of the substantial
+truth of their accounts, of the authenticity of the books, of the
+competent information or general fidelity of the writers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But these discrepancies will be still more numerous,
+when men do not write histories, but <i>memoirs</i>; which is
+perhaps the true name and proper description of our Gospels; that
+is, when they do not undertake, or ever meant to deliver, in
+order of time, a regular and complete account of <i>all</i> the
+things of importance which the person who is the subject of their
+history did or said; but only, out of many similar ones, to give
+such passages, or such actions and discourses, as offered
+themselves more immediately to their attention, came in the way
+of their enquiries, occurred to their recollection, or were
+suggested by their <i>particular design</i> at the time of
+writing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This particular design may appear sometimes, but not
+always, nor often.&nbsp; Thus I think that the particular design
+which St. Matthew had in view whilst he was writing the history
+of the Resurrection, was to attest the faithful performance of
+Christ&rsquo;s promise to his disciples to go before them into
+Galilee; because he alone, except Mark, who seems to have taken
+it from him, has recorded this promise, and he alone has confined
+his narrative to that single appearance to the disciples which
+fulfilled it.&nbsp; It was the preconcerted, the great and most
+public manifestation of our Lord&rsquo;s person.&nbsp; It was the
+thing which dwelt upon St. Matthew&rsquo;s mind, and he adapted
+his narrative to it.&nbsp; But, that there is nothing in St.
+Matthew&rsquo;s language which negatives other appearances, or
+which imports that this his appearance to his disciples in
+Galilee, in pursuance of his promise, was his first or only
+appearance, is made pretty evident by St. Mark&rsquo;s Gospel,
+which uses the same terms concerning the appearance in Galilee as
+St. Matthew uses, yet itself records two other appearances prior
+to this: &lsquo;Go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he
+goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said
+unto you&rsquo; (xvi., 7).&nbsp; We might be apt to infer from
+these words, that this was the <i>first</i> time they were to see
+him: at least, we might infer it with as much reason as we draw
+the inference from the same words in Matthew; yet the historian
+himself did not perceive that he was leading his readers to any
+such conclusion, for in the twelfth and two following verses of
+this chapter, he informs us of two appearances, which, by
+comparing the order of events, are shown to have been prior to
+the appearance in Galilee.&nbsp; &lsquo;He appeared in another
+form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country:
+and they went and told it unto the residue: neither believed they
+them.&nbsp; Afterward He appeared unto the eleven as they sat at
+meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief, because they
+believed not them which had seen Him after He was
+risen.&rsquo;&nbsp; Probably the same observation, concerning the
+<i>particular design</i> which guided the historian, may be of
+use in comparing many other passages of the Gospels.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>[My brother&rsquo;s work, which has been interrupted by the
+letter and extract just given, will now be continued.&nbsp; What
+follows should be considered as coming immediately after the
+preceding chapter.&mdash;W.&nbsp; B. O.]</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">But</span> 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 should put an end to such a style of
+argument, and get into a manner which shall commend itself to
+sincere and able adversaries, that I shall not apologise for
+giving them in full here.&nbsp; They refer to the spear wound
+recorded in St. John&rsquo;s Gospel as having been inflicted upon
+the body of our Lord.</p>
+<p>The passage in St. John&rsquo;s Gospel stands thus (John xix.,
+32&ndash;37)&mdash;&ldquo;Then came the soldiers and brake the
+legs of the first and of the other which was crucified with
+Him.&nbsp; But when they came to Jesus and saw that He was dead
+already they brake not His legs: but one of the soldiers with a
+spear pierced His side, and forthwith came there out blood and
+water.&nbsp; And he that saw it bare record, and we know that his
+record is true, and he knoweth that he saith true that ye might
+believe.&nbsp; For these things were done that the Scripture
+should be fulfilled, &lsquo;A bone of Him shall not be
+broken&rsquo; and again another Scripture saith, &lsquo;They
+shall look on Him whom they pierced.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In his note upon the thirty-fourth verse Dean Alford
+writes&mdash;&ldquo;The lance must have penetrated deep, for the
+object was to <i>ensure</i> death.&rdquo;&nbsp; Now what warrant
+is there for either of these assertions?&nbsp; We are told that
+the soldiers saw that our Lord was dead already, and that for
+this reason they did not break his legs: if there had been any
+doubt about His being dead can we believe that they would have
+hesitated?&nbsp; There is ample proof of the completeness of the
+death in the fact that those whose business it was to assure
+themselves of its having taken place were so satisfied that they
+would be at no further trouble; what need to kill a dead
+man?&nbsp; If there had been any question as to the possibility
+of life remaining, it would not have been resolved by the thrust
+of the spear, but in a way which we must shudder to think
+of.&nbsp; It is most painful to have had to write the foregoing
+lines, but are they not called for when we see a man so well
+intentioned and so widely read as the late Dean Alford
+condescending to argument which must only weaken the strength of
+his cause in the eyes of those who have not yet been brought to
+know the blessings and comfort of Christianity?&nbsp; From the
+words of St. John no one can say whether the wound was a deep
+one, or why it was given&mdash;yet the Dean continues, &ldquo;and
+see John xx., 27,&rdquo; thereby implying that the wound must
+have been large enough for Thomas to get his hand into it,
+because our Lord says, &ldquo;reach hither thine hand and thrust
+it into my side.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is simply shocking.&nbsp;
+Words cannot be pressed in this way.&nbsp; Dean Alford then says
+that the spear was thrust &ldquo;probably into the <i>left</i>
+side on account of the position of the soldier&rdquo; (no one can
+arrive at the position of the soldier, and no one would attempt
+to do so, unless actuated by a nervous anxiety to direct the
+spear into the heart of the Redeemer), &ldquo;and of what
+followed&rdquo; (the Dean here implies that the water must have
+come from the pericardium; yet in his next note we are led to
+infer that he rejects this supposition, inasmuch as the quantity
+of water would have been &ldquo;so small as to have scarcely been
+observed&rdquo;).&nbsp; Is this fair and manly argument, and can
+it have any other effect than to increase the scepticism of those
+who doubt?</p>
+<p>Here this note ends.&nbsp; The next begins upon the words
+&ldquo;blood and water.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The spear,&rdquo; says the Dean, &ldquo;perhaps pierced
+the pericardium or envelope of the heart&rdquo; (but why
+introduce a &ldquo;perhaps&rdquo; when there is ample proof of
+the death without it?), &ldquo;in which case a liquid answering
+to the description of water may have&rdquo; (<i>may</i> have)
+&ldquo;flowed with the blood, but the quantity would have been so
+small as scarcely to have been observed&rdquo; (yet in the
+preceding note he has led us to suppose that he thinks the water
+&ldquo;probably&rdquo; came from near the heart).&nbsp; &ldquo;It
+is scarcely possible that the separation of the blood into
+placenta and serum should have taken place so soon, or that if it
+had, it should have been described by an observe as blood and
+water.&nbsp; It is more probable that the fact here so strongly
+testified was a consequence of the extreme exhaustion of the body
+of the Redeemer.&rdquo;&nbsp; (Now if this is the case, the
+spear-wound does not prove the death of Him on whom it was
+inflicted, and Dean Alford has weakened a strong case for
+nothing.)&nbsp; &ldquo;The medical opinions on the subject are
+very various and by no means satisfactory.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Satisfactory!&nbsp; What does Dean Alford mean by
+satisfactory?&nbsp; If the evidence does not go to prove that the
+spear-wound must have been necessarily fatal why not have said so
+at once, and have let the whole matter rest in the obscurity from
+which no human being can remove it.&nbsp; The wound may have been
+severe or may not have been severe, it may have been given in
+mere wanton mockery of the dead King of the Jews, for the
+indignity&rsquo;s sake: 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 the object of its having been recorded is
+no mystery, for we are expressly told that it was in order to
+shew <i>that prophecy was thus fulfilled</i>: the Evangelist
+tells us so in the plainest language: he even goes farther, for
+he says that these things were <i>done</i> for this end (not only
+that they were <i>recorded</i>)&mdash;so that the primary motive
+of the Almighty in causing the soldier to be inspired with a
+desire to inflict the wound is thus graciously vouchsafed to us,
+and we have no reason to harrow our feelings by supposing that a
+deeper thrust was given than would suffice for the fulfilment of
+the prophecy.&nbsp; May we not then well rest thankful with the
+knowledge which the Holy Spirit has seen fit to impart to us,
+without causing the weak brother to offend by our special
+pleading?</p>
+<p>The reader has now seen the two first of Dean Alford&rsquo;s
+notes upon this subject, and I trust he will feel that I have
+used no greater plainness, and spoken with no greater severity
+than the case not only justifies but demands.&nbsp; We can hardly
+suppose that the Dean himself is not firmly convinced that our
+Lord died upon the Cross, but there are millions who are not
+convinced, and whose conviction should be the nearest wish of
+every Christian heart.&nbsp; How deeply, therefore, should we not
+grieve at meeting with a style of argument from the pen of one of
+our foremost champions, which can have no effect but that of
+making the sceptic suspect that the evidences for the death of
+our Lord are felt, even by Christians, to be insufficient.&nbsp;
+For this is what it comes to.</p>
+<p>Let us, however, go on to the note on John xix., 35, that is
+to say on St. John&rsquo;s emphatic assertion of the truth of
+what he is recording.&nbsp; The note stands thus, &ldquo;This
+emphatic assertion of the fact seems rather to regard the whole
+incident than the mere outflowing of the blood and water.&nbsp;
+It was the object of John to shew that the Lord&rsquo;s body was
+a <i>real body</i> and <i>underwent real death</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+(This is not John&rsquo;s own account&mdash;supposing that John
+is the writer of the fourth Gospel&mdash;either of his own object
+in recording, or yet of the object of the wound&rsquo;s having
+been inflicted; his words, as we have seen above, run
+thus:&mdash;&ldquo;and he that saw it bare record, and we know
+that his record is true; and he knoweth that he saith true that
+ye might believe.&nbsp; <i>For these things were done that the
+Scripture should be fulfilled</i> which saith &lsquo;a bone of
+him shall not be broken,&rsquo; and, again, another Scripture
+saith, &lsquo;they shall look upon&rsquo; him whom they
+pierced.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; Who shall dare to say that St. John
+had any other object than to show that the event which he relates
+had been long foreseen, and foretold by the words of the
+Almighty?)&nbsp; And both these were shewn by what took place,
+<i>not so much by the phenomenon of the water and
+blood</i>&rdquo; (then here we have it admitted that so much
+disingenuousness has been resorted to for no advantage, inasmuch
+as the fact of the water and blood having flowed is not <i>per
+se</i> proof of a necessarily fatal wound) &ldquo;as by the
+infliction of such a wound&rdquo; (Such a wound!&nbsp; What can
+be the meaning of this?&nbsp; What has Dean Alford made clear
+about the wound?&nbsp; We know absolutely nothing about the
+severity or intention of the wound, and it is mere baseless
+conjecture and assumption to say that we do; neither do we know
+anything concerning its effect unless it be shewn that the
+issuing of the blood and water <i>prove</i> that death must have
+ensued, and this Dean Alford has just virtually admitted to be
+not shewn), after which, <i>even if death had not taken place
+before</i> (this is intolerable), <i>there could not by any
+possibility be life remaining</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; (The italics on
+this page are mine.)</p>
+<p>With this climax of presumptuous assertion these disgraceful
+notes are ended.&nbsp; They have shewn clearly that the wound
+does not in itself prove the death: they shew no less clearly
+that the Dean does not consider that the death is proved beyond
+possibility of doubt <i>without</i> the wound; what therefore
+should be the legitimate conclusion?&nbsp; Surely that we have no
+proof of the completeness of Christ&rsquo;s death upon the
+Cross&mdash;or in other words no proof of His having died at
+all!&nbsp; Couple this with the notes upon the Resurrection
+considered above, and we feel rather as though we were in the
+hands of some Jesuitical unbeliever, who was trying to undermine
+our faith in our most precious convictions under the guise of
+defending them, than in those of one whom it is almost impossible
+to suspect of such any design.&nbsp; What should we say if we had
+found Newton, Adam Smith or Darwin, arguing for their opinions
+thus?&nbsp; What should we think concerning any scientific cause
+which we found thus defended?&nbsp; We should exceedingly well
+know that it was lost.&nbsp; And yet our leading theologians are
+to be applauded and set in high places for condescending to such
+sharp practice as would be despised even by a disreputable
+attorney, as too transparently shallow to be of the smallest use
+to him.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s body was wounded more severely, or less
+severely, as the case may be, with the point of a spear, that
+from this wound there flowed something which to the eyes of the
+writer resembled blood and water, and that the whole was done in
+order that a well-known prophecy might be fulfilled.&nbsp; Yet
+his sentences in reference to this fact being ended, without his
+having added one iota to our knowledge upon the subject, the Dean
+gravely winds up by throwing a doubt upon the certainty of our
+Lord&rsquo;s death which was not felt by a single one of those
+upon the spot, and resting his clenching proof of its having
+taken place upon a wound, which he has just virtually admitted to
+have not been necessarily fatal.&nbsp; Nothing can be more
+deplorable either as morality or policy.</p>
+<p>Yet the Dean is justified by the event.&nbsp; One would have
+thought he could have been guilty of nothing short of infatuation
+in hoping that the above notes would pass muster with any
+ordinarily intelligent person, but he knew that he might safely
+trust to the force of habit and prejudice in the minds of his
+readers, and his confidence has not been misplaced.&nbsp; Of all
+those engaged in the training of our young men for Holy Orders,
+of all our Bishops and clergy and tutors at colleges, whose very
+profession it is to be lovers of truth and candour, who are paid
+for being so, and who are mere shams and wolves in sheep&rsquo;s
+clothing if they are not ever on the look-out for falsehood, to
+make war upon it as the enemy of our souls&mdash;not one,
+<i>no</i>, <i>not a single one</i>, so far as I know, has raised
+his voice in protest.&nbsp; If a man has not lost his power of
+weeping let him weep for this; if there is any who realises the
+crime of self-deception, as perhaps the most subtle and hideous
+of all forms of sin, let him lift up his voice and proclaim it
+now; for the times are not of peace, but of a sowing of wind for
+the reaping of whirlwinds, and of the calm that is the centre of
+the hurricane.</p>
+<p>Either Christianity is the truth of truths&mdash;the one which
+should in this world overmaster all others in the thoughts of all
+men, and compared with which all other truths are insignificant
+except as grouping themselves around it&mdash;or it is at the
+best a mistake which should be set right as soon as
+possible.&nbsp; There is no middle course.&nbsp; Either Jesus
+Christ was the Son of God, or He was not.&nbsp; If He was, His
+great Father forbid that we should juggle in order to prove Him
+so&mdash;that we should higgle for an inch of wound more, or an
+inch less, and haggle for the root &nu;&upsilon;y in the Greek
+word &epsilon;&nu;&upsilon;&xi;&epsilon;.&nbsp; Better admit that
+the death of Christ must be ever a matter of doubt, should so
+great a sacrifice be demanded of us, than go near to the handling
+of a lie in order to make assurance doubly sure.&nbsp; No
+truthful mind can doubt that the cause of Christ is far better
+served by exposing an insufficient argument than by silently
+passing it over, or else that the cause of Christ is one to be
+attacked and not defended.</p>
+<h3><a name="page170"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+170</span>Chapter VII<br />
+Difficulties felt by our Opponents</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> are some who avoid all close
+examination into the circumstances attendant upon the death of
+our Lord, using the plea that however excellent a quality
+intellect may be, and however desirable that the facts connected
+with the Crucifixion should be intelligently considered, yet that
+after all it is spiritual insight which is wanted for a just
+appreciation of spiritual truths, and that the way to be
+preserved from error is to cultivate holiness and purity of
+life.&nbsp; This is well for those who are already satisfied with
+the evidences for their convictions.&nbsp; We could hardly give
+them any better advice than simply to &ldquo;depart from evil, do
+good, seek peace and ensue it&rdquo; (Psalm xxxiv., 14), if we
+could only make sure that their duty would never lead them into
+contact with those who hold the external evidences of
+Christianity to be insufficient.&nbsp; When, however, they meet
+with any of these unhappy persons they will find their influence
+for good paralysed; for unbelievers do not understand what is
+meant by appealing to their spiritual insight as a thing which
+can in any way affect the evidence for or against an alleged fact
+in history&mdash;or at any rate as forming evidence for a fact
+which they believe to be in itself improbable and unsupported by
+external proof.&nbsp; They have not got any spiritual insight in
+matters of this sort; nor, indeed, do they recognise what is
+meant by the words at all, unless they be interpreted as
+self-respect and regard for the feelings and usages of other
+people.&nbsp; What spiritual insight they have, they express by
+the very nearly synonymous terms, &ldquo;current feeling,&rdquo;
+or &ldquo;common sense,&rdquo; and however deep their reverence
+for these things may be, they will never admit that goodness or
+right feeling can guide them into intuitive accuracy upon a
+matter of history.&nbsp; On the contrary, in any such case they
+believe that sentiment is likely to mislead, and that the
+well-disciplined intellect is alone trustworthy.&nbsp; The
+question is, whether it is worth while to try and rescue those
+who are in this condition or not.&nbsp; If it <i>is</i> worth
+while, we must deal with them according to their sense of right
+and not ours: in other words, if we meet with an unbeliever we
+must not expect him to accept our faith unless we take much pains
+with him, and are prepared to make great sacrifice of our own
+peace and patience.</p>
+<p>Yet how many shrink from this, and think that they are doing
+God service by shrinking; the only thing from which they should
+really shrink, is the falsehood which has overlaid the best
+established fact in all history with so much sophistry, that even
+our own side has come to fear that there must be something
+lurking behind which will not bear daylight; to such a pass have
+we been brought by the desire to prove too much.</p>
+<p>Now for the comfort of those who may feel an uneasy sense of
+dread, as though any close examination of the events connected
+with the Crucifixion might end in suggesting a natural instead of
+a miraculous explanation of the Resurrection, for the comfort of
+such&mdash;and they indeed stand in need of comfort&mdash;let me
+say at once that the ablest of our adversaries would tell them
+that they need be under no such fear.&nbsp; Strauss himself
+admits that our Lord died upon the Cross; he does not even
+attempt to dispute it, but writes as though he were well aware
+that there was no room for any difference of opinion about the
+matter.&nbsp; He has therefore been compelled to adopt the
+hallucination theory, with a result which we have already
+considered.&nbsp; Yet who can question that Strauss would have
+maintained the position that our Lord did not die upon the Cross,
+unless he had felt that it was one in which he would not be able
+to secure the support even of those who were inclined to
+disbelieve?&nbsp; We cannot doubt that the conviction of the
+reality of our Lord&rsquo;s death has been forced upon him by a
+weight of testimony which, like St. Paul, he has found himself
+utterly unable to resist.</p>
+<p>Here then, we might almost pause.&nbsp; Strauss admits that
+our Lord died upon the Cross.&nbsp; Yet can the reader help
+feeling that the vindication of the reality of our Lord&rsquo;s
+reappearances, and the refutation of Strauss&rsquo;s theories
+with which this work opened, was triumphant and conclusive?&nbsp;
+Then what follows?&nbsp; That Christ died and rose again!&nbsp;
+The central fact of our faith is proved.&nbsp; It is proved
+externally by the most solid and irrefragable proofs, such as
+should appeal even to minds which reject all spiritual evidence,
+and recognise no canons of investigation but those of the purest
+reason.</p>
+<p>But anything and everything is believable concerning one whose
+resurrection from death to life has been established.&nbsp; What
+need, then, to enter upon any consideration of the other
+miracles?&nbsp; Of the Ascension?&nbsp; Of the descent of the
+Holy Spirit?&nbsp; Who can feel difficulty about these
+things?&nbsp; Would not the miracle rather be that they should
+<i>not</i> have happened!&nbsp; May we not now let the wings of
+our soul expand, and soar into the heaven of heavens, to the
+footstool of the Throne of Grace, secure that we have earned the
+right to hope and to glory by having consented to the pain of
+understanding?</p>
+<p>We may: and I have given the reader this foretaste of the
+prize which he may justly claim, lest he should be swallowed up
+in overmuch grief at the journey which is yet before him ere he
+shall have done all which may justly be required of him.&nbsp;
+For it is not enough that his own sense of security should be
+perfected.&nbsp; This is well; but let him also think of
+others.</p>
+<p>What then is their main difficulty, now that it has been shewn
+that the reappearances of our Lord were not due to
+hallucination?</p>
+<p>I propose to shew this by collecting from all the sources with
+which I was familiar in former years, and throwing the whole
+together as if it were my own.&nbsp; I shall spare no pains to
+make the argument tell with as much force as fairness will
+allow.&nbsp; I shall be compelled to be very brief, but the
+unbeliever will not, I hope, feel that anything of importance to
+his side has been passed over.&nbsp; The believer, on the other
+hand, will be thankful both to know the worst and to see how
+shallow and impotent it will appear when it comes to be
+tested.&nbsp; Oh! that this had been done at the beginning of the
+controversy, instead of (as I heartily trust) at the end of
+it.</p>
+<p>Our opponents, therefore, may be supposed to speak somewhat
+after the following manner:&mdash;&ldquo;Granted,&rdquo; they
+will say, &ldquo;for the sake of argument, that Jesus Christ did
+reappear alive after his Crucifixion; it does not follow that we
+should at once necessarily admit that his reappearance was due to
+miracle.&nbsp; What was enough, and reasonably enough, to make
+the first Christians accept the Resurrection, and hence the other
+miracles of Christ, is not enough and ought not to be enough to
+make men do so now.&nbsp; If we were to hear now of the
+reappearance of a man who had been believed to be dead, our first
+impulse would be to learn the when and where of the death, and
+the when and where of the first reappearance.&nbsp; What had been
+the nature of the death?&nbsp; What conclusive proof was there
+that the death had been actual and complete?&nbsp; What
+examination had been made of the body?&nbsp; And to whom had it
+been delivered on the completeness of the death having been
+established?&nbsp; How long had the body been in the
+grave&mdash;if buried?&nbsp; What was the condition of the grave
+on its being first revisited?&nbsp; It is plain to any one that
+at the present day we should ask the above questions with the
+most jealous scrutiny and that our opinion of the character of
+the reappearance would depend upon the answers which could be
+given to them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it is no less plain that the distance of the
+supposed event from our own time and country is no bar to the
+necessity for the same questions being as jealously asked
+concerning it, as would be asked if it were alleged to have
+happened recently and nearer home.&nbsp; On the contrary,
+distance of time and space introduces an additional necessity for
+caution.&nbsp; It is one thing to know that the first Christians
+unanimously believed that their master had miraculously risen
+from death to life; it is another to know their reasons for so
+thinking.&nbsp; Times have changed, and tests of truth are
+infinitely better understood, so that the reasonable of those
+days is reasonable to us no longer.&nbsp; Nor would it be enough
+that the answers given could be just strained into so much
+agreement with one another as to allow of a <i>modus vivendi</i>
+between them, <i>and not to exclude the possibility of death</i>,
+<i>they must exclude all possibility of life having remained</i>,
+or we should not hesitate for a moment about refusing to believe
+that the reappearance had been miraculous: indeed, so long as any
+chink or cranny or loophole for escape from the miraculous was
+afforded to us, we should unhesitatingly escape by it; this, at
+least, is the course which would be adopted by any judge and jury
+of sensible men if such a case were to come before their
+unprejudiced minds in the common course of affairs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We should not refuse to believe in a miracle even now,
+if it were supported by such evidence as was considered to be
+conclusive by the bench of judges and by the leading scientific
+men of the day: in such a case as this we should feel bound to
+accept it; but we cannot believe in a miracle, no matter how
+deeply it has been engrained into the creeds of the civilised
+world, merely because it was believed by &lsquo;unlettered
+fishermen&rsquo; two thousand years ago.&nbsp; This is not a
+source from which such an event as a miracle should be received
+without the closest investigation.&nbsp; We know, indeed, that
+the Apostles were sincere men, and that they firmly believed that
+Jesus Christ had risen from the dead; their lives prove their
+faith; but we cannot forget that the fact itself of
+Christ&rsquo;s having been crucified and afterwards seen alive,
+would be enough, under the circumstances, to incline the men of
+that day to believe that he had died and had been miraculously
+restored to life, although we should ourselves be bound to make a
+far more searching inquiry before we could arrive at any such
+conclusion.&nbsp; A miracle was not and could not be to them,
+what it is and ought to be to ourselves&mdash;a matter to be
+regarded <i>a priori</i> with the very gravest suspicion.&nbsp;
+To them it was what it is now to the lower and more ignorant
+classes of Irish, French, Spanish and Italian peasants: that is
+to say, a thing which was always more or less likely to happen,
+and which hardly demanded more than a <i>prim&acirc; facie</i>
+case in order to establish its credibility.&nbsp; If we would
+know what the Apostles felt concerning a miracle, we must ask
+ourselves how the more ignorant peasants of to-day feel: if we do
+this we shall have to admit that a miracle might have been
+accepted upon very insufficient grounds, and that, once accepted,
+it would not have had one-hundredth part so good a chance of
+being refuted as it would have now.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It should be borne in mind, and is too often lost sight
+of, that <i>we have no account of the Resurrection from any
+source whatever</i>.&nbsp; We have accounts of the visit of
+certain women to a tomb which they found empty; but this is not
+an account of a resurrection.&nbsp; We are told that Jesus Christ
+was seen alive after being thought to have been dead, but this
+again is not an account of a resurrection.&nbsp; It is a
+statement of a fact, but it is not an account of the
+circumstances which attended that fact.&nbsp; In the story told
+by Matthew we have what comes nearest to an account of the
+Resurrection, but even here the principal figure is wanting; the
+angel rolls away the stone and sits upon it, but we hear nothing
+about the body of Christ emerging from the tomb; we only meet
+with this, when we come to the Italian painters.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Moreover, St. Matthew&rsquo;s account is utterly
+incredible from first to last; we are therefore thrown back upon
+the other three Evangelists, none of whom professes to give us
+the smallest information as to the time and manner of
+Christ&rsquo;s Resurrection.&nbsp; <i>There is nothing in any of
+their accounts to preclude his having risen within two hours from
+his having been laid in the tomb</i>.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If a man of note were condemned to death, crucified and
+afterwards seen alive, the almost instantaneous conclusion in the
+days of the Apostles, and in such minds as theirs, would be that
+he had risen from the dead; but the almost instantaneous
+conclusion now, among all whose judgement would carry the
+smallest weight, would be that he had never died&mdash;that there
+must have been some mistake.&nbsp; Children and inexperienced
+persons believe readily in all manner of improbabilities and
+impossibilities, which when they become older and wiser they
+cannot conceive their having ever seriously accepted.&nbsp; As
+with men, so with ages; an unusual train of events brings about
+unusual results, whereon the childlike age turns instinctively to
+miracle for a solution of the difficulty.&nbsp; In the days of
+Christ men would ask for evidence of the Crucifixion and the
+reappearance; when these two points had been established they
+would have been satisfied&mdash;not unnaturally&mdash;that a
+great miracle had been performed: but no sane man would be
+contented now with the evidence that was sufficient then, any
+more than he would be content to accept many things which a child
+must take upon authority, and authority only.&nbsp; <i>We</i>
+ought to require the most ample evidence that not only the
+appearance of death, but death itself, must have inevitably
+ensued upon the Crucifixion, and if this were not forthcoming we
+should not for a moment hesitate about refusing to believe that
+the reappearance was miraculous.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And this is what would most assuredly be done now by
+impartial examiners&mdash;by men of scientific mind who had no
+wish either to believe or disbelieve except according to the
+evidence; but even now, if their affections and their hopes of a
+glorious kingdom in a world beyond the grave were enlisted on the
+side of the miracle, it would go hard with the judgement of most
+men.&nbsp; How much more would this be so, if they had believed
+from earliest childhood that miracles were still occasionally
+worked in England, and that a few generations ago they had been
+much more signal and common?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can we wonder then, if we ourselves feel so strongly
+concerning events which are hull down upon the horizon of time,
+that those who lived in the very thick of them should have been
+possessed with an all absorbing ecstasy or even frenzy of
+excitement?&nbsp; Assuredly there is no blame on the score of
+credulity to be attached to those who propagated the Christian
+religion, but the beliefs which were natural and lawful to them,
+are, if natural, yet not lawful to ourselves: they should be
+resisted: they are neither right nor wise, and do not form any
+legitimate ground for faith: if faith means only the believing
+facts of history upon insufficient evidence, we deny the merit of
+faith; on the contrary, we regard it as one of the most
+deplorable of all errors&mdash;as sapping the foundations of all
+the moral and intellectual faculties.&nbsp; It is grossly immoral
+to violate one&rsquo;s inner sense of truth by assenting to
+things which, though they may appear to be supported by much, are
+still not supported by enough.&nbsp; The man who can knowingly
+submit to such a derogation from the rights of his self-respect,
+deserves the injury to his mental eye-sight which such a course
+will surely bring with it.&nbsp; But the mischief will
+unfortunately not be confined to himself; it will devolve upon
+all who are ill-fated enough to be in his power; he will be
+reckless of the harm he works them, provided he can keep its
+consequences from being immediately offensive to himself.&nbsp;
+No: if a good thing can be believed legitimately, let us believe
+it and be thankful, otherwise the goodness will have departed out
+of it; it is no longer ours; we have no right to it, and shall
+suffer for it, we and our children, if we try to keep it.&nbsp;
+It has been said that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
+children&rsquo;s teeth are set on edge, but, more truly, it is
+the eating of sweet and stolen fruit by the fathers that sets the
+teeth of the children jarring.&nbsp; Let those who love their
+children look to this, for on their own account they may be
+mainly trusted to avoid the sour.&nbsp; Hitherto the intensity of
+the belief of the Apostles has been the mainstay of our own
+belief.&nbsp; But that mainstay is now no longer strong
+enough.&nbsp; A rehearing of the evidence is imperatively
+demanded, that it may either be confirmed or
+overthrown.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It cannot be denied that there is much in the above with which
+all true Christians will agree, and little to find fault with
+except the self-complacency which would seem to imply that common
+sense and plain dealing belong exclusively to the unbelieving
+side.&nbsp; It is time that this spirit should be protested
+against not in word only but in deed.&nbsp; The fact is, that
+both we and our opponents are agreed that nothing should be
+believed unless it can be proved to be true.&nbsp; We repudiate
+the idea that faith means the accepting historical facts upon
+evidence which is insufficient to establish them.&nbsp; We do not
+call this faith; we call it credulity, and oppose it to the
+utmost of our power.</p>
+<p>Our opponents imply that we regard as a virtue well-pleasing
+in the sight of God, and dignify with the name of faith, a state
+of mind which turns out to be nothing but a willingness to stand
+by all sorts of wildly improbable stories which have reached us
+from a remote age and country, and which, if true, must lead us
+to think otherwise of the whole course of nature than we should
+think if we were left to ourselves.&nbsp; This accusation is
+utterly false and groundless.&nbsp; Faith is the &ldquo;evidence
+of things not seen,&rdquo; but it is not &ldquo;insufficient
+evidence for things alleged to have been seen.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is
+&ldquo;the substance of things hoped for,&rdquo; but
+&ldquo;reasonably hoped for&rdquo; was unquestionably intended by
+the Apostle.&nbsp; We base our faith in the deeper mysteries of
+our religion, as in the nature of the Trinity and the sacramental
+graces, upon the certainty that other things which are within the
+grasp of our reason can be shewn to be beyond dispute.&nbsp; We
+know that Christ died and rose again; therefore we believe
+whatever He sees fit to tell us, and follow Him, or endeavour to
+follow Him, whereinsoever He commands us, but we are not required
+to take both the commands of the Mediator <i>and His
+credentials</i> upon faith.&nbsp; It is because certain things
+within our comprehension are capable of the most irrefragable
+proof, that certain others out of it may justly be required to be
+believed, and indeed cannot be disbelieved without contumacy and
+presumption.&nbsp; And this applies to a certain extent to the
+credentials also: for although no man should be captious, nor ask
+for more evidence than would satisfy a well-disciplined mind
+concerning the truth of any ordinary fact (as one who not
+contented with the evidence of a seal, a handwriting and a matter
+not at variance with probability, would nevertheless refuse to
+act upon instructions because he had not with his own eyes
+actually seen the sender write and sign and seal), yet it is both
+reasonable and indeed necessary that a certain amount of care
+should be taken before the credentials are accepted.&nbsp; If our
+opponents mean no more than this we are at one with them, and may
+allow them to proceed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Turn then,&rdquo; they say, &ldquo;to the account of
+the events which are alleged to have happened upon the morning of
+the Resurrection, as given in the fourth Gospel: and assume for
+the sake of the argument that that account, if not from
+John&rsquo;s own hand, is nevertheless from a Johannean source,
+and virtually the work of the Apostle.&nbsp; The account runs as
+follows:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene
+while it was yet dark unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone
+taken away from the sepulchre.&nbsp; Then she runneth and cometh
+to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and
+saith unto them, &lsquo;They have taken away the Lord out of the
+sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid Him.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Peter therefore went forth and that other disciple, and came to
+the sepulchre.&nbsp; So they both ran together: and the other
+disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.&nbsp;
+And he stooping down and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying,
+yet went he not in.&nbsp; Then cometh Simon Peter following him
+and went into the sepulchre and seeth the linen clothes lie, and
+the napkin that was about His head not lying with the linen
+clothes but wrapped together in a place by itself.&nbsp; Then
+went in also that other disciple, which came first to the
+sepulchre, and he saw and believed.&nbsp; For as yet they knew
+not the Scripture that he must rise from the dead.&nbsp; Then the
+disciples went away again to their own home.&nbsp; But Mary stood
+without 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 Jesus had lain, and they say unto her, &lsquo;Woman,
+why weepest thou?&rsquo;&nbsp; She saith unto them,
+&lsquo;Because they have taken away my Lord and I know not where
+they have laid him.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then Mary sees Jesus himself, but does not at first
+recognise him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, let us see what the above amounts to, and,
+dividing it into two parts, let us examine first what we are told
+as having come actually under John&rsquo;s own observation, and,
+secondly, what happened afterwards.</p>
+<p>I.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is clear that Mary had seen nothing
+miraculous before she came running to the two Apostles, Peter and
+John.&nbsp; She had found the tomb empty when she reached
+it.&nbsp; She did not know where the body of her Lord then was,
+<i>nor was there anything to shew how long it had been
+removed</i>: all she knew was that within thirty-six hours from
+the time of its having been laid in the tomb it had disappeared,
+but how much earlier it had been gone neither did she know, nor
+shall we.&nbsp; Peter and John went into the sepulchre and
+thoroughly examined it: they saw no angel, nor anything
+approaching to the miraculous, simply the grave clothes (<i>which
+were probably of white linen</i>), lying <i>in two separate
+places</i>.&nbsp; Then, <i>and not till then</i>, do they appear
+to have entertained their first belief or hope that Christ might
+have risen from the dead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is plain and credible; but it amounts to an empty
+tomb, and to an empty tomb only.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here, for a moment, we must pause.&nbsp; Had these men
+but a few weeks previously seen Lazarus raised from the
+corruption of the grave&mdash;to say nothing of other
+resurrections from the dead?&nbsp; Had they seen their master
+override every known natural law, and prove that, as far as he
+was concerned, all human experience was worthless, by walking
+upon rough water, by actually talking to a storm of wind and
+making it listen to him, by feeding thousands with a few loaves,
+and causing the fragments that remained after all had eaten, to
+be more than the food originally provided?&nbsp; Had they seen
+events of this kind continually happening for a space of some two
+years, and finally had they seen their master transfigured,
+conversing with the greatest of their prophets (men who had been
+dead for ages), and recognised by a voice from heaven as the Son
+of the Almighty, and had they also heard anything approaching to
+an announcement that he should himself rise from the
+dead&mdash;or had they not?&nbsp; They might have seen the
+raising of Lazarus and the rest of the miracles, but might not
+have anticipated that Christ himself would rise, for want of any
+announcement that this should be so; or, again, they might have
+heard a prophecy of his Resurrection from the lips of Christ, but
+disbelieved it for the want of any previous miracles which should
+convince them that the prophecy came from no ordinary person; so
+that their not having expected the Resurrection is explicable by
+giving up either the prophecies, or the miracles, but it is
+impossible to believe that <i>in spite both of the miracles and
+the prophecies</i>, the Apostles should have been still without
+any expectation of the Resurrection.&nbsp; If they had both seen
+the miracles and heard the prophecies, they must have been in a
+state of inconceivably agitated excitement in anticipation of
+their master&rsquo;s reappearance.&nbsp; And this they were not;
+on the contrary, they were expecting nothing of the kind.&nbsp;
+The condition of mind ascribed to them considering their supposed
+surroundings, is one which belongs to the drama only; it is not
+of nature: it is so utterly at variance with all human experience
+that it should be dismissed at once as incredible.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it is very credible if Christ was seen alive after
+his Crucifixion, and his reappearance, though due to natural
+causes, was once believed to be miraculous, that this one
+seemingly well substantiated miracle should become the parent of
+all the others, and of the prophecies of the Resurrection.&nbsp;
+Thirty years in all probability elapsed between the reappearances
+of Christ and the earliest of the four Gospels; thirty years of
+oral communication and spiritual enthusiasm, among an oriental
+people, and in an unscientific age; an age by which the idea of
+an interference with the modes of the universe from a point
+outside of itself, was taken as a matter of course; an age which
+believed in an anthropomorphic Deity who had back parts, which
+Moses had been allowed to see through the hand of God; an age
+which, over and above all this, was at the time especially
+convulsed with expectations of deliverance from the Roman
+yoke.&nbsp; Have we not here a soil suitable for the growth of
+miracles, if the seed once fell upon it?&nbsp; Under such
+conditions they would even spring up of themselves, seedless.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Once let the reappearances of Christ have been believed
+to be miraculous (and under all the circumstances they might
+easily have been believed to be so, though due to natural
+causes), and it is not wonderful that, in such an age and among
+such a people, the other miracles and the prophecies of the
+Resurrection should have become current within thirty
+years.&nbsp; Even we ourselves, with all our incalculably greater
+advantages, could not withstand so great a temptation to let our
+wish become father to our thoughts.&nbsp; If we had been the
+especially favoured friends of one whom we believed to have died,
+but who yet was not to beholden by death, no matter how careful
+and judicially minded we might be by nature, we should be blind
+to everything except the fact that we had once been the chosen
+companions of an immortal.&nbsp; There lives no one who could
+withstand the intoxication of such an idea.&nbsp; A single
+well-substantiated miracle 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 sense of the continuity of nature, in which
+our judgements are, consciously or unconsciously, anchored; but
+if we were very closely connected with it in our own persons, we
+should dwell upon the recollection of it and on little else.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Few of us can realise what happened so very long
+ago.&nbsp; Men believe in the Christian miracles, though they
+would reject the notion of a modern miracle almost with ridicule,
+and would hardly even examine the evidence in its favour.&nbsp;
+But the Christian miracles stand in their minds as things apart;
+their <i>prestige</i> is greater than that attaching to any other
+events in the whole history of mankind.&nbsp; They are hallowed
+by the unhesitating belief of many, many generations.&nbsp; Every
+circumstance which should induce us to bow to their authority
+surrounds them with a bulwark of defences which may make us well
+believe that they must be impregnable, and sacred from
+attack.&nbsp; Small wonder then that the many should still
+believe them.&nbsp; Nevertheless they do not believe them so
+fully, nor nearly so fully, as they think they do.&nbsp; For even
+the strongest imagination can travel but a very little way beyond
+a man&rsquo;s own experience; it will not bear the burden of
+carrying him to a remote age and country; it will flag, wander
+and dream; it will not answer truly, but will lay hold of the
+most obvious absurdity, and present it impudently to its tired
+master, who will accept it gladly and have done with it.&nbsp;
+Even recollection fails, but how much more imagination!&nbsp; It
+is a high flight of imagination to be able to realise how weak
+imagination is.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We cannot therefore judge what would be the effect of
+immediate contact even with the wild hope of a miracle, from our
+conventional acceptance of the Christian miracles.&nbsp; If we
+would realise this we must look to modern alleged
+miracles&mdash;to the enthusiasm of the Irish and American
+revivals, when mind inflames mind till strong men burst into
+hysterical tears like children; we must look for it in the effect
+produced by the supposed Irvingite miracles on those who believed
+in them, or in the miracles that followed the Port Royal miracle
+of the holy thorn.&nbsp; There never was a miracle solitary yet:
+one will soon become the parent of many.&nbsp; The minds of those
+who have believed in a single miracle as having come within their
+own experience become ecstatic; so deeply impressed are they with
+the momentous character of what they have known, that their power
+of enlisting sympathy becomes immeasurably greater than that of
+men who have never believed themselves to have come into contact
+with the miraculous; their deep conviction carries others along
+with it, and so the belief is strengthened till adverse
+influences check it, or till it reaches a pitch of grotesque
+horror, as in the case of the later Jansenist miracles.&nbsp;
+There is nothing, therefore, extraordinary in the gradual
+development within thirty years of all the Christian miracles, if
+the Resurrection were once held to be well substantiated; and
+there is nothing wonderful, under the circumstances, in the
+reappearance of Christ alive after his Crucifixion having been
+assigned to miracle.&nbsp; He had already made sufficient
+impression upon his followers to require but little help from
+circumstances.&nbsp; He had not so impressed them as to want
+<i>no</i> help from any supposed miracle, but nevertheless any
+strange event in connection with him would pass muster, with
+little or no examination, as being miraculous.&nbsp; He had
+undoubtedly professed himself to be, and had been half accepted
+as, the promised Messiah.&nbsp; He had no less undoubtedly
+appeared to be dead, and had been believed to be so both by
+friends and foes.&nbsp; Let us also grant that he reappeared
+alive.&nbsp; Would it, then, be very astonishing that the little
+missing link in the completeness of the chain of
+evidence&mdash;<i>absolute certainty concerning the actuality of
+the death</i>&mdash;should have been allowed to drop out of
+sight?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Round such a centre, and in such an age, the other
+miracles would spring up spontaneously, and be accepted the
+moment that they arose; there is nothing in this which is foreign
+to the known tendencies of the human mind, but there would be
+something utterly foreign to all we know of human nature, in the
+fact of men not anticipating that Christ would rise, if they had
+already seen him raise others from the dead and work the miracles
+ascribed to him, and if they had also heard him prophesy that he
+should himself rise from the dead.&nbsp; In fact nothing can
+explain the universally recorded incredulity of the Apostles as
+to the reappearance of Christ, except the fact that they had
+never seen him work a single miracle, or else that they had never
+heard him say anything which could lead them to suppose that he
+was to rise from the dead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are therefore not unwilling to accept the facts
+recorded in the fourth Gospel, in so far as they inform us of
+things which came under the knowledge of the writer.&nbsp; Mary
+found the tomb empty.&nbsp; Ignorant alike of what had taken
+place and of what was going to happen, she came to Peter and John
+to tell them that the body was gone; this was all she knew.&nbsp;
+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 have flashed upon
+their minds, that the aspirations which they had already indulged
+in were to prove well founded.&nbsp; Within an hour or two Christ
+was seen alive, nor can we wonder if the years which intervened
+between the morning of the Resurrection and the writing of the
+fourth Gospel, should have sufficed to make the writer believe
+that John had had an actual belief in the Resurrection, while in
+truth he had only wildly hoped it.&nbsp; This much is at any rate
+plain, that neither he nor Peter had as yet heard any clearly
+intelligible prophecy that their master should rise from the
+dead.&nbsp; Whatever subsequent interpretation may have been
+given to some of the sayings of Jesus Christ, no saying was yet
+known which would of itself have suggested any such
+inference.&nbsp; We may justly doubt the caution and accuracy of
+the first founders of Christianity, without, even in our hearts,
+for one moment impugning the honesty of their intentions.&nbsp;
+We are ready to admit that had we been in their places we should
+in all likelihood have felt, believed, and, we will hope, acted
+as they did; but we cannot and will not admit, in the face of so
+much evidence to the contrary, that they were superior to the
+intelligence of their times, or, in other words, that they were
+capable critics of an event, in which both their feelings and the
+<i>prim&acirc; facie</i> view of the facts would be so likely to
+mislead them.</p>
+<p>II.&nbsp; &ldquo;Turning now to the narrative of what passed
+when Peter and John were gone, we find that Mary, stooping down,
+looked through her tears into the darkness of the tomb, and saw
+two angels clothed in white, who asked her why she wept.&nbsp; We
+must remember the wide difference between believing what the
+writer of the fourth Gospel tells us that John saw, and what he
+tells us that Mary Magdalene saw.&nbsp; All we know on this point
+is that he believed that Mary had spoken truly.&nbsp; Peter and
+John were men, they went into the tomb itself, and we may say for
+a certainty that they saw no angel, nor indeed anything at all,
+but the grave clothes (<i>which were probably of white
+linen</i>), lying <i>in two separate places</i> within it.&nbsp;
+Mary was a woman&mdash;a woman whose parallel we must look for
+among Spanish or Italian women of the lower orders at the present
+day; she had, we are elsewhere told, been at one time possessed
+with devils; she was in a state of tearful excitement, and
+looking through her tears from light into comparative
+darkness.&nbsp; Is it possible not to remember what Peter and
+John <i>did</i> see when they were in the tomb?&nbsp; Is it
+possible not to surmise that Mary in good truth saw nothing
+more?&nbsp; She thought she saw more, but the excitement under
+which she was labouring at the time, an excitement which would
+increase tenfold after she had seen Christ (as she did
+immediately afterwards and before she had had time to tell her
+story), would easily distort either her vision or her memory, or
+both.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The evidence of women of her class&mdash;especially
+when they are highly excited&mdash;is not to be relied upon in a
+matter of such importance and difficulty as a miracle.&nbsp; Who
+would dare to insist upon such evidence now?&nbsp; And why should
+it be considered as any more trustworthy eighteen hundred years
+ago?&nbsp; We are indeed told that the angels spoke to her; but
+the speech was very short; the angels simply ask her why she
+weeps; she answers them as though it were the common question of
+common people, and then leaves them.&nbsp; This is in itself
+incredible; but it is not incredible that if Mary looking into
+the tomb saw two white objects within, she should have drawn back
+affrighted, and that her imagination, thrown into a fever by her
+subsequent interview with Christ, should have rendered her
+utterly incapable of recollecting the true facts of the case; or,
+again, it is not incredible that she should have been believed to
+have seen things which she never did see.&nbsp; All we can say
+for certain is that before the fourth Gospel was written, and
+probably shortly after the first reappearance of Christ, Mary
+Magdalene believed, or was thought to have believed, that she had
+seen angels in the tomb; and this being so, the development of
+the short and pointless question attributed to
+them&mdash;possibly as much due to the eager cross-questioning of
+others as to Mary herself&mdash;is not surprising.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Before the Sunday of the Resurrection was over, the
+facts as derivable from the fourth Gospel would stand thus.&nbsp;
+Jesus Christ, who was supposed to have been verily and indeed
+dead, was known to be alive again.&nbsp; He had been seen, and
+heard to speak.&nbsp; He had been seen by those who were already
+prepared to accept him as their leader, and whose previous
+education, and tone of mind, would lead them rather to an excess
+of faith in a miracle, than of scepticism concerning its
+miraculous character.&nbsp; The Apostles would be in no impartial
+nor sceptical mood when they saw that Christ was alive.&nbsp; The
+miracle was too near themselves&mdash;too fascinating in its
+supposed consequences for themselves&mdash;to allow of their
+going into curious questions about the completeness of the
+death.&nbsp; The Master whom they had loved, and in whom they had
+hoped, had been crucified and was alive again.&nbsp; Is it a
+harsh or strained supposition, that what would have assuredly
+been enough for ourselves, if we had known and loved Christ and
+had been attuned in mind as the Apostles were, should also have
+been enough for them?&nbsp; Who can say so?&nbsp; The nature of
+our belief in our Master would have been changed once and for
+ever; and so we find it to have been with the Christian
+Apostles.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Over and above the reappearance of Christ, there would
+also be a report (probably current upon the very Sunday of the
+Resurrection), that Mary Magdalene had seen a vision of angels in
+the tomb in which Christ&rsquo;s body had been laid; and this,
+though a matter of small moment in comparison with the
+reappearance of Christ himself, will nevertheless concern us
+nearly when we come to consider the narratives of the other
+Evangelists.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a name="page194"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+194</span>Chapter VIII<br />
+The Preceding Chapter Continued</h3>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Let</span> us now turn to
+Luke.&nbsp; His account runs as follows:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Now upon the first day of the week, very early
+in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre bringing the spices
+which they had prepared, and certain others with them.&nbsp;
+<i>And they found the stone rolled away from the
+sepulchre</i>.&nbsp; <i>And they entered in</i>, <i>and found not
+the body of the Lord Jesus</i>.&nbsp; And it came to pass as they
+were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in
+shining garments, <i>and as they were afraid</i>, <i>and bowed
+their faces to the earth</i>, they said unto them, &ldquo;<i>Why
+seek ye the living among the dead</i>?&nbsp; He is not here, but
+is risen: <i>remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in
+Galilee</i>, saying, &lsquo;<i>The Son of Man must be delivered
+into the hands of sinful men and be crucified</i>, <i>and the
+third day rise again</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; <i>And they remembered his
+words</i>, and returned from the sepulchre, and told all these
+things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.&nbsp; It was Mary
+Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other
+women that were with them which told these things unto the
+Apostles.&nbsp; <i>And their words seemed unto them as idle
+tales</i>, <i>and they believed them not</i>.&nbsp; Then arose
+Peter, and went unto the sepulchre: and, stooping down, he beheld
+the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed wondering in
+himself at that which was come to pass.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When we compare this account with John&rsquo;s we are
+at once struck with the resemblances and the discrepancies.&nbsp;
+Luke and John indeed are both agreed that Christ was seen alive
+after the Crucifixion.&nbsp; Both agree that the tomb was found
+empty very early on the Sunday morning (<i>i.e.</i>, within
+thirty-six hours of the deposition from the Cross), and neither
+writer affords us any clue whatever as to the time and manner of
+the removal of the body; but here the resemblances end; the
+angelic vision of Mary, seen <i>after</i> Peter and John had
+departed from the tomb, and seen apparently by Mary alone, in
+Luke finds its way into the van of the narrative, and Peter is
+represented as having gone to the tomb, <i>not in consequence of
+having been simply told that the body of Christ was missing</i>,
+<i>but because he refused to believe the miraculous story which
+was told him by the women</i>.&nbsp; In the fourth Gospel we
+heard of no miraculous story being carried by Mary to Peter and
+John.&nbsp; The angels instead of being seen by one person only,
+as would have appeared from the fourth Gospel, are now seen <i>by
+many</i>; and the women instead of being almost stolidly
+indifferent to the presence of supernatural beings, are afraid,
+and bow down their faces to the earth; instead of merely wanting
+to be informed why Mary was weeping, the angels speak with
+definite point, and as angels might be expected to speak; they
+allude, also, to past prophecy, which the women at once
+remember.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Strange, that they should want reminding!&nbsp; And
+stranger still that a few verses lower down we should find the
+Apostles remembering no prophetic saying, but regarding the story
+of the women as mere idle tales.&nbsp; What shall we say?&nbsp;
+Are not these differences precisely similar to those which we are
+continually meeting with, when a case of exaggeration comes
+before us?&nbsp; Can we accept <i>both</i> the stories?&nbsp; Is
+this one of those cases in which all would be made clear if we
+did but know <i>all</i> the facts, or is it rather one in which
+we can understand how easily the story given by the one writer
+might become distorted into the version of the other?&nbsp; Does
+it seem in any way improbable that within the forty years or so
+between the occurrences recorded by John and the writing of
+Luke&rsquo;s Gospel, the apparently trifling, yet truly most
+important, differences between the two writers should have been
+developed?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No one will venture to say that the facts, upon the
+face of them, do not strongly suggest such an inference, and
+that, too, with no conscious fraud on the part of any of those
+through whose mouths the story must have passed.&nbsp; If the
+fourth Gospel be assigned to John (and if it is <i>not</i>
+assigned to John the difficulties on the Christian side become so
+great that the cause may be declared lost), his story is that of
+a principal actor and eye-witness; it bears every impress of
+truth and none of exaggeration upon any point which came under
+his own observation.&nbsp; Even when he tells of what Mary
+Magdalene said she saw, we see the myth in its earliest and
+crudest form; there is no attempt at circumstance in connection
+with it, and abundant reason for suspecting its supernatural
+character is given along with it; reason which to our minds is at
+any rate sufficient to make us doubt it, but which would
+naturally have no weight whatever with John after he had once
+seen Christ alive, or indeed with us if we had been in his
+place.&nbsp; It is not to be wondered at that in such times many
+a fresh bud should be grafted on to the original story; indeed it
+was simply inevitable that this should have been the case.&nbsp;
+No one would mean to deceive, but we know how, among uneducated
+and enthusiastic persons, the marvellous has an irresistible
+tendency to become more marvellous still; and, as far as we can
+gather, all the causes which bring this about were more actively
+at work shortly after the time of Christ&rsquo;s first
+reappearance than at any other time which can be readily called
+to mind.&nbsp; The main facts, as we derive them from the consent
+of <i>both</i> writers, were simply these:&mdash;That the tomb of
+Christ was found unexpectedly empty on the Sunday morning; that
+this fact was reported to the Apostles; that Peter went into the
+tomb and saw the linen clothes laid by themselves; that Mary
+Magdalene said that she had seen angels; and that eventually
+Christ shewed himself undoubtedly alive.&nbsp; Both writers agree
+so far, but it is impossible to say that they agree farther.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Some may say that it is of little moment whether the
+angels appeared first or last; whether they were seen by many or
+by one; whether, if seen only by one, that one had previously
+been insane; whether they spoke as angels might be expected to
+speak, <i>i.e.</i>, to the point, and are shewn to have been
+recognised as angels by the fear which their appearance caused;
+or whether they caused no alarm, and said nothing which was in
+the least equal to the occasion.&nbsp; But most men will feel
+that the whole complexion of the story changes according to the
+answers which can be made to these very questions.&nbsp; Surely
+they will also begin to feel a strong suspicion that the story
+told by Luke is one which has not lost in the telling.&nbsp; How
+natural was it that the angelic vision should find its way into
+the foreground of the picture, and receive those little
+circumstantial details of which it appeared most to stand in
+need; how desirable also that the testimony of Mary should be
+corroborated by that of others who were with her, and out of whom
+no devils had been cast.&nbsp; The first Christians would not
+have been men and women at all unless they had felt thus; but
+they <i>were</i> men and women, and hence they acted after the
+fashion of their age and unconsciously exaggerated; the only
+wonder is that they did not exaggerate more, for we must remember
+that even though the Apostles themselves be supposed to have been
+more judicially unimpassioned and less liable to inaccuracy than
+we have reason to believe they were, yet that from the very
+earliest ages of the Church there would be some converts of an
+inferior stamp.&nbsp; No matter how small a society is, there
+will be bad in it as well as good&mdash;there was a Judas even in
+the twelve.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But to speak less harshly, there must from the first
+have been some converts who would be capable of reporting
+incautiously; visions and dreams were vouchsafed to many, and not
+a few marvels may be referable to this source; there is no
+trusting an age in which men are liable to give a supernatural
+interpretation to an extraordinary dream, nor is there any end to
+what may come of it, if people begin seriously confounding their
+sleeping and waking impressions.&nbsp; In such times, then, Luke
+may have said with a clear conscience that he had carefully
+sifted the truth of what he wrote; but the world has not passed
+through the last two thousand years in vain, and we are bound to
+insist upon a higher standard of credibility.&nbsp; Luke would
+believe at once, and as a matter of course, things which we
+should as a matter of course reject; yet it is probable that he
+too had heard much that he rejected; he seems to have been
+dissatisfied with all the records with the existence of which he
+was aware; the account which he gives is possibly derived from
+some very early report; even if this report arose at Jerusalem,
+and within a week after the Crucifixion, it might well be very
+inaccurate, though apparently supported by excellent authority,
+so that there is no necessity for charging Luke with unusual
+credulity.&nbsp; No one can be expected to be greatly in advance
+of his surroundings; it is well for every one except himself if
+he should happen to be so, but no man is to be blamed if he is
+not; it is enough to save him if he is fairly up to the standard
+of his own times.&nbsp; &lsquo;Morality&rsquo; is rather of the
+custom which <i>is</i>, than of the custom which ought to be.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Turning now to the account of Mark, we find the
+following:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene,
+and Mary the mother of James, and Salome had bought sweet spices
+that they might come and anoint him.&nbsp; And very early in the
+morning, the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre
+at the rising of the sun.&nbsp; And they said among
+themselves,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the
+sepulchre?&rdquo;&nbsp; And when they looked they saw that the
+stone was rolled away; for it was very great.&nbsp; And entering
+into the sepulchre they saw <i>a young man</i> sitting on the
+right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were
+affrighted.&nbsp; And he saith unto them, &ldquo;Be not
+affrighted; ye seek Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified; he is
+risen; he is not here; behold the place where they laid
+him.&nbsp; But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he
+goeth before you into Galilee: there ye shall see him, as he said
+unto you.&rdquo;&nbsp; And they went out quickly, and fled from
+the sepulchre; <i>for they trembled and were amazed</i>,
+<i>neither said they any thing to any man</i>, <i>for they were
+afraid</i>.&nbsp; Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of
+the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had
+cast seven devils.&nbsp; And she went and told them that had been
+with him as they mourned and wept.&nbsp; And they, when they
+heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, <i>believed
+not</i>.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 is possible that there may have been another who is
+not mentioned, inasmuch as he remained silent; the angelic
+vision, however, is again brought into the foreground of the
+story and the fear of the women is even more strongly insisted on
+than it was in Luke.&nbsp; The angel reminds the women that
+Christ had said that he should be seen by his Apostles in
+Galilee, of which saying we again find that the Apostles seem to
+have had no recollection.&nbsp; The linen clothes have quite
+dropped out of the story, and we can detect no trace of Peter and
+John&rsquo;s visit to the tomb, but it is remarkable that the
+women are represented as not having said anything about the
+presence of the angel immediately on their having seen him; and
+this fact, which might be in itself suspicious, is apologised for
+on the score of fear, notwithstanding that their silence was a
+direct violation of the command of the being whom they so greatly
+feared.&nbsp; We should have expected that if they had feared him
+so much they would have done as he told them, but here again
+everybody seems to act as in a dream or drama, in defiance of all
+the ordinary principles of human action.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Throughout the preceding paragraph we have assumed that
+Mark intended his readers to understand that the young man seen
+in the tomb was an angel; but, after all, this is rather a bold
+assumption.&nbsp; On what grounds is it supported?&nbsp; Because
+Luke tells us that when the women reached the tomb they found
+<i>two</i> white angels within it, are we therefore to conclude
+that Mark, who wrote many years earlier, and as far as we can
+gather with much greater historical accuracy, must have meant an
+angel when he spoke of a &lsquo;young man&rsquo;?&nbsp; Yet this
+can be the only reason, unless the young man&rsquo;s having worn
+a long white robe is considered as sufficient cause for believing
+him to have been an angel; and this, again, is rather a bold
+assumption.&nbsp; But if St. Mark meant no more than he said, and
+when he wrote of a &lsquo;young man&rsquo; intended to convey the
+idea of a young man and of nothing more, what becomes of the
+angelic visions at the tomb of Christ?&nbsp; For St.
+Matthew&rsquo;s account is wholly untenable; St. Luke is a much
+later writer, who must have got all his materials second or third
+hand; and although we granted, and are inclined to believe, that
+the accounts of the visits of Mary Magdalene, and subsequently of
+Peter and John to the tomb, which are given in the fourth Gospel,
+are from a Johannean source, if we were asked our reasons for
+this belief, we should be very hard put to it to give them.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless we think it probable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But take it either way; if the account in the fourth
+Gospel is supposed to have been derived from the Apostle John, we
+have already seen that there is nothing miraculous about it, so
+far as it deals with what came under John&rsquo;s own
+observation; if, on the other hand, it is <i>not</i> authentic we
+are thrown back upon St. Mark as incomparably our best authority
+for the facts that occurred on the Sunday after the 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 long white
+dress and told the women to tell the Apostles to go to Galilee,
+where they should see Christ.&nbsp; On the strength of this we
+are asked to believe that the reappearance of Christ alive, after
+a hurried crucifixion, must have been due to supernatural causes,
+and supernatural causes only!&nbsp; It will be easily seen what a
+number of threads might be taken up at this point, and followed
+with not uninteresting results.&nbsp; For the sake, however, of
+brevity, we grant it as most probable that St. Mark meant the
+young man said to have been seen in the tomb, to be considered as
+an angel; but we must also express our conviction that this
+supposed angelic vision is a misplaced offshoot of the report
+that Mary Magdalene had seen angels in the tomb after Peter and
+John had left it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is possible that Mark&rsquo;s account may be the
+most historic of all those that we have; but we incline to think
+otherwise, inasmuch as the angelic vision placed in the
+foreground by Mark and Luke, would not be likely to find its way
+into the background again, as it does in the fourth Gospel,
+unless in consequence of really authentic information; no
+unnecessary detraction from the miraculous element is conceivable
+as coming from the writer who has handed down to us the story of
+the raising of Lazarus, where we have, indeed, <i>a real account
+of a resurrection</i>, the continuity of the evidence being
+unbroken, and every link in the chain forged fast and strong,
+even to the unwrapping of the grave clothes from the body as it
+emerged from the sepulchre.&nbsp; Is it possible that the writer
+may have given the story of the raising of Lazarus (of which we
+find no trace except in the fourth Gospel), because he felt that
+in giving the Apostolic version with absolute or substantial
+accuracy, he was so weakening the miraculous element in
+connection with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ himself, that it
+became necessary to introduce an incontrovertible account of the
+resurrection of some other person, which should do, as it were,
+vicarious duty?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nevertheless there are some points on which all the
+three writers are agreed: we have the same substratum of facts,
+namely, <i>the tomb found already empty when the women reached
+it</i>, a confused and contradictory report of an angel or angels
+seen within it, and the subsequent reappearance of Christ.&nbsp;
+Not one of the three writers affords us the slightest clue as to
+the time and manner of the removal of the body from the tomb;
+there is nothing in any of the narratives which is incompatible
+with its having been taken away on the very night of the
+Crucifixion itself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is this a case in which the defenders of Christianity
+would clamour for <i>all</i> the facts, unless they exceedingly
+well knew that there was no chance of their getting them?&nbsp;
+<i>All</i> the facts, indeed&mdash;what tricks does our
+imagination play us!&nbsp; One would have thought that there were
+quite enough facts given as the matter stands to make the
+defenders of Christianity wish that there were not so many; and
+then for them to say that if we had more, those that we have
+would become less contradictory!&nbsp; What right have they to
+assume that if they had all the 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 find these accounts even
+more inexplicable than we do at present?&nbsp; Had <i>we</i>
+argued thus we should have been accused of shameless impudence;
+of a desire to maintain any position in which we happened to find
+ourselves, and by which we made money, regardless of every common
+principle of truth or honour, or whatever else makes the
+difference between upright men and self-deceivers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It may be said by some that the discrepancies between
+the three accounts given above are discrepancies concerning
+details only, but that all three writers agree about the
+&lsquo;main fact.&rsquo;&nbsp; We are continually hearing about
+this &lsquo;main fact,&rsquo; but nobody is good enough to tell
+us precisely what fact is meant.&nbsp; Is the main fact the fact
+that Jesus Christ was crucified?&nbsp; Then no one denies
+it.&nbsp; We all admit that Jesus Christ was crucified.&nbsp; Or,
+is it that he was seen alive several times after the
+Crucifixion?&nbsp; This also we are not disposed to deny.&nbsp;
+We believe that there is a considerable preponderance of evidence
+in its favour.&nbsp; But if the &lsquo;main fact&rsquo; turns out
+to be that Christ was crucified, <i>died</i>, and then came to
+life again, we admit that here too all the writers are agreed,
+but we cannot find with any certainty that one of them was
+present when Christ died or when his body was taken down from the
+Cross, or that there was any such examination of the body as
+would be absolutely necessary in order to prove that a man had
+been dead who was afterwards seen alive.&nbsp; If Christ
+reappeared alive, there is not only no tittle of evidence in
+support of his death which would be allowed for a moment in an
+English court of justice, but there is an overwhelming amount of
+evidence which points inexorably in the direction of his never
+having died.&nbsp; If he reappeared, there is no evidence of his
+having died.&nbsp; If he did not reappear, there is no evidence
+of his having risen from the dead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are inclined, however, as has been said already, to
+believe that Jesus Christ really did reappear shortly after the
+Crucifixion, and that his reappearance, though due to natural
+causes, was conceived to be miraculous.&nbsp; We believe also
+that Mary fancied that she had seen angels in the tomb, and
+openly said that she had done so; who would doubt her when so far
+greater a marvel than this had been made palpably manifest to
+all?&nbsp; Who would care to inquire very particularly whether
+there were two angels or only one?&nbsp; Whether there were other
+women with Mary or whether she was quite alone?&nbsp; Who would
+compare notes about the exact moment of their appearing, and what
+strictly accurate account of their words could be expected in the
+ferment of such excitement and such ignorance?&nbsp; Any speech
+which sounded tolerably plausible would be accepted under the
+circumstances, and none will complain of Mark as having wilfully
+attempted to deceive, any more than he will of Luke: the
+amplification of the story was inevitable, and the very candour
+and innocence with which the writers leave loophole after
+loophole for escape from the miraculous, is alone sufficient
+proof of their sincerity; nevertheless, it is also proof that
+they were all more or less inaccurate; we can only say in their
+defence, that in the reappearance of Christ himself we find
+abundant palliation of their inaccuracy.&nbsp; Given one great
+miracle, proved with a sufficiency of evidence for the capacities
+and proclivities of the age, and the rest is easy.&nbsp; The
+groundwork of the after-structure of the other miracles is to be
+found in the fact that Christ was crucified, and was afterwards
+seen alive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There is no occasion for me to examine St. Matthew&rsquo;s
+account of the Resurrection in company with the unhappy men whose
+views I have been endeavouring to represent above.&nbsp; For
+reasons which have already been sufficiently dwelt upon I freely
+own that I agree with them in rejecting it.&nbsp; I shall
+therefore admit that the story of the sealing of the tomb, and
+setting of the guard, the earthquake, the descent of the angel
+from Heaven, his rolling away the stone, sitting upon it, and
+addressing the women therefrom, is to be treated for all
+controversial purposes as though it had never been written.&nbsp;
+By this admission, I confess to complete ignorance of the time
+when the stone was removed from the mouth of the tomb, or the
+hour when the Redeemer rose.&nbsp; I should add that I agree with
+our opponents in believing that our Lord never foretold His
+Resurrection to the Apostles.&nbsp; But how little does it matter
+whether He foretold His Resurrection or not, and whether He rose
+at one hour or another.&nbsp; It is enough for me that he rose at
+all; for the rest I care not.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yet, see,&rdquo; our opponents will exclaim in answer,
+&ldquo;what a mighty river has come from a little spring.&nbsp;
+We heard first of two men going into an empty tomb, finding two
+bundles of grave clothes, and departing.&nbsp; Then there comes a
+certain person, concerning whom we are elsewhere told a fact
+which leaves us with a very uncomfortable impression, and
+<i>she</i> sees, not two bundles of grave clothes, but two white
+angels, who ask a dreamy pointless question, and receive an
+appropriate answer.&nbsp; Then we find the time of this
+apparition shifted; it is placed in the front, not in the
+background, and is seen by many, instead of being vouchsafed to
+no one but to a weeping woman looking into the bottom of a
+tomb.&nbsp; The speech of the angels, also, becomes effective,
+and the linen clothes drop out of sight entirely, unless some
+faint trace of them is to be found in the &lsquo;long white
+garment&rsquo; which Mark tells us was worn by the young man who
+was in the tomb when the women reached it.&nbsp; Finally, we have
+a guard set upon the tomb, and the stone which was rolled in
+front of it is sealed; the angel <i>is seen to descend from
+Heaven</i>, to roll away the stone, and sit upon it, and there is
+a great earthquake.&nbsp; Oh! how things grow, how things
+grow!&nbsp; And, oh! how people believe!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;See by what easy stages the story has grown up from the
+smallest seed, as the mustard tree in the parable, and how the
+account given by Matthew changes the whole complexion of the
+events.&nbsp; And see how this account has been dwelt upon to the
+exclusion of the others by the great painters and sculptors from
+whom, consciously or unconsciously, our ideas of the Christian
+era are chiefly drawn.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; These men have been the
+most potent of theologians, for their theology has reached and
+touched most widely.&nbsp; We have mistaken their echo of the
+sound for the sound itself, and what was to them an aspiration,
+has, alas! been to us in the place of science and reality.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Truly the ease with which the plainest inferences from
+the Gospel narratives have been overlooked is the best apology
+for those who have attributed unnatural blindness to the
+Apostles.&nbsp; If we are so blind, why not they also?&nbsp; A
+pertinent question, but one which raises more difficulties than
+it solves.&nbsp; The seeing of truth is as the finding of gold in
+far countries, where the shepherd has drunk of the stream and
+used it daily to cleanse the sweat of his brow, and recked little
+of the treasure which lay abundantly concealed therein, until one
+luckier than his fellows espies it, and the world comes flocking
+thither.&nbsp; So with truth; a little care, a little patience, a
+little sympathy, and the wonder is that it should have lain
+hidden even from the merest child, not that it should now be
+manifest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How early must it have been objected that there was no
+evidence that the tomb had not been tampered with (not by the
+Apostles, for they were scattered, and of him who laid the body
+in the tomb&mdash;Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a&mdash;we hear no
+more) and that the body had been delivered not to enemies, but
+friends; how natural that so desirable an addition to the
+completeness of the evidences in favour of a miraculous
+Resurrection should have been early and eagerly accepted.&nbsp;
+Would not twenty years of oral communication and Spanish or
+Italian excitability suffice for the rooting of such a
+story?&nbsp; Yet, as far as we can gather, the Gospel according
+to St. Matthew was even then unwritten.&nbsp; And who was
+Matthew?&nbsp; And what was his original Gospel?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is one part of his story, and one only, which
+will stand the test of criticism, and that is this:&mdash;That
+the saying that the disciples came by night and stole the body of
+Jesus away was current among the Jews, at the time when the
+Gospel which we now have appeared.&nbsp; Not that they did
+so&mdash;no one will believe this; but the allegation of the
+rumour (which would hardly have been ventured unless it would
+command assent as true) points in the direction of search having
+been made for the body of Jesus&mdash;and made in vain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We have now seen that there is no evidence worth the
+name, for any miracle in connection with the tomb of
+Christ.&nbsp; He probably reappeared alive, but not with any
+circumstances which we are justified in regarding as
+supernatural.&nbsp; We are therefore at length led to a
+consideration of the Crucifixion itself.&nbsp; Is there evidence
+for more than this&mdash;that Christ was crucified, was
+afterwards seen alive, and that this was regarded by his first
+followers as a sufficient proof of his having risen from the
+dead?&nbsp; This would account for the rise of Christianity, and
+for all the other miracles.&nbsp; Take the following passage from
+Gibbon:&mdash;&lsquo;The grave and learned Augustine, whose
+understanding scarcely admits the excuse of credulity, has
+attested the innumerable prodigies which were worked in Africa by
+the relics of St. Stephen, and this marvellous narrative is
+inserted in the elaborate work of &ldquo;The City of God,&rdquo;
+which the Bishop designed as a solid and immortal proof of the
+truth of Christianity.&nbsp; Augustine solemnly declares that he
+had selected those miracles only which had been publicly
+certified by persons who were either the objects or the
+spectators of the powers of the martyr.&nbsp; Many prodigies were
+omitted or forgotten, and Hippo had been less favourably treated
+than the other cities of the province, yet the Bishop enumerates
+above seventy miracles, of which three were resurrections from
+the dead, within the limits of his own diocese.&nbsp; If we
+enlarge our view to all the dioceses and all the saints of the
+Christian world, it will not be easy to calculate the fables and
+errors which issued from this inexhaustible source.&nbsp; But we
+may surely be allowed to observe that a miracle in that age of
+superstition and credulity lost its name and its merits, since it
+could hardly be considered as a deviation from the established
+laws of Nature.&rsquo;&mdash;(Gibbon&rsquo;s <i>Decline and
+Fall</i>, chap. xxviii., sec. 2).</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who believes in the miracles, or who would dare to
+quote them?&nbsp; Yet on what better foundation do those of the
+New Testament rest?&nbsp; For the death of Christ there is no
+evidence at all.&nbsp; There is evidence that he was believed to
+have been dead (under circumstances where a misapprehension was
+singularly likely to arise), by men whose minds were altogether
+in a different <i>clef</i> to ours as regards the miraculous, and
+whom we cannot therefore fairly judge by any modern
+standard.&nbsp; We cannot judge <i>them</i>, but we are bound to
+weigh the facts which they relate, not in their balance, but in
+our own.&nbsp; It is not what might have seemed reasonably
+believable to them, but what is reasonably believable in our own
+more enlightened age which can be alone accepted sinlessly by
+ourselves.&nbsp; Men&rsquo;s modes of thought concerning facts
+change from age to age; but the facts change not at all, and it
+is of them that we are called to judge.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We turn to the fourth Gospel, as that from which we
+shall derive the most accurate knowledge of the facts connected
+with the Crucifixion.&nbsp; Here we find that it was about twelve
+o&rsquo;clock when Pilate brought out Christ for the last time;
+the dialogue that followed, the preparations for the Crucifixion,
+and the leading Christ outside the city to the place where the
+Crucifixion was to take place, could hardly have occupied less
+than an hour.&nbsp; By six o&rsquo;clock (by consent of all
+writers) the body was entombed, so that the actual time during
+which Christ hung upon the cross was little more than four
+hours.&nbsp; Let us be thankful to hope that the time of
+suffering may have been so short&mdash;but say five hours, say
+six, say whatever the reader chooses, the Crucifixion was
+avowedly too hurried for death in an ordinary case to have
+ensued.&nbsp; The thieves had to be killed, as yet alive.&nbsp;
+Immediately before being taken down from the cross the body was
+delivered to friends.&nbsp; Within thirty-six hours afterwards
+the tomb 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 later Christ was seen alive.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let it be remembered also that the fact of the body
+having been delivered to Joseph <i>before</i> the taking down
+from the cross, greatly enhanced the chance of an escape from
+death, inasmuch as the duties of the soldiers would have ended
+with the presentation of the order from Pilate.&nbsp; If any
+faint symptom of returning animation shewed itself in consequence
+of the mere change of position and the inevitable shock attendant
+upon being moved, the soldiers would not know it; their task was
+ended, and they would not be likely either to wish, or to be
+allowed, to have anything to do with the matter.&nbsp; Joseph
+appears to have been a rich man, and would be followed by
+attendants.&nbsp; Moreover, although we are told by Mark that
+Pilate sent for the centurion to inquire whether Christ was dead,
+yet the same writer also tells us that this centurion had already
+come to the conclusion that Christ was the Son of God, a
+statement which is supported by the accounts of Matthew and Luke;
+Mark is the only Evangelist who tells us that the centurion
+<i>was</i> sent for, but even granting that this was so, would
+not one who had already recognised Christ as the Son of God be
+inclined to give him every assistance in his power?&nbsp; He
+would be frightened, and anxious to get the body down from the
+cross as fast as possible.&nbsp; So long as Christ appeared to be
+dead, there would be no unnecessary obstacle thrown in the way of
+the delivery of the body to Joseph, by a centurion who believed
+that he had been helping to crucify the Son of God.&nbsp; Besides
+Joseph was rich, and rich people have many ways of getting their
+wishes attended to.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We know of no one as assisting at the taking down or
+the removal of the body, except Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a, for
+the presence of Nicodemus, and indeed his existence, rests upon
+the slenderest evidence.&nbsp; None of the Apostles appear to
+have had anything to do with the deposition, nor yet the women
+who had come from Galilee, who are represented as seeing where
+the body was laid (and by Luke as seeing <i>how</i> it was laid),
+but do not seem to have come into close contact with the
+body.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would any modern jury of intelligent men believe under
+similar circumstances that the death had been actual and
+complete?&nbsp; Would they not regard&mdash;and ought they not to
+regard&mdash;reappearance as constituting ample proof that there
+had been no death?&nbsp; Most assuredly, unless Christ had had
+his head cut off, or had been seen to be burnt to ashes.&nbsp;
+Again, if unexceptionable medical testimony as to the
+completeness of the death had reached us, there would be no help
+for it; we should have to admit that something had happened which
+was at variance with all our experience of the course of nature;
+or again if his legs had been broken, or his feet pierced, we
+could say nothing; but what irreparable mischief is done to any
+vital function of the body by the mere act of crucifixion?&nbsp;
+The feet were not always, &lsquo;nor perhaps generally,&rsquo;
+pierced (so Dean Alford tells us, quoting from Justin Martyr),
+nor is there a particle of evidence to shew that any exception
+was made in the present instance.&nbsp; A man who is crucified
+dies from sheer exhaustion, so that it cannot be deemed
+improbable that he might swoon away, and that every outward
+appearance of death might precede death by several hours.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are we to suppose that a handful of ignorant soldiers
+should be above error, when we remember that men have been left
+for dead, been laid out for burial and buried by their best
+friends&mdash;nay, that they have over and over again been
+pronounced dead by skilled physicians, when the facilities for
+knowing the truth were far greater, and when a mistake was much
+less likely to occur, than at the hurried Crucifixion of Jesus
+Christ?&nbsp; The soldiers would apply no polished mirror to the
+lips, nor make use of any of those tests which, under the
+circumstances, would be absolutely necessary before life could be
+pronounced to be extinct; they would see that the body was
+lifeless, inanimate, to all outward appearance like the few other
+dead bodies which they had probably observed closely; with this
+they would rest contented.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is true, they probably believed Christ to be dead at
+the time they handed over the body to his friends, and if we had
+heard nothing more of the matter we might assume that they were
+right; but the reappearance of Christ alive changes the whole
+complexion of the story.&nbsp; It is not very likely that the
+Roman soldiers would have been mistaken in believing him to be
+dead, unless the hurry of the whole affair, and the order from
+Pilate, had disposed them to carelessness, and to getting the
+matter done as fast as possible; but it is much less likely that
+a dead man should come to life again than that a mistake should
+have been made about his having being dead.&nbsp; The latter is
+an event which probably happens every week in one part of the
+world or another; the former has never yet been known.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is not probable that a man officially executed
+should escape death; but that a <i>dead man</i> should escape
+from it is more improbable still; in addition to the enormous
+preponderance of probability on the side of Christ&rsquo;s never
+having died which arises from this consideration alone, we are
+told many facts which greatly lessen the improbability of his
+having escaped death, inasmuch as the Crucifixion was hurried,
+and the body was immediately delivered to friends without the
+known destruction of any organic function, and while still
+hanging upon the cross.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Joseph and Nicodemus (supposing that Nicodemus was
+indeed a party to the entombment) may be believed to have thought
+that Christ was dead when they received the body, but they could
+not refuse him their assistance when they found out their
+mistake, nor, again, could they forfeit their high position by
+allowing it to be known that they had restored the life of one
+who was so obnoxious to the authorities.&nbsp; They would be in a
+very difficult position, and would take the prudent course of
+backing out of the matter at the first moment that humanity would
+allow, of leaving the rest to chance, and of keeping their own
+counsel.&nbsp; It is noticeable that we never hear of them again;
+for there were no two people in the world better able to know
+whether the Resurrection was miraculous or not, and none who
+would be more deeply interested in favour of the miracle.&nbsp;
+They had been faithful when the Apostles themselves had failed,
+and if their faith had been so strong while everything pointed in
+the direction of the utter collapse of Christianity, what would
+it be, according to every natural impulse of self-approbation,
+when so transcendent a miracle as a resurrection had been worked
+almost upon their own premises, and upon one whose remains they
+had generously taken under their protection at a time when no
+others had ventured to shew them respect?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We should have fancied that Mary would have run to
+Joseph and Nicodemus, not to the Apostles; that Joseph and
+Nicodemus would then have sent for the Apostles, or that, to say
+the least of it, we should have heard of these two persons as
+having been prominent members of the Church at Jerusalem; but
+here again the experience of the ordinary course of nature fails
+us, and we do not find another word or hint concerning
+them.&nbsp; This may be the result of accident, but if so, it is
+a very unfortunate accident, and we have already had a great deal
+too much of unfortunate accidents, and of truths which <i>may</i>
+be truths, but which are uncommonly like exaggeration.&nbsp;
+Stories are like people, whom we judge of in no small degree by
+the dress they wear, the company they keep, and that subtle
+indefinable something which we call their expression.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nevertheless, there arise the questions how far the
+spear wound recorded by the writer of the fourth Gospel must be
+regarded, firstly, as an actual occurrence, and, secondly, as
+having been necessarily fatal, for unless these things are shewn
+to be indisputable we have seen that the balance of probability
+lies greatly in favour of Christ&rsquo;s having escaped with
+life.&nbsp; If, however, it can be proved that it is a matter of
+certainty both that the wound was actually inflicted, and that
+death must have inevitably followed, then the death of Christ is
+proved.&nbsp; The Resurrection becomes supernatural; the
+Ascension forthwith ceases to be marvellous; the Miraculous
+Conception, the Temptation in the Wilderness, all the other
+miracles of Christ and his Apostles, become believable at once
+upon so signal a failure of human experience; human experience
+ceases to be a guide at all, inasmuch as it is found to fail on
+the very point where it has been always considered to be most
+firmly established&mdash;the remorselessness of the grip of
+death.&nbsp; But before we can consent to part with the firm
+ground on which we tread, in the confidence of which we live,
+move, and have our being&mdash;the trust in the established
+experience of countless ages&mdash;we must prove the infliction
+of the wound and its necessarily fatal character beyond all
+possibility of mistake.&nbsp; We cannot be expected to reject a
+natural solution of an event however mysterious, and to adopt a
+supernatural in its place, so long as there is any element of
+doubt upon the supernatural side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The natural solution of the origin of belief in the
+Resurrection lies very ready to our hands; once admit that Christ
+was crucified hurriedly, that there is no proof of the
+destruction of any organic function of the body, that the body
+itself was immediately delivered to friends, and that thirty-six
+hours afterwards Christ was seen alive, and it is impossible to
+understand how any human being can doubt what he ought to
+think.&nbsp; We must own also that once let Joseph have kept his
+own counsel (and he had a great stake to lose if he did
+<i>not</i> keep it), once let the Apostles believe that
+Christ&rsquo;s restoration to life was miraculous (and under the
+circumstances they would be sure to think so), and their reason
+would be so unsettled that in a very short time all the
+recognised and all the apocryphal miracles of Christ would pass
+current with them without a shadow of difficulty.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It will be observed that throughout both this and the
+preceding chapter I have been dealing with those of our opponents
+who, while admitting the reappearances of our Lord, ascribe them
+to natural causes only.&nbsp; I consider this position to be only
+second in importance to the one taken by Strauss, and as perhaps
+in some respects capable of being supported with an even greater
+outward appearance of probability.&nbsp; I therefore resolved to
+combat it, and as a preliminary to this, have taken care that it
+shall be stated in the clearest and most definite manner
+possible.&nbsp; But it is plain that those who accept the fact
+that our Lord reappeared after the Crucifixion differ hardly less
+widely from Strauss than they do from ourselves; it will
+therefore be expedient to shew how they maintain their ground
+against so formidable an antagonist.&nbsp; Let it be remembered
+that Strauss and his followers admit that <i>the Death</i> of our
+Lord is proved, while those of our opponents who would deny this,
+nevertheless admit that we can establish <i>the
+reappearances</i>; it follows therefore that each of our most
+important propositions is admitted by one section or other of the
+enemy, and each section would probably be heartily glad to be
+able to deny what it admits.&nbsp; Can there be any doubt about
+the significance of this fact?&nbsp; Would not a little
+reflection be likely to suggest to the distracted host of our
+adversaries that each of its two halves is right, as <i>far as it
+goes</i>, but that agreement will only be possible between them
+when each party has learnt that it is in possession of only half
+the truth, and has come to admit both the <i>Death of our Lord
+and His Resurrection</i>?</p>
+<p>Returning, however, to the manner in which the section of our
+opponents with whom I am now dealing meet Strauss, they may be
+supposed to speak as follows:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Strauss believes that Christ died, and says (<i>New
+Life of Jesus</i>, Vol. I., p. 411) that &lsquo;the account of
+the Evangelists of the death of Jesus is clear, unanimous, and
+connected.&rsquo;&nbsp; If this means that the Evangelists would
+certainly know whether Christ died or not, we demur to it at
+once.&nbsp; Strauss would himself admit that not one of the
+writers who have recorded the facts connected with the
+Crucifixion was an eyewitness of that event, and he must also be
+aware that the very utmost which any of these writers can have
+<i>known</i>, was <i>that Christ was believed to have been
+dead</i>.&nbsp; It is strange to see Strauss so suddenly struck
+with the clearness, unanimity, and connectedness of the
+Evangelists.&nbsp; In the very next sentence he goes on to say,
+&lsquo;Equally fragmentary, full of contradiction and obscurity,
+is all that they tell us of the opportunities of observing him
+which his adherents are supposed to have had after his
+resurrection.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now, this seems very unfair, for,
+after all, the gospel writers are quite as unanimous in asserting
+the main fact that Christ reappeared, as they are in asserting
+that he died; they would seem to be just as &lsquo;clear,
+unanimous, and connected,&rsquo; about the former event as the
+latter (for the accounts of the Crucifixion vary not a little),
+and they must have had infinitely better means of knowing whether
+Christ reappeared than whether he had actually died.&nbsp; There
+is not the same scope for variation in the bare assertion that a
+man died, as there is in the narration of his sayings and doings
+upon the several occasions of his reappearance.&nbsp; Besides, in
+support of the reappearances, we have the evidence of Paul, who,
+though not an eye-witness, was well acquainted with those who
+were; whereas no man can make more out of the facts recorded
+concerning the death of Jesus, than that he was believed to be
+dead under circumstances in which mistake might easily arise,
+that there is no reason to think that any organic function of the
+body had been destroyed at the time that it was delivered over to
+friends, and that none of those who testified to Christ&rsquo;s
+death appear to have verified their statement by personal
+inspection of the body.&nbsp; On these points the Evangelists do
+indeed appear to be &lsquo;clear, unanimous, and
+connected.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Later on Strauss is even more unsatisfactory, for on
+the page which follows the one above quoted from, he writes:
+&lsquo;Besides which, it is quite evident that this (the natural)
+view of the resurrection of Jesus, apart from the difficulties in
+which it is involved, does not even solve the problem which is
+here under consideration: the origin, that is, of the Christian
+Church by faith in the miraculous resurrection of the
+Messiah.&nbsp; It is impossible that a being who had stolen
+half-dead out of a sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill,
+wanting medical treatment, who required bandaging, strengthening,
+and indulgence, and who still, at last, yielded to his
+sufferings, could have given to the disciples the impression that
+he was a conqueror over death and the grave, the Prince of Life,
+an impression which lay at the bottom of their future
+ministry.&nbsp; Such a resuscitation could only have weakened the
+impression which he had made upon them in life and in death; at
+the most could only have given it an elegiac voice, but could by
+no possibility have changed their sorrow into enthusiasm, have
+elevated their reverence into worship.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, the fallacy in the above is obvious; it assumes
+that <i>Christ</i> was in such a state as to be compelled to
+creep about, weak and ill, &amp;c., and ultimately to die from
+the effects of his sufferings; whereas there is not a word of
+evidence in support of all this.&nbsp; He may have been weak and
+ill when he forbade Mary to touch him, on the first occasion of
+his being seen alive; but it would be hard to prove even this,
+and on no subsequent occasion does he shew any sign of
+weakness.&nbsp; The supposition that he died of the effects of
+his sufferings is quite gratuitous; one would like to know where
+Strauss got it from.&nbsp; He <i>may</i> have done so, or he may
+have been assassinated by some one commissioned by the Jewish
+Sanhedrim, or he may have felt that his work was done, and that
+any further interference upon his part would only mar it, and
+therefore resolved upon withdrawing himself from Palestine for
+ever, or Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a may have feared the revolution
+which he saw approaching&mdash;or twenty things besides might
+account for Christ&rsquo;s final disappearance.&nbsp; The only
+thing, however, which we can say with any certainty is that he
+disappeared, and that there is no reason to believe that he died
+of his wounds.&nbsp; All over and above this is guesswork.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Again, if Christ on reappearing had continued in daily
+intercourse with his disciples, it might have been impossible
+that they should not find out that he was in all respects like
+themselves.&nbsp; But he seems to have been careful to avoid
+seeing them much.&nbsp; Paul only mentions five reappearances,
+only one of which was to any considerable number of people.&nbsp;
+According also to the gospel writers, the reappearances were few;
+they were without preparation, and nothing seems to have been
+known of where he resided between each visit; this rarity and
+mysteriousness of the reappearances of Christ (whether dictated
+by fear of his enemies or by policy) would heighten their effect,
+and prevent the Apostles from knowing much more about their
+master than the simple fact that he was indisputably alive.&nbsp;
+They saw enough to assure them of this, but they did not see
+enough to prevent their being able to regard their master as a
+conqueror over death and the grave, even though it could be shewn
+(which certainly cannot be done) that he continued in infirm
+health, and ultimately died of his wounds.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If the Apostles had been highly educated English or
+German Professors, it might be hard to believe them capable of
+making any mistake; but they were nothing of the kind; they were
+ignorant Eastern peasants, living in the very thick of every
+conceivable kind of delusive influence.&nbsp; Strauss himself
+supposes their minds to have been so weak and unhinged that they
+became easy victims to hallucination.&nbsp; But if this was the
+case, they would be liable to other kinds of credulity, and it
+seems strange that one who would bring them down so low, should
+be here so suddenly jealous for their intelligence.&nbsp; There
+is no reason to suppose that Christ <i>was</i> weak and ill after
+the first day or two, any more than there is for believing that
+he died of his wounds.&nbsp; This being so, is it not more simple
+and natural to believe that the Apostles were really misled by a
+solid substratum of strange events&mdash;a substratum which seems
+to be supported by all the evidence which we can get&mdash;than
+that the whole story of the appearances of Christ after the
+Crucifixion should be due to baseless dreams and fancies?&nbsp;
+At any rate, if the Apostles could be misled by hallucination,
+much more might they be misled by a natural reappearance, which
+looked not unlike a supernatural one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The belief in the miraculous character of the
+Resurrection is the central point of the whole Christian
+system.&nbsp; Let this be once believed, and considering the
+times, which, it must always be remembered, were in respect of
+credulity widely different from our own, 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, and unfamiliarity with the
+ideas of accuracy and science, and considering also the
+unquestionable beauty and wisdom of much which is recorded as
+having been taught by Christ, and the really remarkable
+circumstances of the case&mdash;we say, once let the Resurrection
+be believed to be miraculous, and the rest is clear; there is no
+further mystery about the origin of the Christian religion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So the matter has now come to this pass, that we are to
+jeopardise our faith in all human experience, if we are unable to
+see our way clearly out of a few words about a spear wound,
+recorded as having been inflicted in a distant country nearly two
+thousand years ago, by a writer concerning whom we are entirely
+ignorant, and whose connection with any eye-witness of the events
+which he records is a matter of pure conjecture.&nbsp; We will
+see about this hereafter; all that is necessary now is to make
+sure that we do not jeopardise it, if we <i>do</i> see a way of
+escape, and this assuredly exists.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I will not pain either the reader or myself by a
+recapitulation of the arguments which have led our opponents as
+well as the Dean of Canterbury, and I may add, with due apology,
+myself, to conclude that nothing is known as to the severity or
+purpose of the spear wound.&nbsp; The case, therefore, of our
+adversaries will rest thus:&mdash;that there is not only no
+sufficient reason for believing that Christ died upon the cross,
+but that there are the strongest conceivable reasons for
+believing that He did not die; that the shortness of time during
+which He remained upon the cross, the immediate delivery of the
+body to friends, and, above all, the subsequent reappearance
+alive, are ample grounds for arriving at such a conclusion.&nbsp;
+They add further that it would seem a monstrous supposition to
+believe that a good and merciful God should have designed to
+redeem the world by the infliction of such awful misery upon His
+own Son, and yet determined to condemn every one who did not
+believe in this design, in spite of such a deficiency of evidence
+that disbelief would appear to be a moral obligation.&nbsp; No
+good God, they say, would have left a matter of such unutterable
+importance in a state of such miserable uncertainty, when the
+addition of a very small amount of testimony would have been
+sufficient to establish it.</p>
+<p>In the two following chapters I shall show the futility and
+irrelevancy of the above reasoning&mdash;if, indeed, that can be
+called reasoning which is from first to last essentially
+unreasonable.&nbsp; Plausible as, in parts, it may have appeared,
+I have little doubt that the reader will have already detected
+the greater number of the fallacies which underlie it.&nbsp; But
+before I can allow myself to enter upon the welcome task of
+refutation, a few more words from our opponents will yet be
+necessary.&nbsp; However strongly I disapprove of their views, I
+trust they will admit that I have throughout expressed them as
+one who thoroughly understands them.&nbsp; I am convinced that
+the course I have taken is the only one which can lead to their
+being brought into the way of truth, and I mean to persevere in
+it until I have explained the views which they take concerning
+our Lord&rsquo;s Ascension, with no less clearness than I shewed
+forth their opinions concerning the Resurrection.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In St. Matthew&rsquo;s Gospel,&rdquo; they will say,
+&ldquo;we find no trace whatever of any story concerning the
+Ascension.&nbsp; The writer had either never heard anything about
+the matter at all, or did not consider it of sufficient
+importance to deserve notice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dean Alford, indeed, maintains otherwise.&nbsp; In his
+notes on the words, &lsquo;And lo!&nbsp; I am with you always
+unto the end of the world,&rsquo; he says, &lsquo;These words
+imply and set forth the Ascension&rsquo;; it is true that he
+adds, &lsquo;the manner of which is not related by the
+Evangelist&rsquo;: but how do the words quoted, &lsquo;imply and
+set forth&rsquo; the Ascension?&nbsp; They imply a belief that
+Christ&rsquo;s spirit would be present with his disciples to the
+end of time; but how do they set forth the fact that his body was
+seen by a number of people to rise into the air and actually to
+mount up far into the region of the clouds?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The fact is simply this&mdash;and nobody can know it
+better than Dean Alford&mdash;that Matthew tells us nothing about
+the Ascension.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The last verses of Mark&rsquo;s Gospel are admitted by
+Dean Alford himself to be not genuine, but even in these the
+subject is dismissed in a single verse, and although it is stated
+that Christ was received into Heaven, there is not a single word
+to imply that any one was supposed to have seen him actually on
+his way thither.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The author of the fourth Gospel is also silent
+concerning the Ascension.&nbsp; There is not a word, nor hint,
+nor faintest trace of any knowledge of the fact, unless an
+allusion be detected in the words, &lsquo;What and if ye shall
+see the Son of Man ascending where he was before?&rsquo; (John
+vi., 62) in reference to which passage Dean Alford, in his note
+on Luke xxiv., 52, writes as follows:&mdash;&lsquo;And might not
+we have concluded from the wording of John vi., 62, that our Lord
+must have intended an ascension <i>insight of some of those to
+whom he spoke</i>, and that the Evangelist <i>gives that
+hint</i>, <i>by recording those words without comment</i>,
+<i>that he had seen it</i>?&rsquo;&nbsp; That is to say, we are
+to conclude that the writer of the fourth Gospel actually
+<i>saw</i> the Ascension, because he tells us that Christ uttered
+the words, &lsquo;What and if ye shall see the Son of Man
+ascending where he was before?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But who <i>was</i> the author of the fourth
+Gospel?&nbsp; And what reason is there for thinking that that
+work is genuine?&nbsp; Let us make another extract from Dean
+Alford.&nbsp; In his prolegomena, chapter v., section 6, on the
+genuineness of the fourth Gospel, he writes:&mdash;&lsquo;Neither
+Papias, who carefully sought out all that Apostles and Apostolic
+men had related regarding the life of Christ; nor Polycarp, who
+was himself a disciple of the Apostle John; nor Barnabas, nor
+Clement of Rome, in their epistles; nor, lastly, Ignatius (in his
+genuine writings), makes any mention of, or allusion to, this
+gospel.&nbsp; <i>So that in the most ancient circle of
+ecclesiastical testimony</i>, <i>it appears to be unknown or not
+recognised</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; We may add that there is no trace of
+its existence before the latter half of the second century, and
+that the internal evidence against its genuineness appears to be
+more and more conclusive the more it is examined.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;St. Paul, when enumerating the last appearances of his
+master, in a passage where the absence of any allusion to the
+Ascension is almost conclusive as to his never having heard a
+word about it, is also silent.&nbsp; In no part of his genuine
+writings does he give any sign of his having been aware that any
+story was in existence as to the manner in which Christ was
+received into Heaven.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where, then, does the story come from, if neither
+Matthew, Mark, John, nor Paul appear to have heard of it?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It comes from a single verse in St. Luke&rsquo;s
+Gospel&mdash;written more than half a century after the supposed
+event, when few, or more probably none, of those who were
+supposed to have seen it were either living or within reach to
+contradict it.&nbsp; Luke writes (xxiv., 51), &lsquo;And it came
+to pass that while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and
+carried up into Heaven.&rsquo;&nbsp; This is the only account of
+the Ascension given in any part of the Gospels which can be
+considered genuine.&nbsp; It gives Bethany as the place of the
+miracle, whereas, if Dean Alford is right in saying that the
+words of Matthew &lsquo;set forth&rsquo; the Ascension, they set
+it forth as having taken place on a mountain in Galilee.&nbsp;
+But here, as elsewhere, all is haze and contradiction.&nbsp;
+Perhaps some Christian writers will maintain that it happened
+both at Bethany and in Galilee.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In his subsequent work, written some sixty or seventy
+years after the Ascension, St. Luke gives us that more detailed
+account which is commonly present to the imagination of all men
+(thanks to the Italian painters), when the Ascension is alluded
+to.&nbsp; The details, it would seem, came to his knowledge after
+he had written his Gospel, and many a long year after Matthew and
+Mark and Paul had written.&nbsp; How he came by the additional
+details we do not know.&nbsp; Nobody seems to care to know.&nbsp;
+He must have had them revealed to him, or been told them by some
+one, and that some one, whoever he was, doubtless knew what he
+was saying, and all Europe at one time believed the story, and
+this is sufficient proof that mistake was impossible.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is indisputable that from the very earliest ages of
+the Church there existed a belief that Christ was at the right
+hand of God; but no one who professes to have seen him on his way
+thither has left a single word of record.&nbsp; It is easy to
+believe that the facts may have been revealed in a night vision,
+or communicated in one or other of the many ways in which
+extraordinary circumstances <i>are</i> communicated, during the
+years of oral communication and enthusiasm which elapsed between
+the supposed Ascension of Christ and the writing of Luke&rsquo;s
+second work.&nbsp; It is not surprising that a firm belief in
+Christ&rsquo;s having survived death should have arisen in
+consequence of the actual circumstances connected with the
+Crucifixion and entombment.&nbsp; Was it then strange that this
+should develop itself into the belief that he was now in Heaven,
+sitting at the right hand of God the Father?&nbsp; And finally
+was it strange that a circumstantial account of the manner in
+which he left this earth should be eagerly accepted?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>[In an appendix at the end of the book I have given the
+extracts from the Gospels which are necessary for a full
+comprehension of the preceding chapters.&mdash;W. B. O.]</p>
+<h3><a name="page230"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+230</span>Chapter IX<br />
+The Christ-Ideal</h3>
+<p>I <span class="smcap">have</span> completed a task painful to
+myself and the reader.&nbsp; Painful to myself inasmuch as I am
+humiliated upon remembering the power which arguments, so shallow
+and so easily to be refuted, once had upon me; painful to the
+reader, as everything must be painful which even appears to throw
+doubt upon the most sublime event that has happened in human
+history.&nbsp; How little does all that has been written above
+touch the real question at issue, yet, what self-discipline and
+mental training is required before we learn to distinguish the
+essential from the unessential.</p>
+<p>Before, however, we come to close quarters with our opponents
+concerning the views put forward in the preceding chapters, it
+will be well to consider two questions of the gravest and most
+interesting character, questions which will probably have already
+occurred to the reader with such force as to demand immediate
+answer.&nbsp; They are these.</p>
+<p>Firstly, what will be the consequences of admitting any
+considerable deviation from historical accuracy on the part of
+the sacred writers?</p>
+<p>Secondly, how can it be conceivable that God should have
+permitted inaccuracy or obscurity in the evidence concerning the
+Divine commission of His Son?</p>
+<p>If God so loved the World that He sent His only begotten Son
+into it to rescue those who believed in Him from destruction, how
+is it credible that He should not have so arranged matters as
+that all should find it easy to believe?&nbsp; If He wanted to
+save mankind and knew that the only way in which mankind could be
+saved was by believing certain facts, how can it be that the
+records of the facts should have been allowed to fall into
+confusion?</p>
+<p>To both these questions I trust that the following answers may
+appear conclusive.</p>
+<p>I.&nbsp; As regards the consequences which may be supposed to
+follow upon giving up any part of the sacred writings, no matter
+how seemingly unimportant, it is undoubtedly true that to many
+minds they have appeared too dangerous to be even
+contemplated.&nbsp; Thus through fear of some supposed
+unutterable consequences which would happen to the cause of truth
+if truth were spoken, people profess to believe in the
+genuineness of many passages in the Bible which are universally
+acknowledged by competent judges of every shade of theological
+opinion to be interpolations into the original text.&nbsp; To say
+nothing of the Old Testament, where many whole books are of
+disputed genuineness or authenticity, there are portions of the
+New which none will seriously defend;&mdash;for example, the last
+verses of St. Mark&rsquo;s Gospel,&mdash;containing, as they do,
+the sentence of damnation against all who do not
+believe&mdash;the second half of the third, and the whole of the
+fourth verse of the fifth chapter of St. John&rsquo;s Gospel, the
+story of the woman taken in adultery, and probably the whole of
+the last chapter of St. John&rsquo;s Gospel, not to mention the
+Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and to
+the Ephesians, the Epistles of Peter and James, the famous verses
+as to the three witnesses in the First Epistle of St. John, and
+perhaps also the book of Revelation.&nbsp; These are passages and
+works about which there is either no doubt at all as to their not
+being genuine, or over which there hangs so much uncertainty that
+no dependence can be placed upon them.</p>
+<p>But over and above these, there are not a few parts of each of
+the Gospels which, though of undisputed genuineness, cannot be
+accepted as historical; thus the account of the Resurrection
+given by St. Matthew, and parts of those by Luke and Mark, the
+cursing of the barren fig-tree, and the prophecies of His
+Resurrection ascribed to our Lord Himself, will not stand the
+tests of criticism which we are bound to apply to them if we are
+to exercise the right of private judgement; instead of handing
+ourselves over to a priesthood as the sole custodians and
+interpreters of the Bible.&nbsp; It has been said by some that
+the miracle of the penny found in the fish&rsquo;s mouth should
+be included in the above category, but it should be remembered
+that we have only the injunction of our Lord to St. Peter that he
+should catch the fish and the promise that he should find the
+penny in its mouth, but that we have no account of the sequel, it
+is therefore possible that in the event of St. Peter&rsquo;s
+faith having failed him he may have procured the money from some
+other source, and that thus the miracle, though undoubtedly
+intended, was never actually performed.&nbsp; How unnecessary
+therefore as well as presumptuous are the Rationalistic
+interpretations which have been put upon the event by certain
+German writers!</p>
+<p>Now there are few, if any, who would be so illiberal as to
+wish for the exclusion from the sacred volume of all those books
+or passages which, though neither genuine nor perhaps edifying,
+have remained in the Canon of Scripture for many centuries.&nbsp;
+Any serious attempt to reconstruct the Canon would raise a
+theological storm which would not subside in this century.&nbsp;
+The work could never be done perfectly, and even if it could, it
+would have to be done at the expense of tearing all Christendom
+in pieces.&nbsp; The passages do little or no harm where they
+are, and have received the sanction of time; let them therefore
+by all means remain in their present position.&nbsp; But the
+question is still forced upon us whether the consequences of
+openly admitting the certain spuriousness of many passages, and
+the questionable nature of others as regards morality,
+genuineness and authenticity, should be feared as being likely to
+prejudice the main doctrines of Christianity.</p>
+<p>The answer is very plain.&nbsp; He who has vouchsafed to us
+the Christian dispensation may be safely trusted to provide that
+no harm shall happen, either to it or to us, from an honest
+endeavour to attain the truth concerning it.&nbsp; What have we
+to do with consequences?&nbsp; These are in the hands of
+God.&nbsp; Our duty is to seek out the truth in prayer and
+humility, and when we believe that we have found it, to cleave to
+it through evil and good report; <i>to fail in this is to fail in
+faith</i>; to fail in faith is to be an infidel.&nbsp; Those who
+suppose that it is wiser to gloss over this or that, and who
+consider it &ldquo;injudicious&rdquo; to announce the whole truth
+in connection with Christianity, should have learnt by this time
+that no admission which can by any possibility be required of
+them can be so perilous to the cause of Christ as the appearance
+of shirking investigation.&nbsp; It has already been insisted
+upon that cowardice is at the root of the infidelity which we see
+around us; the want of faith in the power of truth which exists
+in certain pious but timid hearts has begotten utter unbelief in
+the minds of all superficial investigators into Christian
+evidences.&nbsp; Such persons see that the defenders have
+something in the background, something which they would cling to
+although they are secretly aware that they cannot justly claim
+it.&nbsp; This is enough for many, and hence more harm is done by
+fear than could ever have been done by boldness.&nbsp; Boldness
+goes out into the fight, and if in the wrong gets slain,
+childless.&nbsp; Fear stays at home and is prolific of a brood of
+falsehoods.</p>
+<p>It is immoral to regard consequences at all, where truth and
+justice are concerned; the being impregnated with this conviction
+to the inmost core of one&rsquo;s heart is an axiom of common
+honesty&mdash;one of the essential features which distinguish a
+good man from a bad one.&nbsp; Nevertheless, to make it plain
+that the consequences of outspoken truthfulness in connection
+with the scriptural writings would have no harmful effect
+whatever, but would, on the contrary, be of the utmost service as
+removing a stumbling-block from the way of many&mdash;let us for
+the moment suppose that very much more would have to be given up
+than can ever be demanded.</p>
+<p>Suppose we were driven to admit that nothing in the life of
+our Lord can be certainly depended upon beyond the facts that He
+was begotten by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary; that He worked
+many miracles upon earth, and delivered St. Matthew&rsquo;s
+version of the sermon on the mount and most of the parables as we
+now have them; finally, that He was crucified, dead, and buried,
+that He rose again from the dead upon the third day, and ascended
+unto Heaven.&nbsp; Granting for the sake of argument that we
+could rely on no other facts, what would follow?&nbsp; Nothing
+which could in any way impair the living power of
+Christianity.</p>
+<p>The essentials of Christianity, <i>i.e.</i>, a belief in the
+Divinity of the Saviour and in His Resurrection and Ascension,
+have stood, and will stand, for ever against any attacks that can
+be made upon them, and these are probably the only facts in which
+belief has ever been absolutely necessary for salvation; the
+answer, therefore, to the question what ill consequences would
+arise from the open avowal of things which every student must
+know to be the fact concerning the biblical writings is that
+there would be none at all.&nbsp; The Christ-ideal which, after
+all, is the soul and spirit of Christianity would remain
+precisely where it was, while its recognition would be far more
+general, owing to the departure on the part of its apologists
+from certain lines of defence which are irreconcilable with the
+ideal itself.</p>
+<p>II.&nbsp; Returning to the objection how it could be possible
+that God should have left the records of our Lord&rsquo;s history
+in such a vague and fragmentary condition, if it were really of
+such intense importance for the world to understand it and
+believe in it, we find ourselves face to face with a question of
+far greater importance and difficulty.</p>
+<p>The old theory that God desired to test our faith, and that
+there would be no merit in believing if the evidence were such as
+to commend itself at once to our understanding, is one which need
+only be stated to be set aside.&nbsp; It is blasphemy against the
+goodness of God 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 to violate one of the very most precious of
+God&rsquo;s own gifts.&nbsp; There is an ingenious cruelty about
+such conduct which it is revolting even to imagine.&nbsp; Indeed,
+the whole theory reduces our Heavenly Father to a level of wisdom
+and goodness far below our own; and this is sufficient answer to
+it.</p>
+<p>But when, turning aside from the above, we try to adopt some
+other and more reasonable view, we naturally set ourselves to
+consider why the Almighty should have required belief in the
+Divinity of His Son from man.&nbsp; What is there in this belief
+on man&rsquo;s part which can be so grateful to God that He
+should make it a <i>sine qu&acirc; non</i> for man&rsquo;s
+salvation?&nbsp; As regards Himself, how can it matter to Him
+what man should think of Him?&nbsp; Nay, it must be for
+man&rsquo;s own good that the belief is demanded.</p>
+<p>And why?&nbsp; Surely we can see plainly that it is the beauty
+of the Christ-ideal which constitutes the working power of
+Christianity over the hearts and lives of men, leading them to
+that highest of all worships which consists in imitation.&nbsp;
+Now the sanction which is given to this ideal by belief in the
+Divinity of our Lord, raises it at once above all possibility of
+criticism.&nbsp; If it had not been so sanctioned it might have
+been considered open to improvement; one critic would have had
+this, and another that; comparison would have been made with
+ideals of purely human origin such as the Greek ideal,
+exemplified in the work of Phidias, and in later times with the
+medi&aelig;val Italian ideal, as deducible from the best
+fifteenth and early sixteenth Italian painting and sculpture, the
+Madonnas of Bellini and Raphael, or the St. George of Donatello;
+or again with the ideal derivable from the works of our own
+Shakespeare, and there are some even now among those who deny the
+Divinity of Christ who will profess that each one of these ideals
+is more universal, more fitted for the spiritual food of a man,
+and indeed actually higher, than that presented by the life and
+death of our Saviour.&nbsp; But once let the Divine origin of
+this last ideal be admitted, and there can be no further
+uncertainty; hence the absolute necessity for belief in
+Christ&rsquo;s Divinity as closing the most important of all
+questions, Whereunto should a man endeavour to liken both himself
+and his children?</p>
+<p>Seeing then that we have reasonable ground for thinking that
+belief in the Divinity of our Lord is mainly required of us in
+order to exalt our sense of the paramount importance of following
+and obeying the life and commands of Christ, it is natural also
+to suppose <i>that whatever may have happened to the records of
+that life</i> should have been ordained with a view to the
+enhancing of the preciousness of the ideal.</p>
+<p>Now, the fragmentary character, and the partial
+obscurity&mdash;I might have almost written, the incomparable
+<i>chiaroscuro</i>&mdash;of the Evangelistic writings have added
+to the value of our Lord&rsquo;s character as an ideal, not only
+in the case of Christians, but as bringing the Christ-ideal
+within the reach and comprehension of an infinitely greater
+number of minds than it could ever otherwise have appealed
+to.&nbsp; It is true that those who are insensible to spiritual
+influences, and whose materialistic instinct leads them to deny
+everything which is not as clearly demonstrable by external
+evidence as a fact in chemistry, geography, or mathematics, will
+fail to find the hardness, definition, tightness, and, let me
+add, littleness of outline, in which their souls delight; they
+will find rather the gloom and gleam of Rembrandt, or the golden
+twilight of the Venetians, the losing and the finding, and the
+infinite liberty of shadow; and this they hate, inasmuch as it
+taxes their imagination, which is no less deficient than their
+power of sympathy; they would have all found, as in one of those
+laboured pictures wherein each form is as an inflated bladder
+and, has its own uncompromising outline remorselessly insisted
+upon.</p>
+<p>Looking to the ideals of purely human creation which have come
+down to us from old times, do we find that the Theseus suffers
+because we are unable to realise to ourselves the precise
+features of the original?&nbsp; Or again do the works of John
+Bellini suffer because the hand of the painter was less dexterous
+than his intention pure?&nbsp; It is not what a man has actually
+put upon his canvas, but what he makes us feel that he felt,
+which makes the difference between good and bad in
+painting.&nbsp; Bellini&rsquo;s hand was cunning enough to make
+us feel what he intended, and did his utmost to realise; but he
+has not realised it, and the same hallowing effect which has been
+wrought upon the Theseus by decay (to the enlarging of its
+spiritual influence), has been wrought upon the work of Bellini
+by incapacity&mdash;the incapacity of the painter to utter
+perfectly the perfect thought which was within.&nbsp; The early
+Italian paintings have that stamp of individuality upon them
+which assures us that they are not only portraits, but as
+faithful portraits as the painter could make them, more than this
+we know not, but more is unnecessary.</p>
+<p>Do we not detect an analogy to this in the records of the
+Evangelists?&nbsp; Do we not see the child-like unself-seeking
+work of earnest and loving hearts, whose innocence and simplicity
+more than atone for their many shortcomings, their distorted
+renderings, and their omissions?&nbsp; We can see <i>through</i>
+these things as through a glass darkly, or as one looking upon
+some ineffable masterpiece of Venetian portraiture by the fading
+light of an autumnal evening, when the beauty of the picture is
+enhanced a hundredfold by the gloom and mystery of dusk.&nbsp; We
+may indeed see less of the actual lineaments themselves, but the
+echo is ever more spiritually tuneful than the sound, and the
+echo we find within us.&nbsp; Our imagination is in closer
+communion with our longings than the hand of any painter.</p>
+<p>Those who relish definition, and definition only, are indeed
+kept away from Christianity by the present condition of the
+records, but even if the life of our Lord had been so definitely
+rendered as to find a place in their system, would it have
+greatly served their souls?&nbsp; And would it not repel hundreds
+and thousands of others, who find in the suggestiveness of the
+sketch a completeness of satisfaction, which no photographic
+reproduction could have given?&nbsp; The above may be difficult
+to understand, but let me earnestly implore the reader to
+endeavour to master its import.</p>
+<p>People misunderstand the aim and scope of religion.&nbsp;
+Religion is only intended to guide men in those matters upon
+which science is silent.&nbsp; God illumines us by science as
+with a mechanical draughtsman&rsquo;s plan; He illumines us in
+the Gospels as by the drawing of a great artist.&nbsp; We cannot
+build a &ldquo;Great Eastern&rdquo; from the drawings of the
+artist, but what poetical feeling, what true spiritual emotion
+was ever kindled by a mechanical drawing?&nbsp; How cold and dead
+were science unless supplemented by art and by religion!&nbsp;
+Not joined with them, for the merest touch of these things
+impairs scientific value&mdash;which depends essentially upon
+accuracy, and not upon any feeling for the beautiful and
+lovable.&nbsp; In like manner the merest touch of science chills
+the warmth of sentiment&mdash;the spiritual life.&nbsp; The
+mechanical drawing is spoiled by being made artistic, and the
+work of the artist by becoming mechanical.&nbsp; The aim of the
+one is to teach men how to construct, of the other how to
+feel.</p>
+<p>For the due conservation therefore of both the essential
+requisites of human well-being&mdash;science, and
+religion&mdash;it is requisite that they be kept asunder and
+reserved for separate use at different times.&nbsp; Religion is
+the mistress of the arts, and every art which does not serve
+religion truly is doomed to perish as a lying and unprofitable
+servant.&nbsp; Science is external to religion, being a separate
+dispensation, a distinct revelation to mankind, whereby we are
+put into full present possession of more and more of God&rsquo;s
+modes of dealing with material things, according as we become
+more fitted to receive them through the apprehension of those
+modes which have been already laid open to us.</p>
+<p>We ought not therefore to have expected scientific accuracy
+from the Gospel records&mdash;much less should we be required to
+believe that such accuracy exists.&nbsp; Does any great artist
+ever dream of aiming directly at imitation?&nbsp; He aims at
+representation&mdash;not at imitation.&nbsp; In order to attain
+true mastery here, he must spend years in learning how to see;
+and then no less time in learning how <i>not</i> to see.&nbsp;
+Finally, he learns how to translate.&nbsp; Take Turner for
+example.&nbsp; Who conveys so living an impression of the face of
+nature?&nbsp; Yet go up to his canvas and what does one find
+thereon?&nbsp; Imitation?&nbsp; Nay&mdash;blotches and daubs of
+paint; the combination of these daubs, each one in itself when
+taken alone absolutely untrue, forms an impression which is quite
+truthful.&nbsp; No combination of minute truths in a picture will
+give so faithful a representation of nature as a wisely arranged
+tissue of untruths.</p>
+<p>Absolute reproduction is impossible even to the
+photograph.&nbsp; The work of a great artist is far more truthful
+than any photograph; but not even the greatest artist can convey
+to our minds the whole truth of nature; no human hand nor
+pigments can expound all that lies hidden in
+&ldquo;Nature&rsquo;s infinite book of secrecy&rdquo;; the utmost
+that can be done is to convey an impression, and if the
+impression is to be conveyed truthfully, the means must often be
+of the most unforeseen character.&nbsp; The old Pre-Raphaelites
+aimed at absolute reproduction.&nbsp; They were succeeded by a
+race of men who saw all that their predecessors had seen, but
+also something higher.&nbsp; The Van Eycks and Memling paved the
+way for painters who found their highest representatives in
+Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt&mdash;the mightiest of them
+all.&nbsp; Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio and Mantegna were
+succeeded by Titian, Giorgione, and Tintoretto; Perugino was
+succeeded by Raphael.&nbsp; It is everywhere the same story; a
+reverend but child-like worship of the letter, followed by a
+manful apprehension of the spirit, and, alas! in due time by an
+almost total disregard of the letter; then rant and cant and
+bombast, till the value of the letter is reasserted.&nbsp; In
+theology the early men are represented by the Evangelicals, the
+times of utter decadence by infidelity&mdash;the middle race of
+giants is yet to come, and will be found in those who, while
+seeing something far beyond either minute accuracy or minute
+inaccuracy, are yet fully alive both to the letter and to the
+spirit of the Gospels.</p>
+<p>Again, do not the seeming wrongs which the greatest ideals of
+purely human origin have suffered at the hands of time, add to
+their value instead of detracting from it?&nbsp; Is it not
+probable that if we were to see the glorious fragments from the
+Parthenon, the Theseus and the Ilyssus, or even the Venus of
+Milo, in their original and unmutilated condition, we should find
+that they appealed to us much less forcibly than they do at
+present?&nbsp; All ideals gain by vagueness and lose by
+definition, inasmuch as more scope is left for the imagination of
+the beholder, who can thus fill in the missing detail according
+to his own spiritual needs.&nbsp; This is how it comes that
+nothing which is recent, whether animate or inanimate, can serve
+as an ideal unless it is adorned by more than common mystery and
+uncertainty.&nbsp; A new Cathedral is necessarily very
+ugly.&nbsp; There is too much found and too little lost.&nbsp;
+Much less could an absolutely perfect Being be of the highest
+value as an ideal, as long as He could be clearly seen, for it is
+impossible that He could be known as perfect by imperfect men,
+and His very perfections must perforce appear as blemishes to any
+but perfect critics.&nbsp; To give therefore an impression of
+perfection, to create an absolutely unsurpassable ideal, it
+became essential that the actual image of the original should
+become blurred and lost, whereon the beholder now supplies from
+his own imagination that which is <i>to him</i> more perfect than
+the original, though objectively it must be infinitely less
+so.</p>
+<p>It is probably to this cause that the incredulity of the
+Apostles during our Lord&rsquo;s life-time must be
+assigned.&nbsp; The ideal was too near them, and too far above
+their comprehension; for it must be always remembered that the
+convincing power of miracles in the days of the Apostles must
+have been greatly weakened by the current belief in their being
+events of no very unusual occurrence, and in the existence both
+of good and evil spirits who could take possession of men and
+compel them to do their bidding.&nbsp; A resurrection from the
+dead or a restoration of sight to the blind, must have seemed
+even less portentous to them, than an unusually skilful treatment
+of disease by a physician is to us.&nbsp; We can therefore
+understand how it happened that the faith of the Apostles was so
+little to be depended upon even up to the Crucifixion, inasmuch
+as the convincing power of miracles had been already, so to
+speak, exhausted, a fact which may perhaps explain the early
+withdrawal of the power to work them; we cannot indeed believe
+that it could have been so far weakened as to make the Apostles
+disregard the prophecies of their Master that He should rise from
+the dead, if He had ever uttered them, and we have already seen
+reason to think that these prophecies are the <i>ex post
+facto</i> handiwork of time; but the incredulity of the
+disciples, when seen through the light now thrown upon it, loses
+that wholly inexplicable character which it would otherwise
+bear.</p>
+<p>But to return to the subject of the ideal presented by the
+life and death of our Lord.&nbsp; In the earliest days of the
+Church there can have been no want of the most complete and
+irrefragable evidence for the objective reality of the miracles,
+and especially of the Resurrection and Ascension.&nbsp; The
+character of Christ would also stand out revealed to all, with
+the most copious fulness of detail.&nbsp; The limits within which
+so sharply defined an ideal could be acceptable were narrow, but
+as the radius of Christian influence increased, so also would the
+vagueness and elasticity of the ideal; and as the elasticity of
+the ideal, so also the range of its influence.</p>
+<p>A beneficent and truly marvellous provision for the greater
+complexity of man&rsquo;s spiritual needs was thus provided by a
+gradual loss of detail and gain of breadth.&nbsp; Enough evidence
+was given in the first instance to secure authoritative sanction
+for the ideal.&nbsp; During the first thirty or forty years after
+the death of our Lord no one could be in want of evidence, and
+the guilt of unbelief is therefore brought prominently
+forward.&nbsp; Then came the loss of detail which was necessary
+in order to secure the universal acceptability of the ideal; but
+the same causes which blurred the distinctness of the features,
+involved the inevitable blurring of no small portions of the
+external evidences whereby the Divine origin of the ideal was
+established.&nbsp; The primary external evidence became less and
+less capable of compelling instantaneous assent, according as it
+was less wanted, owing to the greater mass of secondary evidence,
+and to the growth of appreciation of the internal evidences, a
+growth which would be fostered by the growing adaptability of the
+ideal.</p>
+<p>Some thirty or forty years, then, from the death of our
+Saviour the case would stand thus.&nbsp; The Christ-ideal would
+have become infinitely more vague, and hence infinitely more
+universal: but the causes which had thus added to its value would
+also have destroyed whatever primary evidence was superabundant,
+and the vagueness which had overspread the ideal would have
+extended itself in some measure over the evidences which had
+established its Divine origin.</p>
+<p>But there would of course be limits to the gain caused by
+decay.&nbsp; Time came when there would be danger of too much
+vagueness in the ideal, and too little distinctness in the
+evidences.&nbsp; It became necessary therefore to provide against
+this danger.</p>
+<p><i>Precisely at that epoch the Gospels made their
+appearance</i>.&nbsp; Not simultaneously, not in concert, and not
+in perfect harmony with each other, yet with the error
+distributed skilfully among them, as in a well-tuned instrument
+wherein each string is purposely something out of tune with every
+other.&nbsp; Their divergence of aim, and different authorship,
+secured the necessary breadth of effect when the accounts were
+viewed together; their universal recognition afforded the
+necessary permanency, and arrested further decay.&nbsp; If I may
+be pardoned for using another illustration, I would say that as
+the roundness of the stereoscopic image can only be attained by
+the combination of two distinct pictures, neither of them in
+perfect harmony with the other, so the highest possible
+conception of Christ, cannot otherwise be produced than through
+the discrepancies of the Gospels.</p>
+<p>From the moment of the appearing of the Gospels, and, I should
+add, of the Epistles of St. Paul, the external evidences of
+Christianity became secured from further change; as they were
+then, so are they now, they can neither be added to nor
+subtracted from; they have lain as it were sleeping, till the
+time should come to awaken them.&nbsp; And the time is surely
+now, for there has arisen a very numerous and increasing class of
+persons, whose habits of mind unfit them for appreciating the
+value of vagueness, but who have each one of them a soul which
+may be lost or saved, and on whose behalf the evidences for the
+authority whereby the Christ-ideal is sanctioned, should be
+restored to something like their former sharpness.&nbsp;
+Christianity contains provision for all needs upon their
+arising.&nbsp; The work of restoration is easy.&nbsp; It demands
+this much only&mdash;the recognition that time has made
+incrustations upon some parts of the evidences, and that 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.&nbsp; Only let this be done outside the pages of the Bible
+itself, and not to the disturbance of their present form and
+arrangement.</p>
+<p>The above explanation of the causes for the obscurity which
+rests upon much of our Lord&rsquo;s life and teaching, may give
+us ground for hoping that some of those who have failed to feel
+the force of the external evidences hitherto, may yet be saved,
+provided they have fully recognised the Christ-ideal and
+endeavoured to imitate it, although irrespectively of any belief
+in its historical character.</p>
+<p>It is reasonable to suppose that the duty of belief was so
+imperatively insisted upon, in order that the ideal might thus be
+exalted above controversy, and made more sacred in the eyes of
+men than it could have been if referable to a purely human
+source.&nbsp; May not, then, one who recognises the ideal as his
+<i>summum bonum</i> find grace although he knows not, or even
+cares not, how it should have come to be so?&nbsp; For even a
+sceptic who regarded the whole New Testament as a work of art, a
+poem, a pure fiction from beginning to end, and who revered it
+for its intrinsic beauty only, as though it were a picture or
+statue, even such a person might well find that it engendered in
+him an ideal of goodness and power and love and human sympathy,
+which could be derived from no other source.&nbsp; If, then, our
+blessed Lord so causes the sun of His righteousness to shine upon
+these men, shall we presume to say that He will not in another
+world restore them to that full communion with Himself which can
+only come from a belief in His Divinity?</p>
+<p>We can understand that it should have been impossible to
+proclaim this in the earliest ages of the Church, inasmuch as no
+weakening of the sanctions of the ideal could be tolerated, but
+are we bound to extend the operation of the many passages
+condemnatory of unbelief to a time so remote as our own, and to
+circumstances so widely different from those under which they
+were uttered?&nbsp; Do we so extend the command not to eat things
+strangled or blood, or the assertion of St. Paul that the
+unmarried state is higher than the married?&nbsp; May we not
+therefore hope that certain kinds of unbelief have become less
+hateful in the sight of God inasmuch as they are less dangerous
+to the universal acceptance of our Lord as the one model for the
+imitation of all men?&nbsp; For, after all, it is not belief in
+the facts which constitutes the essence of Christianity, but
+rather the being so impregnated with love at the contemplation of
+Christ that imitation becomes almost instinctive; this it is
+which draws the hearts of men to God the Father, far more than
+any intellectual belief that God sent our Lord into the world,
+ordaining that he should be crucified and rise from the
+dead.&nbsp; Christianity is addressed rather to the infinite
+spirit of man than to his finite intelligence, and the believing
+in Christ through love is more precious in the sight of God than
+any loving through belief.&nbsp; May we not hope, then, that
+those whose love is great may in the end find acceptance, though
+their belief is small?&nbsp; We dare not answer this positively;
+but we know that there are times of transition in the clearness
+of the Christian evidences as in all else, and the treatment of
+those whose lot is cast in such times will surely not escape the
+consideration of our Heavenly Father.</p>
+<p>But with reference to the many-sidedness of the Christ-ideal,
+as having been part of the design of God, and not attainable
+otherwise than as the creation of destruction&mdash;as coming out
+of the waste of time&mdash;it is clear that the perception of
+such a design could only be an offspring of modern thought; the
+conception of such an apparently self-frustrating scheme could
+only arise in minds which were familiar with the manner in which
+it is necessary &ldquo;to hound nature in her wanderings&rdquo;
+before her feints can be eluded, and her prevarications brought
+to book.&nbsp; A deep distrust of the over-obvious is wanted,
+before men can be brought to turn aside from objections which at
+the first blush appear to be very serious, and to take refuge in
+solutions which seem harder than the problems which they are
+intended to solve.&nbsp; What a shock must the discovery of the
+rotation of the earth have given to the moral sense of the age in
+which it was made.&nbsp; How it contradicted all human
+experience.&nbsp; How it must have outraged common sense.&nbsp;
+How it must have encouraged scepticism even about the most
+obvious truths of morality.&nbsp; No question could henceforth be
+considered settled; everything seemed to require reopening; for
+if man had once been deceived by Nature so entirely, if he had
+been so utterly led astray and deluded by the plausibility of her
+pretence that the earth was immovably fixed, what else, that
+seemed no less incontrovertible, might not prove no less
+false?</p>
+<p>It is probable that the opposition to Galileo on the part of
+the Roman church was as much due to some such feelings as these,
+as to theological objections; the discovery was felt to unsettle
+not only the foundations of the earth, but those of every branch
+of human knowledge and polity, and hence to be an outrage upon
+morality itself.&nbsp; A man has no right to be very much in
+advance of other people; he is as a sheep, which may lead the
+mob, but must not stray forward a quarter of a mile in front of
+it; if he does this, he must be rounded up again, no matter how
+right may have been his direction.&nbsp; He has no right to be
+right, unless he can get a certain following to keep him company;
+the shock to morality and the encouragement to lawlessness do
+more harm than his discovery can atone for.&nbsp; Let him hold
+himself back till he can get one or two more to come with
+him.&nbsp; In like manner, had reflections as to the advantage
+gained by the Christ ideal in consequence of the inaccuracies and
+inconsistencies of the Gospels&mdash;reflections which must now
+occur to any one&mdash;been put forward a hundred years ago, they
+would have met justly with the severest condemnation.&nbsp; But
+now, even those to whom they may not have occurred already will
+have little difficulty in admitting their force.</p>
+<p>But be this as it may, it is certain that the inability to
+understand how the sense of Christ in the souls of men could be
+strengthened by the loss of much knowledge of His character, and
+of the facts connected with His history, lies at the root of the
+error even of the Apostle St. Paul, who exclaims with his usual
+fervour, but with less than his usual wisdom, &ldquo;Has Christ
+been divided?&rdquo; (I. Cor. i., 13).&nbsp; &ldquo;Yea,&rdquo;
+we may make answer, &ldquo;He is divided and is yet divisible
+that all may share in Him.&rdquo;&nbsp; St. Paul himself had
+realised that it was the spiritual value of the Christ-ideal
+which was the purifier and refresher of our souls, inasmuch as he
+elsewhere declares that even though he had known Christ Himself
+after the flesh, he knew Him no more; the spiritual Christ, that
+is to say the spirit of Christ as recognisable by the spirits of
+men, was to him all in all.&nbsp; But he lived too near the days
+of our Lord for a full comprehension of the Christian scheme, and
+it is possible that had he known Christ after the flesh, his soul
+might have been less capable of recognising the spiritual
+essence, rather than more so.&nbsp; Have we here a faint
+glimmering of the motive of the Almighty in not having allowed
+the Gentile Apostle to see Christ after the flesh?&nbsp; We
+cannot say.&nbsp; But we may say this much with certainty, that
+had he been living now, St. Paul would have rejoiced at the
+many-sidedness of Christ, which he appears to have hardly
+recognised in his own life-time.</p>
+<p>The apparently contradictory portraits of our Lord which we
+find in the Gospels&mdash;so long a stumbling-block to
+unbelievers&mdash;are now seen to be the very means which enable
+men of all ranks, and all shades of opinion, to accept Christ as
+their ideal; they are like the sea, which from having seemed the
+most impassable of all objects, turns out to be the greatest
+highway of communication.&nbsp; To the artisan, for instance, who
+may have long been out of work, or who may have suffered from the
+greed and selfishness of his employers, or again, to the farm
+labourer who has been discharged perhaps at the approach of
+winter, the parable of &ldquo;the Labourers in the
+Vineyard&rdquo; offers itself as a divinely sanctioned picture of
+the dealings of God with man; few but those who have mixed much
+with the less educated classes, can have any idea of the
+priceless comfort which this parable affords daily to those whose
+lot it has been to remain unemployed when their more fortunate
+brethren have been in full work.&nbsp; How many of the poor,
+again, are drawn to Christianity by the parable of Dives and
+Lazarus.&nbsp; How many a humble-minded Christian while
+reflecting upon the hardness of his lot, and tempted to cast a
+longing eye upon the luxuries which are at the command of his
+richer neighbours, is restrained from seriously coveting them, by
+remembering the awful fate of Dives, and the happy future which
+was in store for Lazarus.&nbsp; &ldquo;Dives,&rdquo; they
+exclaim, &ldquo;in his life-time possessed good things and in
+like manner Lazarus evil things, but now the one is comforted in
+the bosom of Abraham, and the other tormented in a lake of
+fire.&rdquo;&nbsp; They remember, also, that it is easier for a
+camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to
+enter into the kingdom of Heaven.</p>
+<p>It has been said by some that the poor are thus encouraged to
+gloat over the future misery of the rich, and that many of the
+sayings ascribed to our Lord have an unhealthy influence over
+their minds.&nbsp; I remember to have thought so once myself, but
+I have seen reason to change my mind.&nbsp; Hope is given by
+these sayings to many whose lives would be otherwise very nearly
+hopeless, and though I fully grant that the parable of Dives and
+Lazarus can only afford comfort to the very poor, yet it is most
+certain that it <i>does</i> afford comfort to this numerous
+class, and helps to keep them contented with many things which
+they would not otherwise endure.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, though the poor are first provided for, the
+rich are not left without their full share of consolation.&nbsp;
+Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a was rich, and modern criticism forbids
+us to believe that the parable of Dives and Lazarus was ever
+actually spoken by our Lord&mdash;at any rate not in its present
+form.&nbsp; Neither are the children of the rich forgotten; the
+son who repents at length of a course of extravagant or riotous
+living is encouraged to return to virtue, and to seek
+reconciliation with his father, by reflecting upon the parable of
+the Prodigal Son, wherein he will find an everlasting model for
+the conduct of all earthly fathers.&nbsp; I will say nothing of
+the parable of the Unjust Steward, for it is one of which the
+interpretation is most uncertain; nevertheless I am sure that it
+affords comfort to a very large number of persons.</p>
+<p>Christ came not to the whole, but to those that were sick; he
+came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.&nbsp;
+Even our fallen sisters are remembered in the story of the woman
+taken in adultery, which reminds them that they can only be
+condemned justly by those who are without sin.&nbsp; It is to the
+poor, the weak, the ignorant and the infirm that Christianity
+appeals most strongly, and to whose needs it is most especially
+adapted&mdash;but these form by far the greater portion of
+mankind.&nbsp; &ldquo;Blessed are they that mourn!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Whose sorrow is not assuaged by the mere sound of these
+words?&nbsp; Who again is not reassured by being reminded that
+our Heavenly Father feeds the sparrows and clothes the lilies of
+the field, and that if we will only seek the kingdom of God and
+His righteousness we need take no heed for the morrow what we
+shall eat, and what we shall drink, nor wherewithal we shall be
+clothed.&nbsp; God will provide these things for us if we are
+true Christians, whether we take heed concerning them or
+not.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have been young and now am old,&rdquo; saith
+the Psalmist, &ldquo;yet never saw I the righteous forsaken nor
+his seed begging their bread.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How infinitely nobler and more soul-satisfying is the ideal of
+the Christian saint with wasted limbs, and clothed in the garb of
+poverty&mdash;his upturned eyes piercing the very heavens in the
+ecstasy of a divine despair&mdash;than any of the fleshly ideals
+of gross human conception such as have already been alluded
+to.&nbsp; If a man does not feel this instinctively for himself,
+let him test it thus&mdash;whom does his heart of hearts tell him
+that his son will be most like God in resembling?&nbsp; The
+Theseus?&nbsp; The Discobolus? or the St. Peters and St. Pauls of
+Guido and Domenichino?&nbsp; Who can hesitate for a moment as to
+which ideal presents the higher development of human
+nature?&nbsp; And this I take it should suffice; the natural
+instinct which draws us to the Christ-ideal in preference to all
+others as soon as it has been once presented to us, is a
+sufficient guarantee of its being the one most tending to the
+general well-being of the world.</p>
+<h3><a name="page255"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+255</span>Chapter X<br />
+Conclusion</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> only remains to return to the
+seventh and eighth chapters, and to pass in review the reasons
+which will lead us to reject the conclusions therein expressed by
+our opponents.</p>
+<p>These conclusions have no real bearing upon the question at
+issue.&nbsp; Our opponents can make out a strong case, so long as
+they confine themselves to maintaining that exaggeration has to a
+certain extent impaired the historic value of some of the Gospel
+records of the Resurrection.&nbsp; They have made out this much,
+but have they made out more?&nbsp; They have mistaken the
+question&mdash;which is this&mdash;&ldquo;Did Jesus Christ die
+and rise from the dead?&rdquo;&nbsp; And in the place of it they
+have raised another, namely, &ldquo;Has there been any inaccuracy
+in the records of the time and manner of His
+reappearing?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Our error has been that instead of demurring to the relevancy
+of the issue raised by our opponents, we have accepted it.&nbsp;
+We have thus placed ourselves in a false position, and have
+encouraged our opponents by doing so.&nbsp; We have undertaken to
+fight them upon ground of their own choosing.&nbsp; We have been
+discomfited; but instead of owning to our defeat, and beginning
+the battle anew from a fresh base of operations, we have declared
+that we have not been defeated; hence those lamentable and
+suicidal attempts at disingenuous reasoning which we have seen
+reason to condemn so strongly in the works of Dean Alford and
+others.&nbsp; How deplorable, how unchristian they are!</p>
+<p>The moment that we take a truer ground, the conditions of the
+strife change.&nbsp; The same spirit of candid criticism which
+led us to reject the account of Matthew <i>in toto</i>, will make
+it easy for us to admit that those of Mark, Luke, and John, may
+not be so accurate as we could have wished, and yet to feel that
+our cause has sustained no injury.&nbsp; There are probably very
+few who would pin their faith to the fact that Julius C&aelig;sar
+fell exactly at the feet of Pompey&rsquo;s statue, or that he
+uttered the words &ldquo;Et tu, Brute.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet there are
+still fewer who would dispute the fact that Julius Caesar was
+assassinated by conspirators of whom Brutus and Cassius were
+among the leaders.&nbsp; As long as we can be sure that our Lord
+<i>died and rose from the dead</i>, we may leave it to our
+opponents to contend about the details of the manner in which
+each event took place.</p>
+<p>We had thought that these details were known, and so thinking,
+we had a certain consolation in realising to ourselves the
+precise manner in which every incident occurred; yet on
+reflection we must feel that the desire to realise is of the
+essence of idolatry, which, not content with knowing that there
+is a God, will be satisfied with nothing if it has not an effigy
+of His face and figure.&nbsp; If it has not this it falls
+straight-way to the denial of God&rsquo;s existence, being unable
+to conceive how a Being should exist and yet be incapable of
+representation.&nbsp; We are as those who would fall down and
+worship the idol; our opponents, as those who upon the
+destruction of the idol would say that there was no God.</p>
+<p>We have met sceptics hitherto by adhering to the opinions as
+to the necessity of accuracy which prevailed among our
+forefathers, and instead of saying, &ldquo;You are right&mdash;we
+do <i>not</i> know all that we thought we did&mdash;nevertheless
+we know enough&mdash;we know the fact, though the manner of the
+fact be hidden,&rdquo; we have preferred to say, &ldquo;You are
+mistaken, our severe outline, our hard-and-fast lines are all
+perfectly accurate, there is not a detail of our theories which
+we are not prepared to stand by.&rdquo;&nbsp; On this comes
+recrimination and mutual anger, and the strife grows hotter and
+hotter.</p>
+<p>Let us now rather say to the unbeliever, &ldquo;We do not deny
+the truth of much which you assert.&nbsp; We give up
+Matthew&rsquo;s account of the Resurrection; we may perhaps
+accept parts of those of Mark and Luke and John, but it is
+impossible to say which parts, unless those in which all three
+agree with one another; and this being so, it becomes wiser to
+regard all the accounts as early and precious memorials of the
+certainty felt by the Apostles that Christ died and rose again,
+but as having little historic value with regard to the time and
+manner of the Resurrection.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Once take this ground, and instead of demurring to the truth
+of many of the assertions of our opponents, demur to their
+relevancy, and the unbeliever will find the ground cut away from
+under his feet independently of the fact that the reasonableness
+of the concession, and the discovery that we are not fighting
+merely to maintain a position, will incline him to calmness and
+to the reconsideration of his own opinions&mdash;which will in
+itself be a great gain&mdash;he will soon perceive that we are
+really standing upon firm ground, from which no enemy can
+dislodge us.&nbsp; The discovery that we know less of the time
+and manner of our Lord&rsquo;s death and Resurrection than we
+thought we did, does not invalidate a single one of the
+irresistible arguments whereby we can establish the fact of His
+having died and risen again.&nbsp; The reader will now perhaps
+begin to perceive that the sad division between Christians and
+unbelievers has been one of those common cases in which both are
+right and both wrong; Christians being right in their chief
+assertion, and wrong in standing out for the accuracy of their
+details, while unbelievers are right in denying that our details
+are accurate, but wrong in drawing the inference that because
+certain facts have been inaccurately recorded, therefore certain
+others never happened at all.&nbsp; Both the errors are natural;
+it is high time, however, that upon both sides they should be
+recognised and avoided.</p>
+<p>But as regards the demolition of the structure raised in the
+seventh and eighth chapters of this book, whereinsoever, that is
+to say, it seems to menace the more vital part of our faith, the
+ease with which this will effected may perhaps lead the reader to
+think that I have not fulfilled the promise made in the outset,
+and have failed to put the best possible case for our
+opponents.&nbsp; This supposition would be unjust; I have done
+the very best for them that I could.&nbsp; For it is plain that
+they can only take one of two positions, namely, <i>either</i>
+that Christ really died upon the Cross but was never seen alive
+again afterwards at all, and that the stories of His having been
+so seen are purely mythical, <i>or</i>, if they admit that He was
+seen alive after His Crucifixion, they must deny the completeness
+of the death; in other words, if they are to escape miracle, they
+must either deny the reappearances or the death.</p>
+<p>Now in the commencement of this work I dealt with those who
+deny that our Lord rose from the dead, and as the exponent of
+those who take this view I selected Strauss, who is undoubtedly
+the ablest writer they have.&nbsp; Whether I shewed sufficient
+reason for thinking that his theory was unsound must remain for
+the decision of the reader, but I certainly believe that I
+succeeded in doing so.&nbsp; Perhaps the ablest of all the
+writers who have treated the facts given us in the Gospels from
+the Rationalistic point of view, is the author of an anonymous
+work called <i>The Jesus of History</i> (Williams and Norgate,
+1866); but this writer (and it is a characteristic feature of the
+Rationalistic school to become vague precisely at this very
+point) leaves us entirely in doubt as to whether he accepts the
+reappearances of Christ or not, and his treatment of the facts
+connected both with the Crucifixion and Resurrection is less
+definite than that of any other part of the life of our
+Lord.&nbsp; He does not seem to see his own way clearly, and
+appears to consider that it must for ever remain a matter of
+doubt whether the Death of Christ or His reappearance is to be
+rejected.</p>
+<p>It is evident that it was most desirable to examine
+<i>both</i> sets of arguments, <i>i.e.</i>, those against the
+Resurrection, and those against the completeness of the Death; I
+have therefore mainly drawn the opinions of those who deny the
+Death from the same pamphlet as that from which I drew the
+criticisms on Dean Alford&rsquo;s notes.&nbsp; I know of no other
+English work, indeed, in which whatever can be said against us
+upon this all-important head has been put forward, and was
+therefore compelled to draw from this source, or to invent the
+arguments for our opponents, which would have subjected me to the
+accusation of stating them in such way as should best suit my own
+purpose.&nbsp; The reader, however, must now feel that since
+there can be no 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 did actually shew Himself
+subsequently alive; and this amounts to a demonstration of the
+miraculous character of the Resurrection.&nbsp; If, then, this
+one miracle be established, I think it unnecessary to defend the
+others, because I cannot think that any will attack them.</p>
+<p>But, as has been seen already, Strauss admits that our Lord
+died upon the Cross, and denies the reality of the
+reappearances.&nbsp; It is not probable that Strauss would have
+taken refuge in the hallucination theory if he had felt that
+there was the remotest chance of successfully denying our
+Lord&rsquo;s death; for the difficulties of his present position
+are overwhelming, as was fully pointed out in the second, third,
+and fourth chapters of this work.&nbsp; I regret, however, to say
+that I can nowhere find any detailed account of the reasons which
+have led him to feel so positively about our Lord&rsquo;s
+Death.&nbsp; Such reasons must undoubtedly be at his command, or
+he would indisputably have referred the Resurrection to natural
+causes.&nbsp; Is it possible that he has thought it better to
+keep them to himself, as proving the Death of our Lord <i>too</i>
+convincingly?&nbsp; If so, the course which he has adopted is a
+cruel one.</p>
+<p>We must endeavour, however, to dispense with Strauss&rsquo;s
+assistance, and will proceed to inquire what it is that those who
+deny the Death of our Lord, call upon us to reject.</p>
+<p>I regret to pass so quickly over one great field of evidence
+which in justice to myself I must allude to, though I cannot
+dwell upon it, for in the outset I declared that I would confine
+myself to the historical evidence, and to this only.&nbsp; I
+refer to spiritual insight; to the testimony borne by the souls
+of living persons, who from personal experience <i>know</i> that
+their Redeemer liveth, and that though worms destroy this body,
+yet in their flesh shall they see God.&nbsp; How many thousands
+are there in the world at this moment, who have known Christ as a
+personal friend and comforter, and who can testify to the work
+which He has wrought upon them!&nbsp; I cannot pass over such
+testimony as this in silence.&nbsp; I must assign it a foremost
+place in reviewing the reasons for holding that our hope is not
+in vain, but I may not dwell upon it, inasmuch as it would carry
+no weight with those for whom this work is designed, I mean with
+those to whom this precious experience of Christ has not yet been
+vouchsafed.&nbsp; Such persons require the external evidence to
+be made clear to demonstration before they will trust themselves
+to listen to the voices of hope or fear, and it is of no use
+appealing to the knowledge and hopes of others without making it
+clear upon what that knowledge and those hopes are
+grounded.&nbsp; Nevertheless, I may be allowed to point out that
+those who deny the Death and Resurrection of our Lord, call upon
+us to believe that an immense multitude of most truthful and
+estimable people are no less deceivers of their own selves and
+others, than Mohammedans, Jews and Buddhists are.&nbsp; How many
+do we not each of us know to whom Christ is the spiritual meat
+and drink of their whole lives.&nbsp; Yet our opponents call upon
+us to ignore all this, and to refer the emotions and elation of
+soul, which the love of Christ kindles in his true followers, to
+an inheritance of delusion and blunder.&nbsp; Truly a melancholy
+outlook.</p>
+<p>Again, let a man travel over England, North, South, East, and
+West, and in his whole journey he shall hardly find a single spot
+from which he cannot see one or several churches.&nbsp; There is
+hardly a hamlet which is not also a centre for the celebration of
+our Redemption by the Death and Resurrection of Christ.&nbsp; Not
+one of these churches, say the Rationalists, not one of the
+clergymen who minister therein, not one single village school in
+all England, but must be regarded as a fountain of error, if not
+of deliberate falsehood.&nbsp; Look where they may, they cannot
+escape from the signs of a vital belief in the
+Resurrection.&nbsp; All these signs, they will tell us, are signs
+of superstition only; it is superstition which they celebrate and
+would confirm; they are founded upon fanaticism, or at the best
+upon sheer delusion; they poison the fountain heads of moral and
+intellectual well-being, by teaching men to set human experience
+on the one side, and to refer their conduct to the supposed will
+of a personal anthropomorphic God who was actually once a
+baby&mdash;who was born of one of his own creatures&mdash;and who
+is now locally and corporeally in Heaven, &ldquo;of reasonable
+soul and <i>human flesh</i> subsisting.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thus do our opponents taunt us, but when we think not only of
+the present day, but of the nearly two thousand years during
+which Christianity has flourished, not in England only, but over
+all Europe, that is to say, over the quarter of the globe which
+is most civilised, and whose civilisation is in itself proof both
+of capacity to judge and of having judged rightly&mdash;what an
+awful admission do unbelievers require us to make, when they bid
+us think that all these ages and countries have gone astray to
+the imagining of a vain thing.&nbsp; All the self-sacrifice of
+the holiest men for sixty generations, all the wars that have
+been waged for the sake of Christ and His truth, all the money
+spent upon churches, clergy, monasteries and religious education,
+all the blood of martyrs, all the celibacy of priests and nuns,
+all the self-denying lives of those who are now ministers of the
+Gospel&mdash;according to the Rationalist, no part of all this
+devotion to the cause of Christ has had any justifiable base on
+actual fact.&nbsp; The bare contemplation of such a stupendous
+misapplication of self-sacrifice and energy, should be enough to
+prevent any one from ever smiling again to whose mind such a
+deplorable view was present: we wonder that our opponents do not
+shrink back appalled from the contemplation of a picture which
+they must regard as containing so much of sin, impudence and
+folly; yet it is to the contemplation of such a picture, and to a
+belief in its truthfulness to nature, that they would invite us;
+they cannot even see a clergyman without saying to themselves,
+&ldquo;There goes one whose trade is the promotion of error;
+whose whole life is devoted to the upholding of the
+untrue.&rdquo;&nbsp; To them the sight of people flocking to a
+church must be as painful as it would be to us to see a
+congregation of Jews or Mohammedans: they ought to have no
+happiness in life so long as they believe that the vast majority
+of their fellow-countrymen are so lamentably deluded; yet they
+would call on us to join them, and half despise us upon our
+refusing to do so.</p>
+<p>But upon this view also I may not dwell; it would have been
+easy and I think not unprofitable, had my aim been different, to
+have drawn an ampler picture of the heart-rending amount of
+falsehood, stupidity, cruelty and folly which must be referable
+to a belief in Christianity, if, as our opponents maintain, there
+is no solid ground for believing it; but my present purpose is to
+prove that there <i>is</i> such ground, and having said enough to
+shew that I do not ignore the fields of evidence which lie beyond
+the purpose of my work, I will return to the Crucifixion and
+Resurrection.</p>
+<p>What, then, let me ask of freethinkers, <i>became of Christ
+eventually</i>?&nbsp; Several answers may be made to this
+question, <i>but there is none but the one given in Scripture
+which will set it at rest</i>.&nbsp; Thus it has been said that
+Christ survived the Cross, lingered for a few weeks, and in the
+end succumbed to the injuries which He had sustained.&nbsp; On
+this there arises the question, did the Apostles know of His
+death?&nbsp; And if so, were they likely to mistake the
+reappearance of a dying man, so shattered and weak as He must
+have been, for the glory of an immortal being?&nbsp; We know that
+people can idealise a great deal, but they cannot idealise as
+much as this.&nbsp; The Apostles cannot have known of any death
+of Christ except His Death upon the Cross, and it is not credible
+that if He had died from the effects of the Crucifixion the
+Apostles should not have been aware of it.&nbsp; No one will
+pretend that they were, so it is needless to discuss this theory
+further.</p>
+<p>It has also been said that our Lord, having seen the effect of
+His reappearance on the Apostles, considered that further
+converse with them would only weaken it; and that He may have
+therefore thought it wiser to withdraw Himself finally from them,
+and to leave His teaching in their hands, with the certainty that
+it would never henceforth be lost sight of; but this view is
+inconsistent with the character which even our adversaries
+themselves assign to our Saviour.&nbsp; The idea is one which
+might occur to a theorist sitting in his study, and enlightened
+by a knowledge of events, but it would not suggest itself to a
+leader in the heat of action.</p>
+<p>Another supposition has been that our Lord on recovering
+consciousness after He had been left alone in the tomb, or
+perhaps even before Joseph had gone, may have been unable to
+realise to Himself the nature of the events that had befallen
+Him, and may have actually believed that He had been dead, and
+been miraculously restored to life; that He may yet have felt a
+natural fear of again falling into the hands of His enemies; and
+partly from this cause, and partly through awe at the miracle
+that He supposed had been worked upon Him, have only shewn
+Himself to His disciples hurriedly, in secret, and on rare
+occasions, spending the greater part of His time in some one or
+other of the secret places of resort, in which He had been wont
+to live apart from the Apostles before the Crucifixion.</p>
+<p>I have known it urged that our Lord never said or even thought
+that He had risen from the dead, but shewed Himself alive
+secretly and fearfully, and bade His disciples follow Him to
+Galilee, where He might, and perhaps did, appear more openly,
+though still rarely and with caution; that the rarity and mystery
+of the reappearances would add to the impression of a miraculous
+resurrection which had instantly presented itself to the minds of
+the Apostles on seeing Christ alive; that this impression alone
+would prevent them from heeding facts which must have been
+obvious to any whose minds were not already unhinged by the
+knowledge that Christ was alive, and by the belief that He had
+been dead; and that they would be blinded by awe, which awe would
+be increased by the rarity of the reappearances&mdash;a rarity
+that was in reality due, perhaps to fear, perhaps to
+self-delusion, perhaps to both, but which was none the less
+politic for not having been dictated by policy; finally that the
+report of Christ&rsquo;s having been seen alive reached the Chief
+Priests (or perhaps Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a), and that they
+determined at all hazards to nip the coming mischief in the bud;
+that they therefore watched their opportunity, and got rid of so
+probable a cause of disturbance by the knife of the assassin, or
+induced Him to depart by threats, which He did not venture to
+resist.</p>
+<p>But if our Lord was secretly assassinated how could it have
+happened that the body should never have been found, and
+produced, when the Apostles began declaring publicly that Christ
+had risen?&nbsp; What could be easier than to bring it forward
+and settle the whole matter?&nbsp; It cannot be doubted that the
+body must have been looked for when the Apostles began publishing
+their story; we saw reason for believing this when we considered
+the account of the Resurrection given by St. Matthew.&nbsp;
+<i>Now those that hide can find</i>; and if the enemies of Christ
+had got rid of Him by foul play, they would know very well where
+to lay their hands upon that which would be the death blow to
+Christianity.&nbsp; If then Christ did not go away of His own
+accord, as feeling that His teaching would be better preserved by
+His absence, and if He did not die from wounds received upon the
+Cross, and if He was not assassinated secretly, what remains as
+the most reasonable view to be taken concerning His
+disappearance?&nbsp; Surely the one that <i>was</i> taken; the
+view which commended itself to those who were best able to
+judge&mdash;namely, <i>that He had ascended bodily into Heaven
+and was sitting at the right hand of God the Father</i>.</p>
+<p>Where else could He be?</p>
+<p>For that He disappeared, and disappeared finally, within six
+weeks of the Crucifixion must be considered certain; there is no
+one who will be bold enough even to hazard a conjecture that the
+appearance of Christ alluded to by St. Paul, as having been
+vouchsafed to him some years later, was that of the living
+Christ, who had chosen upon this one occasion to depart from the
+seclusion and secrecy which he had maintained hitherto.&nbsp; But
+if Christ was still living on earth, how was it possible that no
+human being should have the smallest clue to His
+whereabouts?&nbsp; If He was dead how is it that no one should
+have produced the body?&nbsp; Such a mysterious and total
+disappearance, even in the face of great jeopardy, has never yet
+been known, and can only be satisfactorily explained by adopting
+the belief which has prevailed for nearly the last two thousand
+years, and which will prevail more and more triumphantly so long
+as the world shall last&mdash;the belief that Christ was restored
+to the glory which He had shared with the Father, as soon as ever
+He had given sufficient proofs of His being alive to ensure the
+devotion of His followers.</p>
+<p>Before we can reject the supernatural solution of a mystery
+otherwise inexplicable, we should have some natural explanation
+which will meet the requirements of the case.&nbsp; A confession
+of ignorance is not enough here.&nbsp; <i>We</i> are <i>not</i>
+ignorant; we <i>know</i> that Christ died, inasmuch as we have
+the testimony of all the four Evangelists to this effect, the
+testimony of the Apostle Paul, and through him that of all the
+other Apostles; we have also the certainty that the centurion in
+charge of the soldiers at the Crucifixion would not have
+committed so grave a breach of discipline as the delivery of the
+body to Joseph and Nicodemus, unless he had felt quite sure that
+life was extinct; and finally we have the testimony of the Church
+for sixty generations, and that of myriads now living, whose
+experience assures them that Christ died and rose from the dead;
+in addition to this tremendous body of evidence we have also the
+story of the spear wound recorded in a Gospel which even our
+opponents believe to be from a Johannean source in its later
+chapters; and though, as has been already stated, this wound
+cannot be insisted upon as in itself sufficient to prove our
+Lord&rsquo;s death, yet it must assuredly be allowed its due
+weight in reviewing the evidence.&nbsp; The unbeliever cannot
+surely have considered how shallow are all the arguments which he
+can produce, in comparison with those that make against
+him.&nbsp; He cannot say that I have not done him justice, and I
+feel confident that when he reconsiders the matter in that spirit
+of humility without which he cannot hope to be guided to a true
+conclusion, he will feel sure that Strauss is right in believing
+that the death of our Lord cannot be seriously called in
+question.</p>
+<p>But this being so, the reappearances, which we have seen to be
+established by the collapse of the hallucination theory, must be
+referred to supernatural or miraculous agency; that is to say,
+our Lord died and rose again on the third day, according to the
+Scriptures.&nbsp; Whereon His disappearance some six weeks later
+must be looked upon very differently from that of any ordinary
+person.&nbsp; If our Lord could have been shewn to have been a
+mere man, who had escaped death only by a hair&rsquo;s breadth,
+but still escaped it, perhaps some one of the theories for His
+disappearance, or some combination of 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 and rose from the
+dead, there is no theory which will stand, except the one which
+it has been reserved for our own lawless and self-seeking times
+to question.&nbsp; Through the light of the Resurrection the
+Ascension is clearly seen.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>My task is now completed.&nbsp; In an age when Rationalism has
+become recognised as the only basis upon which faith can rest
+securely, I have established the Christian faith upon a
+Rationalistic basis.</p>
+<p>I have made no concession to Rationalism which did not place
+all the vital parts of Christianity in a far stronger position
+than they were in before, yet I have conceded everything which a
+sincere Rationalist is likely to desire.&nbsp; I have cleared the
+ground for reconciliation.&nbsp; It only remains for the two
+contending parties to come forward and occupy it in peace
+jointly.&nbsp; May it be mine to see the day when all traces of
+disagreement have been long obliterated!</p>
+<p>To the unbeliever I can say, &ldquo;Never yet in any work upon
+the Christian side have your difficulties been so fully and
+fairly stated; never yet has orthodox disingenuousness been so
+unsparingly exposed.&rdquo;&nbsp; To the Christian I can say with
+no less justice, &ldquo;Never yet have the true reasons for the
+discrepancies in the Gospels been so put forward as to enable us
+to look these discrepancies boldly in the face, and to thank God
+for having graciously allowed them to exist.&rdquo;&nbsp; I do
+not say this in any spirit of self-glorification.&nbsp; We are
+children of the hour, and creatures of our surroundings.&nbsp; As
+it has been given unto us, so will it be required at our hands,
+and we are at best unprofitable servants.&nbsp; Nevertheless I
+cannot refrain from expressing my gratitude at having been born
+in an age when Christianity and Rationalism are not only ceasing
+to appear antagonistic to one another, <i>but have each become
+essential to the very existence of the other</i>.&nbsp; May the
+reader feel this no less strongly than I do, and may he also feel
+that I have supplied the missing element which could alone cause
+them to combine.&nbsp; If he asks me what element I allude to, I
+answer Candour.&nbsp; This is the pilot that has taken us safely
+into the Fair Haven of universal brotherhood in Christ.</p>
+<h3><a name="page273"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+273</span>Appendix</h3>
+<h4>I<br />
+The Burial</h4>
+<p style="text-align: center">(John xix. 38&ndash;42)</p>
+<p>And after this Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a, being a disciple of
+Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he
+might take away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him
+leave.&nbsp; He came therefore, and took the body of Jesus.&nbsp;
+And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus
+by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an
+hundred pound weight.&nbsp; Then took they the body of Jesus, and
+wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the
+Jews is to bury.&nbsp; Now in the place where he was crucified
+there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein
+was never man yet laid.&nbsp; There laid they Jesus therefore
+because of the Jews&rsquo; preparation day; for the sepulchre was
+nigh at hand.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Luke xxiii. 50&ndash;56)</p>
+<p>And, behold, there was a man named Joseph, a counsellor; and
+he was a good man, and a just: (the same had not consented to the
+counsel and deed of them;) he was of Arimath&aelig;a, a city of
+the Jews: who also himself waited for the kingdom of God.&nbsp;
+This man went unto Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus.&nbsp;
+And he took it down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a
+sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was
+laid.&nbsp; And that day was the preparation, and the sabbath
+drew on.&nbsp; And the women also, which came with him from
+Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his
+body was laid.&nbsp; And they returned, and prepared spices and
+ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the
+commandment.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Mark xv. 42&ndash;47)</p>
+<p>And now when the even was come, because it was the
+preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of
+Arimath&aelig;a, an honourable counsellor, which also waited for
+the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and
+craved the body of Jesus.&nbsp; And Pilate marvelled if he were
+already dead: and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him
+whether he had been any while dead.&nbsp; And when he knew it of
+the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph.&nbsp; And he bought
+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 rolled
+a stone unto the door of the sepulchre.&nbsp; And Mary Magdalene
+and Mary the mother of Joseph beheld where he was laid.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Matthew xxvii. 57&ndash;61)</p>
+<p>When the even was come, there came a rich man of
+Arimath&aelig;a, named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus&rsquo;
+disciple.&nbsp; He went to Pilate, and begged the body of
+Jesus.&nbsp; Then Pilate commanded the body to be
+delivered.&nbsp; And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped
+it in a clean linen cloth.&nbsp; And laid it in his own new tomb,
+which he had hewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to
+the door of the sepulchre, and departed.&nbsp; And there was Mary
+Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over against the
+sepulchre.</p>
+<h4>II<br />
+The Guard set upon the Tomb<br />
+(<i>Peculiar to Matthew</i>)</h4>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Matthew xxvii. 62&ndash;66)</p>
+<p>Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation,
+the chief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate.&nbsp;
+Saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was
+yet alive, After three days I will rise again.&nbsp; Command
+therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day,
+lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say
+unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last error
+shall be worse than the first.&nbsp; Pilate said unto them, Ye
+have a watch: go your way, make it as sure as ye can.&nbsp; So
+they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and
+setting a watch.</p>
+<h4>III<br />
+Visit of Mary Magdalene, and Others, to the Tomb</h4>
+<p style="text-align: center">(John xx. 1&ndash;13)</p>
+<p>The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it
+was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away
+from the sepulchre.&nbsp; Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon
+Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith
+unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre,
+and we know not where they have laid him.&nbsp; Peter therefore
+went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the
+sepulchre.&nbsp; So they ran both together: and the other
+disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.&nbsp;
+And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes
+lying; yet went he not in.&nbsp; Then cometh Simon Peter
+following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen
+clothes lie.&nbsp; And the napkin, that was about his head, not
+lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by
+itself.&nbsp; Then went in also that other disciple, which came
+first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.&nbsp; For as
+yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the
+dead.&nbsp; Then the disciples went away again unto their own
+home.&nbsp; But Mary stood without 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, and the
+other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.&nbsp; And
+they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou?&nbsp; She saith unto
+them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where
+they have laid him.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Luke xxiv. 1&ndash;12)</p>
+<p>Now upon the first day of the week very early in the morning,
+they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had
+prepared, and certain others with them.&nbsp; And they found the
+stone rolled away from the sepulchre.&nbsp; And they entered in,
+and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.&nbsp; And it came to
+pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men
+stood by them in shining garments: and as they were afraid, and
+bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why
+seek ye the living among the dead?&nbsp; He is not here, but is
+risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,
+saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful
+men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.&nbsp; And
+they remembered his words, and returned from the sepulchre, and
+told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.&nbsp;
+It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James,
+and other women that were with them, which told these things unto
+the apostles.&nbsp; And their words seemed to them as idle tales,
+and they believed them not.&nbsp; Then arose Peter, and ran unto
+the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes
+laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that
+which was come to pass.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Mark xvi. 1&ndash;8)</p>
+<p>And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the
+mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they
+might come and anoint him.&nbsp; And very early in the morning
+the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the
+rising of the sun.&nbsp; And they said among themselves, Who
+shall roll us away the stone from the door of the
+sepulchre?&nbsp; And when they looked, they saw that the stone
+was rolled away: for it was very great.&nbsp; And entering into
+the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side,
+clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.&nbsp;
+And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of
+Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here:
+behold the place where they laid him.&nbsp; But go your way, tell
+his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee:
+there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.&nbsp; And they went
+out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and
+were amazed: neither said they anything to any man; for they were
+afraid.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Matthew xxviii. 1&ndash;8)</p>
+<p>In the end of the sabbath, as it began to draw toward the
+first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to
+see the sepulchre.&nbsp; And, behold, there was a great
+earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and
+came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon
+it.&nbsp; His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment
+white as snow, and for fear of him the keepers did shake, and
+became as dead men.&nbsp; And the angel answered and said unto
+the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was
+crucified.&nbsp; He is not here: for he is risen, as he
+said.&nbsp; Come, see the place where the Lord lay.&nbsp; And go
+quickly, 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.&nbsp; And they departed quickly from
+the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring his
+disciples word.</p>
+<h4>IV<br />
+Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene and Others</h4>
+<p style="text-align: center">(John xx. 14&ndash;18)</p>
+<p>And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw
+Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.&nbsp; Jesus saith
+unto her, Woman, why weepest thou?&nbsp; Whom seekest thou?&nbsp;
+She, supposing him to be 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.&nbsp; Jesus saith unto her, Mary.&nbsp; She
+turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say,
+Master.&nbsp; Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; 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 to my God,
+and your God.&nbsp; Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples
+that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things
+unto her.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Mark xvi. 9&ndash;11)</p>
+<p>Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he
+appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven
+devils.&nbsp; And she went and told them that had been with him,
+as they mourned and wept.&nbsp; And they, when they had heard
+that he was alive, and had been seen of her, believed not.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Matthew xxvii. 9&ndash;10)</p>
+<p>And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met
+them, saying, All hail.&nbsp; And they came and held him by the
+feet, and worshipped him.&nbsp; Then said Jesus unto them, Be not
+afraid: go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and there
+shall they see me.</p>
+<h4>V<br />
+The Bribing of the Guard<br />
+(<i>Peculiar to Matthew</i>)</h4>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Matthew xxviii. 11&ndash;15)</p>
+<p>Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into
+the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that
+were done.&nbsp; And when they were assembled with the elders,
+and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers,
+saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away
+while we slept.&nbsp; And if this come to the governor&rsquo;s
+ears, we will persuade him, and secure you.&nbsp; So they took
+the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is
+commonly reported among the Jews until this day.</p>
+<h4>VI<br />
+Appearance to Cleopas (and James?)</h4>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Luke xxiv. 13&ndash;35)</p>
+<p>And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village
+called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore
+furlongs.&nbsp; And they talked together of all these things
+which had happened.&nbsp; And it came to pass, that, while they
+communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went
+with them.&nbsp; But their eyes were holden that they should not
+know him.&nbsp; And he said unto them, What manner of
+communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk,
+and are sad?&nbsp; And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas,
+answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem,
+and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in
+these days?&nbsp; And he said unto them, What things?&nbsp; And
+they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a
+prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people:
+And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be
+condemned to death, and have crucified him.&nbsp; But we trusted
+that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside
+all this, to-day is the third day since these things were
+done.&nbsp; Yea, and certain women also of our company made us
+astonished, which were early at the sepulchre; and when they
+found not his body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a
+vision of angels, which said that he was alive, and certain of
+them which were with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even
+so as the women had said: but him they saw not.&nbsp; Then he
+said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that
+the prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ to have suffered these
+things, and to enter into his glory?&nbsp; And beginning at Moses
+and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the
+scriptures the things concerning himself.&nbsp; And they drew
+nigh unto the village, whither they went: and he made as though
+he would have gone further.&nbsp; But they constrained him,
+saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is
+far spent.&nbsp; And he went in to tarry with them.&nbsp; And it
+came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and
+blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.&nbsp; And their eyes
+were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their
+sight.&nbsp; And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn
+within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he
+opened to us the scriptures?&nbsp; And they rose up the same
+hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered
+together, and them that were with them, saying, The Lord is risen
+indeed, and hath appeared to Simon.&nbsp; And they told what
+things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in
+breaking of bread.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Mark xvi. 12&ndash;13)</p>
+<p>After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as
+they walked, and went into the country.&nbsp; And they went and
+told it unto the residue: neither believed they them.</p>
+<h4>VII<br />
+Appearance to the Apostles<br />
+(<i>Twice in John</i>)</h4>
+<p style="text-align: center">(John xx. 19&ndash;29)</p>
+<p>Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week,
+when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for
+fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith
+unto them, Peace be unto you.&nbsp; And when he had so said, he
+shewed them his hands and his side.&nbsp; Then were the disciples
+glad, when they saw the Lord.&nbsp; Then said Jesus to them
+again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even, so
+send I you.&nbsp; And when he had said this, he breathed on them,
+and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.&nbsp; Whose
+soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose
+soever sins ye retain, they are retained.&nbsp; But Thomas, one
+of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus
+came.&nbsp; The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have
+seen the Lord.&nbsp; But he said unto them, Except I shall see in
+his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the
+print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not
+believe.&nbsp; And after eight days again his disciples were
+within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being
+shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.&nbsp;
+Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my
+hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and
+be not faithless, but believing.&nbsp; And Thomas answered and
+said unto him, My Lord and my God.&nbsp; Jesus saith unto him,
+Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed
+are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>[I have not quoted the twenty-first chapter of St.
+John&rsquo;s Gospel on account of its exceedingly doubtful
+genuineness.&mdash;W. B. O.]</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Luke xxiv. 36&ndash;49)</p>
+<p>And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of
+them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.&nbsp; But they were
+terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a
+spirit.&nbsp; And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why
+do thoughts arise in your hearts?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And when he had
+thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.&nbsp; And
+while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto
+them, Have ye here any meat?&nbsp; And they gave him a piece of a
+broiled fish, and of an honeycomb.&nbsp; And he took it, and did
+eat before them.&nbsp; 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, which were written in the law of Moses, and in
+the prophets, and in the psalms concerning me.&nbsp; Then opened
+he their understanding, that they might understand the
+scriptures.&nbsp; And said unto them, Thus it is written, and
+thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the
+third day: And that repentance and remission of sins should be
+preached in his name among all nations, beginning at
+Jerusalem.&nbsp; And ye are witnesses of these things.&nbsp; And,
+behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in
+the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on
+high.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Mark xvi. 14&ndash;18)</p>
+<p>Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and
+upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because
+they believed not them which had seen him after he was
+risen.&nbsp; And he saith unto them, Go ye into all the world,
+and preach the gospel to every creature.&nbsp; He that believeth
+and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall
+be damned.&nbsp; And these signs shall follow them that believe;
+In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new
+tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any
+deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the
+sick, and they shall recover.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Matthew xviii. 16&ndash;20)</p>
+<p>Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a
+mountain where Jesus had appointed them.&nbsp; And when they saw
+him, they worshipped him: but some doubted.&nbsp; And Jesus came
+and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven
+and in earth, go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing
+them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
+Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have
+commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of
+the world.&nbsp; Amen.</p>
+<h4>VIII<br />
+The Ascension</h4>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Luke xxiv. 50&ndash;53)</p>
+<p>And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his
+hands, and blessed them.&nbsp; And it came to pass, while he
+blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into
+heaven.&nbsp; And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem
+with great joy.&nbsp; And were continually in the temple,
+praising and blessing God.&nbsp; Amen.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Mark xvi. 19&ndash;20)</p>
+<p>So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received
+up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.&nbsp; And they
+went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them,
+and confirming the word with signs following.&nbsp; Amen.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Acts i. 1&ndash;12)</p>
+<p>The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that
+Jesus began 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 the apostles whom he had chosen.&nbsp; To whom
+also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible
+proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things
+pertaining to the kingdom of God: and, being assembled together
+with them, commanded them that they should not depart from
+Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith
+he, ye have heard of me.&nbsp; For John truly baptized with
+water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days
+hence.&nbsp; When they therefore were come together, they asked
+of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the
+kingdom to Israel?&nbsp; And he said unto them, It is not for you
+to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in
+his own power.&nbsp; But ye shall receive power, after that the
+Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me
+both in Jerusalem, and in all Jud&aelig;a, and in Samaria, and
+unto the uttermost part of the earth.&nbsp; And when he had
+spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a
+cloud received him out of their sight, And while they looked
+stedfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by
+them in white apparel; Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why
+stand ye gazing up into heaven?&nbsp; This same Jesus, which is
+taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye
+have seen him go into heaven.&nbsp; Then returned they unto
+Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a
+sabbath day&rsquo;s journey.</p>
+<h4>IX<br />
+St. Paul&rsquo;s account of our Lord&rsquo;s Reappearances</h4>
+<p style="text-align: center">(I. Corinthians xv. 3&ndash;8)</p>
+<p>For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also
+received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the
+scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the
+third day according to the scriptures: and that he was seen of
+Cephas, then of the twelve; after that he was seen of above five
+hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto
+this present, but some are fallen asleep.&nbsp; After that, he
+was seen of James: then of all the apostles.&nbsp; And last of
+all he was seen of me also as of one born out of due time.</p>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote82"></a><a href="#citation82"
+class="footnote">[82]</a>&nbsp; It should be borne in mind that
+this passage was written five or six years ago, before the
+commencement of the Franco-Prussian war, What would my brother
+have said had he been able to comprehend the events of 1870 and
+1871?&mdash;W. B. O.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote141"></a><a href="#citation141"
+class="footnote">[141]</a>&nbsp; This pamphlet was by Butler
+himself.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote158a"></a><a href="#citation158a"
+class="footnote">[158a]</a>&nbsp; See Biog. Britann.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote158b"></a><a href="#citation158b"
+class="footnote">[158b]</a>&nbsp; Middleton&rsquo;s Reflections
+answered by Benson.&nbsp; Hist. Christ, vol. iii., p. 50.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote159a"></a><a href="#citation159a"
+class="footnote">[159a]</a>&nbsp; Lardner, part I., vol. ii., p.
+135 et seq.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote159b"></a><a href="#citation159b"
+class="footnote">[159b]</a>&nbsp; Ibid., part I., vol. ii., p.
+742.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAIR HAVEN***</p>
+<pre>
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+
+
+Title: The Fair Haven
+
+Author: Samuel Butler
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6092]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on November 4, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE FAIR HAVEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FAIR HAVEN
+A Work in Defence of the Miraculous Element in our Lord's Ministry
+upon Earth, both as against Rationalistic Impugners and certain
+Orthodox Defenders, by the late John Pickard Owen, with a Memoir of
+the Author by William Bickersteth Owen.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION BY R. A. STREATFEILD
+
+
+
+The demand for a new edition of The Fair Haven gives me an
+opportunity of saying a few words about the genesis of what, though
+not one of the most popular of Samuel Butler's books, is certainly
+one of the most characteristic.  Few of his works, indeed, show more
+strikingly his brilliant powers as a controversialist and his
+implacable determination to get at the truth of whatever engaged his
+attention.
+
+To find the germ of The Fair Haven we should probably have to go back
+to the year 1858, when Butler, after taking his degree at Cambridge,
+was preparing himself for holy orders by acting as a kind of lay
+curate in a London parish.  Butler never took things for granted, and
+he felt it to be his duty to examine independently a good many points
+of Christian dogma which most candidates for ordination accept as
+matters of course.  The result of his investigations was that he
+eventually declined to take orders at all.  One of the stones upon
+which he then stumbled was the efficacy of infant baptism, and I have
+no doubt that another was the miraculous element of Christianity,
+which, it will be remembered, was the cause of grievous searchings of
+heart to Ernest Pontifex in Butler's semi-autobiographical novel, The
+Way of All Flesh.  While Butler was in New Zealand (1859-64) he had
+leisure for prosecuting his Biblical studies, the result of which he
+published in 1865, after his return to England, in an anonymous
+pamphlet entitled "The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
+as given by the Four Evangelists critically examined."  This pamphlet
+passed unnoticed; probably only a few copies were printed and it is
+now extremely rare.  After the publication of Erewhon in 1872, Butler
+returned once more to theology, and made his anonymous pamphlet the
+basis of the far more elaborate Fair Haven, which was originally
+published 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 the
+fruit of a suggestion made by Miss Savage, an able and witty woman
+with whom Butler corresponded at the time.  Miss Savage was so much
+impressed by the narrative power displayed in Erewhon that she urged
+Butler to write a novel, and we shall probably not be far wrong in
+regarding the biography of John Pickard Owen as Butler's trial trip
+in the art of fiction--a prelude to The Way of All Flesh, which he
+began in 1873.
+
+It has often been supposed that the elaborate paraphernalia of
+mystification which Butler used in The Fair Haven was deliberately
+designed in order to hoax the public.  I do not believe that this was
+the case.  Butler, I feel convinced, provided an ironical framework
+for his arguments merely that he might render them more effective
+than they had been when plainly stated in the pamphlet of 1865.  He
+fully expected his readers to comprehend his irony, and he
+anticipated that some at any rate of them would keenly resent it.
+Writing to Miss Savage in March, 1873 (shortly before the publication
+of the book), he said:  "I should hope that attacks on The Fair Haven
+will give me an opportunity of excusing myself, and if so I shall
+endeavour that the excuse may be worse than the fault it is intended
+to excuse."  A few days later he referred to the difficulties that he
+had encountered in getting the book accepted by a publisher:  " ---
+were frightened and even considered the scheme of the book
+unjustifiable.  --- urged me, as politely as he could, not to do it,
+and evidently thinks I shall get myself into disgrace even among
+freethinkers.  It's all nonsense.  I dare say I shall get into a row-
+-at least I hope I shall."  Evidently there is here no anticipation
+of The Fair Haven being misunderstood.  Misunderstood, however, it
+was, not only by reviewers, some of whom greeted it solemnly as a
+defence of orthodoxy, but by divines of high standing, such as the
+late 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 a
+second edition bearing his name and accompanied by a preface in which
+the deceived elect were held up to ridicule.
+
+Butler used to maintain that The Fair Haven did his reputation no
+harm.  Writing in 1901, he said:
+
+"The Fair Haven got me into no social disgrace that I have ever been
+able to discover.  I might attack Christianity as much as I chose and
+nobody cared one straw; but when I attacked Darwin it was a different
+matter.  For many years Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious
+Memory made a shipwreck of my literary prospects.  I am only now
+beginning to emerge from the literary and social injury which those
+two perfectly righteous books inflicted on me.  I dare say they
+abound with small faults of taste, but I rejoice in having written
+both 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 the
+literary world.  Reviewers fought shy of him for the rest of his
+life.  They had been taken in once, and they took very good care that
+they should not be taken in again.  The word went forth that Butler
+was not to be taken seriously, whatever he wrote, and the results of
+the decree were apparent in the conspiracy of silence that greeted
+not only his books on evolution, but his Homeric works, his writings
+on art, and his edition of Shakespeare's sonnets.  Now that he has
+passed beyond controversies and mystifications, and now that his
+other works are appreciated at their true value, it is not too much
+to 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 it
+was forty years ago.  In the early seventies theological polemics
+were fashionable.  Books like Seeley's Ecce Homo and Matthew Arnold's
+Literature and Dogma were eagerly devoured by readers of all classes.
+Nowadays we take but a languid interest in the problems that
+disturbed our grandfathers, and most of us have settled down into
+what Disraeli described as the religion of all sensible men, which no
+sensible man ever talks about.  There is, however, in The Fair Haven
+a good deal more than theological controversy, and our Laodicean age
+will appreciate Butler's humour and irony if it cares little for his
+polemics.  The Fair Haven scandalised a good many people when it
+first appeared, but I am not afraid of its scandalising anybody now.
+I should be sorry, nevertheless, if it gave any reader a false
+impression of Butler's Christianity, and I think I cannot do better
+than conclude with a passage from one of his essays which represents
+his attitude to religion perhaps more faithfully than anything in The
+Fair Haven:  "What, after all, is the essence of Christianity?  What
+is the kernel of the nut?  Surely common sense and cheerfulness, with
+unflinching opposition to the charlatanisms and Pharisaisms of a
+man's own times.  The essence of Christianity lies neither in dogma,
+nor yet in abnormally holy life, but in faith in an unseen world, in
+doing one's duty, in speaking the truth, in finding the true life
+rather in others than in oneself, and in the certain hope that he who
+loses his life on these behalfs finds more than he has lost.  What
+can Agnosticism do against such Christianity as this?  I should be
+shocked if anything I had ever written or shall ever write should
+seem 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 to
+thank the public and my critics for the favourable reception which
+has been accorded to the First Edition.  I had feared that the
+freedom with which I had exposed certain untenable positions taken by
+Defenders of Christianity might have given offence to some reviewers,
+but no complaint has reached me from any quarter on the score of my
+not having put the best possible case for the evidence in favour of
+the miraculous element in Christ's teaching--nor can I believe that I
+should have failed to hear of it, if my book had been open to
+exception on this ground.
+
+An apology is perhaps due for the adoption of a pseudonym, and even
+more so for the creation of two such characters as JOHN PICKARD OWEN
+and his brother.  Why could I not, it may be asked, have said all
+that I had to say in my own proper person?
+
+Are there not real ills of life enough already?  Is there not a "lo
+here!" from this school with its gushing "earnestness," it
+distinctions without differences, its gnat strainings and camel
+swallowings, its pretence of grappling with a question while
+resolutely bent upon shirking it, its dust throwing and
+mystification, its concealment of its own ineffable insincerity under
+an air of ineffable candour?  Is there not a "lo there!" from that
+other school with its bituminous atmosphere of exclusiveness and
+self-laudatory dilettanteism?  Is there not enough actual exposition
+of boredom come over us from many quarters without drawing for new
+bores upon the imagination?  It is true I gave a single drop of
+comfort.  JOHN PICKARD OWEN was dead.  But his having ceased to exist
+(to use the impious phraseology of the present day) did not cancel
+the fact of his having once existed.  That he should have ever been
+born gave proof of potentialities in Nature which could not be
+regarded lightly.  What hybrids might not be in store for us next?
+Moreover, though JOHN PICKARD was dead, WILLIAM BICKERSTETH was still
+living, and might at any moment rekindle his burning and shining lamp
+of persistent self-satisfaction.  Even though the OWENS had actually
+existed, should not their existence have been ignored as a disgrace
+to Nature?  Who then could be justified in creating them when they
+did not exist?
+
+I am afraid I must offer an apology rather than an excuse.  The fact
+is 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 English
+Church and the Erewhonian Musical Banks.  It is inconceivable how
+they can have got hold of this idea; but I was given to understand
+that I should find it far from easy to dispossess them of the notion
+that something in the way of satire had been intended.  There were
+other parts of the book which had also been excepted to, and
+altogether I had reason to believe that if I defended Christianity in
+my own name I should not find Erewhon any addition to the weight
+which my remarks might otherwise carry.  If I had been suspected of
+satire once, I might be suspected again with no greater reason.
+Instead of calmly reviewing the arguments which I adduced, The Rock
+might have raised a cry of non tali auxilio.  It must always be
+remembered that besides the legitimate investors in Christian stocks,
+if so homely a metaphor may be pardoned, there are unscrupulous
+persons whose profession it is to be bulls, bears, stags, and I know
+not what other creatures of the various Christian markets.  It is all
+nonsense about hawks not picking out each other's eyes--there is
+nothing they like better.  I feared The Guardian, The Record, The
+John Bull, etc., lest they should suggest that from a bear I now
+turned bull with a view to an eventual bishopric.  Such insinuations
+would have impaired the value of The Fair Haven as an anchorage for
+well-meaning people.  I therefore resolved to obey the injunction of
+the Gentile Apostle and avoid all appearance of evil, by dissociating
+myself from the author of Erewhon as completely as possible.  At the
+moment of my resolution JOHN PICKARD OWEN came to my assistance; I
+felt that he was the sort of man I wanted, but that he was hardly
+sufficient in himself.  I therefore summoned his brother.  The pair
+have served their purpose; a year nowadays produces great changes in
+men's thoughts concerning Christianity, and the little matter of
+Erewhon having quite blown over I feel that I may safely appear in my
+true colours as the champion of orthodoxy, discard the OWENS as other
+than mouthpieces, and relieve the public from uneasiness as to any
+further writings from the pen of the surviving brother.
+
+Nevertheless I am bound to own that, in spite of a generally
+favourable opinion, my critics have not been unanimous in their
+interpretation 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 our
+custom of reviewing with brevity works entrusted to us, and we shall
+in two consecutive numbers of The Rock lay before its readers what
+appear to us to be the merits and demerits of this posthumous
+production."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"His exhibition of the certain proofs furnished of the Resurrection
+of our Lord is certainly masterly and convincing."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"To the sincerely inquiring doubter, the striking way in which the
+truth of the Resurrection is exhibited must be most beneficial, but
+such a character we are compelled to believe is rare among those of
+the schools of neology."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Mr. OWEN'S exposition and refutation of the hallucination and
+mythical theories of Strauss and his followers is most admirable, and
+all should read it who desire to know exactly what excuses men make
+for their incredulity.  The work also contains many beautiful
+passages on the discomfort of unbelief, and the holy pleasure of a
+settled faith, which cannot fail to benefit the reader."
+
+On the other hand, in spite of all my precautions, the same
+misfortune which overtook Erewhon has also come upon The Fair Haven.
+It has been suspected of a satirical purpose.  The author of a
+pamphlet entitled Jesus versus Christianity says:-
+
+"The Fair Haven is an ironical defence of orthodoxy at the expense of
+the whole mass of Church tenet and dogma, the character of Christ
+only excepted.  Such at least is our reading of it, though critics of
+the Rock and Record order have accepted the book as a serious defence
+of Christianity, and proclaimed it as a most valuable contribution in
+aid of the faith.  Affecting an orthodox standpoint it most bitterly
+reproaches all previous apologists for the lack of candour with which
+they have ignored or explained away insuperable difficulties and
+attached undue value to coincidences real or imagined.  One and all
+they have, the author declares, been at best, but zealous 'liars for
+God,' 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 to
+set forth the truth as he finds it in the New Testament; and in a
+masterly analysis of the account of the Resurrection, which he
+selects as the principal crucial miracle, involving all other
+miracles, he shows how slender is the foundation on which the whole
+fabric of supernatural theology has been reared."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"As told by our author the whole affords an exquisite example of the
+natural growth of a legend."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"If the reader can once fully grasp the intention of the style, and
+its affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy, and perceive also
+how utterly destructive are its 'candid admissions' to the whole
+fabric of supernaturalism, he will enjoy a rare treat.  It is not
+however for the purpose of recommending what we at least regard as a
+piece of exquisite humour, that we call attention to The Fair Haven,
+but &c. &c."
+
+* * * * *
+
+This is very dreadful; but what can one do?
+
+Again, The Scotsman speaks of the writer as being "throughout in
+downright almost pathetic earnestness."  While The National Reformer
+seems to be in doubt whether the book is a covert attack upon
+Christianity or a serious defence of it, but declares that both
+orthodox and unorthodox will find matter requiring thought and
+answer.
+
+I am not responsible for the interpretations of my readers.  It is
+only natural that the same work should present a very different
+aspect according as it is approached from one side or the other.
+There is only one way out of it--that the reader should kindly
+interpret according to his own fancies.  If he will do this the book
+is sure to please him.  I have done the best I can for all parties,
+and feel justified in appealing to the existence of the widely
+conflicting opinions which I have quoted, as a proof that the balance
+has been evenly held, and that I was justified in calling the book a
+defence--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 5th
+of February, 1832.  He was my elder brother by about eighteen months.
+Our father and mother had once been rich, but through a succession of
+unavoidable misfortunes they were left with but a very moderate
+income when my brother and myself were about three and four years
+old.  My father died some five or six years afterwards, and we only
+recollected him as a singularly gentle and humorous playmate who
+doted upon us both and never spoke unkindly.  The charm of such a
+recollection can never be dispelled; both my brother and myself
+returned his love with interest, and cherished his memory with the
+most affectionate regret, from the day on which he left us till the
+time came that the one of us was again to see him face to face.  So
+sweet and winning was his nature that his slightest wish was our law-
+-and whenever we pleased him, no matter how little, he never failed
+to thank us as though we had done him a service which we should have
+had a perfect right to withhold.  How proud were we upon any of these
+occasions, and how we courted the opportunity of being thanked!  He
+did indeed well know the art of becoming idolised by his children,
+and dearly did he prize the results of his own proficiency; yet truly
+there was no art about it; all arose spontaneously from the
+wellspring of a sympathetic nature which knew how to feel as others
+felt, whether old or young, rich or poor, wise or foolish.  On one
+point alone did he neglect us--I refer to our religious education.
+On all other matters he was the kindest and most careful teacher in
+the world.  Love and gratitude be to his memory!
+
+My mother loved us no less ardently than my father, but she was of a
+quicker temper, and less adept at conciliating affection.  She must
+have been exceedingly handsome when she was young, and was still
+comely when we first remembered her; she was also highly
+accomplished, but she felt my father's loss of fortune more keenly
+than my father himself, and it preyed upon her mind, though rather
+for our sake than for her own.  Had we not known my father we should
+have loved her better than any one in the world, but affection goes
+by comparison, and my father spoiled us for any one but himself;
+indeed, in after life, I remember my mother's telling me, with many
+tears, how jealous she had often been of the love we bore him, and
+how mean she had thought it of him to entrust all scolding or
+repression to her, so that he might have more than his due share of
+our affection.  Not that I believe my father did this consciously;
+still, he so greatly hated scolding that I dare say we might often
+have got off scot free when we really deserved reproof had not my
+mother undertaken the onus of scolding us herself.  We therefore
+naturally feared her more than my father, and fearing more we loved
+less.  For as love casteth out fear, so fear love.
+
+This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew the way
+to bear it.  She tried to upbraid us, in little ways, into loving her
+as much as my father; the more she tried this, the less we could
+succeed in doing it; and so on and so on in a fashion which need not
+be detailed.  Not but what we really loved her deeply, while her
+affection for us was unsurpassable still, we loved her less than we
+loved 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, and
+a thoroughly consistent member of the Church of England; but he
+conceived, and perhaps rightly, that it is the mother who should
+first teach her children to lift their hands in prayer, and impart to
+them a knowledge of the One in whom we live and move and have our
+being.  My mother accepted the task gladly, for in spite of a certain
+narrowness of view--the natural but deplorable result of her earlier
+surroundings--she was one of the most truly pious women whom I have
+ever known; unfortunately for herself and us she had been trained in
+the lowest school of Evangelical literalism--a school which in after
+life both my brother and myself came to regard as the main obstacle
+to the complete overthrow of unbelief; we therefore looked upon it
+with something stronger than aversion, and for my own part I still
+deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the cause of Christ
+has ever encountered.  But of this more hereafter.
+
+My mother, as I said, threw her whole soul into the work of our
+religious education.  Whatever she believed she believed literally,
+and, if I may say so, with a harshness of realisation which left very
+little scope for imagination or mystery.  Her plans of Heaven and
+solutions of life's enigmas were direct and forcible, but they could
+only be reconciled with certain obvious facts--such as the
+omnipotence and all-goodness of God--by leaving many things
+absolutely out of sight.  And this my mother succeeded effectually in
+doing.  She never doubted that her opinions comprised the truth, the
+whole truth, and nothing but the truth; she therefore made haste to
+sow the good seed in our tender minds, and so far succeeded that when
+my brother was four years old he could repeat the Apostles' Creed,
+the General Confession, and the Lord's Prayer without a blunder.  My
+mother made herself believe that he delighted in them; but, alas! it
+was far otherwise; for, strange as it may appear concerning one whose
+later life was a continual prayer, in childhood he detested nothing
+so much as being made to pray and to learn his Catechism.  In this I
+am sorry to say we were both heartily of a mind.  As for Sunday, the
+less said the better.
+
+I have already hinted (but as a warning to other parents I had
+better, perhaps, express myself more plainly), that this aversion was
+probably the result of my mother's undue eagerness to reap an
+artificial fruit of lip service, which could have little meaning to
+the heart of one so young.  I believe that the severe check which the
+natural growth of faith experienced in my brother's case was due
+almost entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism in
+which he had been trained; but, however this may be, we both of us
+hated being made to say our prayers--morning and evening it was our
+one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as indeed children generally
+will, by every artifice which we could employ.  Thus we were in the
+habit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer time, and would
+gratefully hear my father tell my mother that it was a shame to wake
+us; whereon he would carry us up to bed in a state apparently of the
+profoundest slumber when we were really wide awake and in great fear
+of detection.  For we knew how to pretend to be asleep, but we did
+not know how we ought to wake again; there was nothing for it
+therefore when we were once committed, but to go on sleeping till we
+were fairly undressed and put to bed, and could wake up safely in the
+dark.  But deceit is never long successful, and we were at last
+ignominiously exposed.
+
+It happened one evening that my mother suspected my brother John, and
+tried to open his little hands which were lying clasped in front of
+him.  Now my brother was as yet very crude and inconsistent in his
+theories concerning sleep, and had no conception of what a real
+sleeper would do under these circumstances.  Fear deprived him of his
+powers of reflection, and he thus unfortunately concluded that
+because sleepers, so far as he had observed them, were always
+motionless, therefore, they must be quite rigid and incapable of
+motion, and indeed that any movement, under any circumstances (for
+from his earliest childhood he liked to carry his theories to their
+legitimate conclusion), would be physically impossible for one who
+was really sleeping; forgetful, oh! unhappy one, of the flexibility
+of his own body on being carried upstairs, and, more unhappy still,
+ignorant of the art of waking.  He, therefore, clenched his fingers
+harder and harder as he felt my mother trying to unfold them while
+his head hung listless, and his eyes were closed I as though he were
+sleeping sweetly.  It is needless to detail the agony of shame that
+followed.  My mother begged my father to box his ears, which my
+father flatly refused to do.  Then she boxed them herself, and there
+followed a scene and a day or two of disgrace for both of us.
+
+Shortly after this there happened another misadventure.  A lady came
+to stay with my mother, and was to sleep in a bed that had been
+brought into our nursery, for my father's fortunes had already
+failed, and we were living in a humble way.  We were still but four
+and five years old, so the arrangement was not unnatural, and it was
+assumed that we should be asleep before the lady went to bed, and be
+downstairs before she would get up in the morning.  But the arrival
+of this lady and her being put to sleep in the nursery were great
+events to us in those days, and being particularly wanted to go to
+sleep, we of course sat up in bed talking and keeping ourselves awake
+till she should come upstairs.  Perhaps we had fancied that she would
+give us something, but if so we were disappointed.  However, whether
+this was the case or not, we were wide awake when our visitor came to
+bed, and having no particular object to gain, we made no pretence of
+sleeping.  The lady kissed us both, told us to lie still and go to
+sleep like good children, and then began doing her hair.
+
+I remember that this was the occasion on which my brother discovered
+a good many things in connection with the fair sex which had hitherto
+been beyond his ken; more especially that the mass of petticoats and
+clothes which envelop the female form were not, as he expressed it to
+me, "all solid woman," but that women were not in reality more
+substantially built than men, and had legs as much as he had, a fact
+which he had never yet realised.  On this he for a long time
+considered them as impostors, who had wronged him by leading him to
+suppose that they had far more "body in them" (so he said), than he
+now found they had.  This was a sort of thing which he regarded with
+stern moral reprobation.  If he had been old enough to have a
+solicitor I believe he would have put the matter into his hands, as
+well as certain other things which had lately troubled him.  For but
+recently my mother had bought a fowl, and he had seen it plucked, and
+the inside taken out; his irritation had been extreme on discovering
+that fowls were not all solid flesh, but that their insides--and
+these formed, as it appeared to him, an enormous percentage of the
+bird--were perfectly useless.  He was now beginning to understand
+that sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good meat was
+concerned; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in comparison with
+what they ought to have considering their apparent bulk--
+insignificant, mere skin and bone covering a cavern.  What right had
+they, or anything else, to assert themselves as so big, and prove so
+empty?  And now this discovery of woman's falsehood was quite too
+much for him.  The world itself was hollow, made up of shams and
+delusions, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
+
+Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough.  Everything with him was to
+be exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it, and
+everything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doing
+hitherto.  If a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid; if
+hollow, very hollow; nothing was to be half and half, and nothing was
+to change unless he had himself already become accustomed to its
+times and manners of changing; there were to be no exceptions and no
+contradictions; all things were to be perfectly consistent, and all
+premises to be carried with extremest rigour to their legitimate
+conclusions.  Heaven was to be very neat (for he was always tidy
+himself), and free from sudden shocks to the nervous system, such as
+those 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 sort
+of 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 such
+modifications as were forced upon him by enlarged perceptions, but
+every modification was an effort to him, in spite of a continual and
+successful resistance to what he recognised as his initial mental
+defect.
+
+I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark in the
+preceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used to notice
+it as an almost invariable rule that children's earliest ideas of God
+are 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, the
+child having learned to look upon God as His Heavenly Father through
+the Lord's Prayer and our Church Services, will feel towards God as
+he does towards his own father; this conception will stick to a man
+for years and years after he has attained manhood--probably it will
+never leave him.  For all children love their fathers and mothers, if
+these last will only let them; it is not a little unkindness that
+will kill so hardy a plant as the love of a child for its parents.
+Nature has allowed ample margin for many blunders, provided there be
+a genuine desire on the parent's part to make the child feel that he
+is loved, and that his natural feelings are respected.  This is all
+the religious education which a child should have.  As he grows older
+he will then turn naturally to the waters of life, and thirst after
+them of his own accord by reason of the spiritual refreshment which
+they, 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 to
+drink against his will, and perhaps with harshness, when all the
+analogies with which he was acquainted pointed in the direction of
+their being unpleasant and unwholesome.  So soul-satisfying is family
+affection to a child, that he who has once enjoyed it cannot bear to
+be deprived of the hope that he is possessed in Heaven of a parent
+who is like his earthly father--of a friend and counsellor who will
+never, never fail him.  There is no such religious nor moral
+education as kindly genial treatment and a good example; all else may
+then be let alone till the child is old enough to feel the want of
+it.  It is true that the seed will thus be sown late, but in what a
+soil!  On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh
+and uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will be
+painful.  He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of
+his father.  He will therefore shrink from Him.  The rottenness of
+stillborn 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 say
+her prayers.  This was a cruel blow to both of us; we had always been
+under the impression that grownup people were not made to say their
+prayers, and the idea of any one saying them of his or her own accord
+had never occurred to us as possible.  Of course the lady would not
+say her prayers if she were not obliged; and yet she did say them;
+therefore she must be obliged to say them; therefore we should be
+obliged to say them, and this was a very great disappointment.  Awe-
+struck and open-mouthed we listened while the lady prayed in sonorous
+accents, for many things which I do not now remember, and finally for
+my 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 had
+confirmed our worst apprehensions; it was just what we had been
+taught 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 that
+there were many mysteries in connection with life and things which it
+was high time to unravel, and that an opportunity was now afforded us
+which might not readily occur again.  All we had to do was to be true
+to ourselves and equal to the occasion.  We laid our plans with great
+astuteness.  We would be fast asleep when the lady came up to bed,
+but our heads should be turned in the direction of her bed, and
+covered with clothes, all but a single peep-hole.  My brother, as the
+eldest, had clearly a right to be nearest the lady, but I could see
+very well, and could depend on his reporting faithfully whatever
+should escape me.
+
+There was no chance of her giving us anything--if she had meant to do
+so she would have done it sooner; she might, indeed, consider the
+moment of her departure as the most auspicious for this purpose, but
+then 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 not
+certain about it, and in the end regretfully concluded that as
+snoring 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 to
+sleep, and promised faithfully that we would do so; the tongue indeed
+swore, but the mind was unsworn.  It was agreed that we should keep
+pinching one another to prevent our going to sleep.  We did so at
+frequent intervals; at last our patience was rewarded with the heavy
+creak, as of a stout elderly lady labouring up the stairs, and
+presently our victim entered.
+
+To cut a long story short, the lady on satisfying herself that we
+were asleep, never said her prayers at all; during the remainder of
+her visit whenever she found us awake she always said them, but when
+she thought we were asleep, she never prayed.  It is needless to add
+that we had the matter out with her before she left, and that the
+consequences were unpleasant for all parties; they added to the
+troubles in which we were already involved as to our prayers, and
+were indirectly among the earliest causes which led my brother to
+look with scepticism upon religion.
+
+For a while, however, all went on as though nothing had happened.  An
+effect of distrust, indeed, remained after the cause had been
+forgotten, but my brother was still too young to oppose anything that
+my mother told him, and to all outward appearance he grew in grace no
+less rapidly than in stature.
+
+For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by the one
+great sorrow of our father's death.  Shortly after this we were sent
+to a day school in Bloomsbury.  We were neither of us very happy
+there, but my brother, who always took kindly to his books, picked up
+a fair knowledge of Latin and Greek; he also learned to draw, and to
+exercise himself a little in English composition.  When I was about
+fourteen my mother capitalised a part of her income and started me
+off to America, where she had friends who could give me a helping
+hand; by their kindness I was enabled, after an absence of twenty
+years, to return with a handsome income, but not, alas, before the
+death of my mother.
+
+Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Bible
+with us and explain it.  She had become deeply impressed with the
+millenarian fervour which laid hold of so many some twenty-five or
+thirty years ago.  The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in
+the Bible, and she was imbued with the fullest conviction that all
+the threatened horrors with which it teems were upon the eve of their
+accomplishment.  The year eighteen hundred and forty-eight was to be
+(as indeed it was) a time of general bloodshed and confusion, while
+in 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 Man
+with 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 them
+that were alive, would be caught up with other saints into the air,
+and would possibly receive while rising some distinguishing token of
+confidence and approbation which should fall with due impressiveness
+upon the surrounding multitude; then would come the consummation of
+all things, and she would be ever with the Lord.  She died peaceably
+in her bed before she could know that a commercial panic was the
+nearest approach to the fulfilment of prophecy which the year
+eighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth.
+
+These opinions of my mother's were positively disastrous--injuring
+her naturally healthy and vigorous mind by leading her to indulge in
+all manner of dreamy and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, which
+any but the most narrow literalist would feel at once to be
+untenable.  Thus several times she expressed to us her conviction
+that my brother and myself were to be the two witnesses mentioned in
+the eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation, and dilated upon the
+gratification she should experience upon finding that we had indeed
+been reserved for a position of such distinction.  We were as yet
+mere children, and naturally took all for granted that our mother
+told us; we therefore made a careful examination of the passage which
+threw light upon our future; but on finding that the prospect was
+gloomy and full of bloodshed we protested against the honours which
+were intended for us, more especially when we reflected that the
+mother of the two witnesses was not menaced in Scripture with any
+particular discomfort.  If we were to be martyrs, my mother ought to
+wish to be a martyr too, whereas nothing was farther from her
+intention.  Her notion clearly was that we were to be massacred
+somewhere in the streets of London, in consequence of the anti-
+Christian machinations of the Pope; that after lying about unburied
+for 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 our
+glorification, but was to survive us many years on earth, living in
+an odour of great sanctity and reflected splendour, as the central
+and most august figure in a select society.  She would perhaps be
+able indirectly, through her sons' influence with the Almighty, to
+have a voice in most of the arrangements both of this world and of
+the next.  If all this were to come true (and things seemed very like
+it), those friends who had neglected us in our adversity would not
+find it too easy to be restored to favour, however greatly they might
+desire it--that is to say, they would not have found it too easy in
+the case of one less magnanimous and spiritually-minded than herself.
+My mother said but little of the above directly, but the fragments
+which occasionally escaped her were pregnant, and on looking back it
+is easy to perceive that she must have been building one of the most
+stupendous aerial fabrics that have ever been reared.
+
+I have given the above in its more amusing aspect, and am half afraid
+that I may appear to be making a jest of weakness on the part of one
+of the most devotedly unselfish mothers who have ever existed.  But
+one can love while smiling, and the very wildness of my mother's
+dream serves to show how entirely her whole soul was occupied with
+the things which are above.  To her, religion was all in all; the
+earth was but a place of pilgrimage--only so far important as it was
+a possible road to heaven.  She impressed this upon both of us by
+every word and action--instant in season and out of season, so that
+she might fill us more deeply with a sense of God.  But the
+inevitable consequences happened; my mother had aimed too high and
+had overshot her mark.  The influence indeed of her guileless and
+unworldly nature remained impressed upon my brother even during the
+time of his extremest unbelief (perhaps his ultimate safety is in the
+main referable to this cause, and to the happy memories of my father,
+which had predisposed him to love God), but my mother had insisted on
+the most minute verbal accuracy of every part of the Bible; she had
+also dwelt upon the duty of independent research, and on the
+necessity of giving up everything rather than assent to things which
+our conscience did not assent to.  No one could have more effectually
+taught us to try TO THINK the truth, and we had taken her at her word
+because our hearts told us that she was right.  But she required
+three incompatible things.  When my brother grew older he came to
+feel that independent and unflinching examination, with a
+determination to abide by the results, would lead him to reject the
+point which to my mother was more important than any other--I mean
+the absolute accuracy of the Gospel records.  My mother was
+inexpressibly shocked at hearing my brother doubt the authenticity of
+the Epistle to the Hebrews; and then, as it appeared to him, she
+tried to make him violate the duties of examination and candour which
+he had learnt too thoroughly to unlearn.  Thereon came pain and an
+estrangement which was none the less profound for being mutually
+concealed.
+
+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 and
+clever.  His manners were, like my father's, singularly genial, and
+his appearance very prepossessing.  He had as yet no doubt concerning
+the soundness of any fundamental Christian doctrine, but his mind was
+too active to allow of his being contented with my mother's child-
+like faith.  There were points on which he did not indeed doubt, but
+which it would none the less be interesting to consider; such for
+example as the perfectibility of the regenerate Christian, and the
+meaning of the mysterious central chapters of the Epistle to the
+Romans.  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 every
+Sunday afternoon, a task for which his patience and good temper well
+fitted him.  On one occasion, however, while he was explaining the
+effect of baptism to one of his favourite pupils, he discovered to
+his great surprise that the boy had never been baptised.  He pushed
+his inquiries further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in his
+class only five had been baptised, and, not only so, but that no
+difference in disposition or conduct could be discovered between the
+regenerate boys and the unregenerate.  The good and bad boys were
+distributed in proportions equal to the respective numbers of the
+baptised and unbaptised.  In spite of a certain impetuosity of
+natural character, he was also of a matter-of-fact and experimental
+turn of mind; he therefore went through the whole school, which
+numbered about a hundred boys, and found out who had been baptised
+and who had not.  The same results appeared.  The majority had not
+been baptised; yet the good and bad dispositions were so distributed
+as to preclude all possibility of maintaining that the baptised boys
+were better than the unbaptised.
+
+The reader may smile at the idea of any one's faith being troubled by
+a fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but in truth my
+brother was seriously and painfully shocked.  The teacher to whom he
+applied for a solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real
+power, and reported my brother to the rector for having disturbed the
+school by his inquiries.  The rector was old and self-opinionated;
+the difficulty, indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to
+my brother, but instead of saying so at once, and referring to any
+recognised theological authority, he tried to put him off with words
+which seemed intended to silence him rather than to satisfy him;
+finally he lost his temper, and my brother fell under suspicion of
+unorthodoxy.
+
+This kind of treatment might answer with some people, but not with my
+brother.  He alludes to it resentfully in the introductory chapter of
+his book.  He became suspicious that a preconceived opinion was being
+defended at the expense of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven upon
+his own unaided investigation.  The result may be guessed:  he began
+to go astray, and strayed further and further.  The children of God,
+he reasoned, the members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom of
+Heaven, were no more spiritually minded than the children of the
+world and the devil.  Was then the grace of God a gift which left no
+trace whatever upon those who were possessed of it--a thing the
+presence or absence of which might be ascertained by consulting the
+parish registry, but was not discernible in conduct?  The grace of
+man was more clearly perceptible than this.  Assuredly there must be
+a screw loose somewhere, which, for aught he knew, might be
+jeopardising the salvation of all Christendom.  Where then was this
+loose screw to be found?
+
+He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief was
+caused by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism.  He
+therefore, to my mother's inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists
+and was immersed in a pond near Dorking.  With the Baptists he
+remained quiet about three months, and then began to quarrel with his
+instructors as to their doctrine of predestination.  Shortly
+afterwards he came accidentally upon a fascinating stranger who was
+no less struck with my brother than my brother with him, and this
+gentleman, who turned out to be a Roman Catholic missionary, landed
+him in the Church of Rome, where he felt sure that he had now found
+rest for his soul.  But here, too, he was mistaken; after about two
+years he rebelled against the stifling of all free inquiry; on this
+rebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and he was soon
+battling with unbelief.  He then fell in with one who was a pure
+Deist, 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 am
+painfully struck with the manner in which they show that all these
+pitiable vagaries were to be traced to a single cause--a cause which
+still exists to the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, I
+fear, 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 regard
+Christianity as a thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirely
+in the strictest reading of the letter, or to be rejected as
+absolutely untrue.  The fact is, that all permanent truth is as one
+of those coal measures, a seam of which lies near the surface, and
+even crops up above the ground, but which is generally of an inferior
+quality and soon worked out; beneath it there comes a layer of sand
+and clay, and then at last the true seam of precious quality and in
+virtually inexhaustible supply.  The truth which is on the surface is
+rarely the whole truth.  It is seldom until this has been worked out
+and done with--as in the case of the apparent flatness of the earth--
+that unchangeable truth is discovered.  It is the glory of the Lord
+to conceal a matter:  it is the glory of the king to find it out.  If
+my brother, from whom I have taken the above illustration, had had
+some judicious and wide-minded friend to correct and supplement the
+mainly admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my
+mother, 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 as
+literal and unspiritual as the other--each impressed with one aspect
+of religious truth, and with one only.  In the end he became perhaps
+the widest-minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but
+no one from his early manhood could have augured this result; on the
+contrary, he shewed every sign of being likely to develop into one of
+those 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 mental
+vision.  In after life, he often met with mere lads who seemed to him
+to 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 laborious
+growth are generally more fruitful than those which are over-early
+luxuriant.  Drawing an illustration from the art of painting, with
+which he was well acquainted, my brother used to say that all the
+greatest painters had begun with a hard and precise manner from which
+they had only broken after several years of effort; and that in like
+manner all the early schools were founded upon definiteness of
+outline to the exclusion of truth of effect.  This may be true; but
+in my brother's case there was something even more unpromising than
+this; there was a commonness, so to speak, of mental execution, from
+which no one could have foreseen his after-emancipation.  Yet in the
+course of time he was indeed emancipated to the very uttermost, while
+his bonds will, I firmly trust, be found to have been of inestimable
+service to the whole human race.
+
+For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see the
+Christian scheme AS A WHOLE, or even to conceive the idea that there
+was any whole at all, other than each one of the stages of opinion
+through which he was at the time passing; yet when the idea was at
+length presented to him by one whom I must not name, the discarded
+fragments of his faith assumed shape, and formed themselves into a
+consistently organised scheme.  Then became apparent the value of his
+knowledge of the details of so many different sides of Christian
+verity.  Buried in the details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that
+they were only the unessential developments of certain component
+parts.  Awakening to the perception of the whole after an intimate
+acquaintance with the details, he was able to realise the position
+and meaning of all that he had hitherto experienced in a way which
+has been vouchsafed to few, if any others.
+
+Thus he became truly a broad Churchman.  Not broad in the ordinary
+and ill-considered use of the term (for the broad Churchman is as
+little able to sympathise with Romanists, extreme High Churchmen and
+Dissenters, as these are with himself--he is only one of a sect which
+is called by the name broad, though it is no broader than its own
+base), but in the true sense of being able to believe in the
+naturalness, legitimacy, and truth qua Christianity even of those
+doctrines which seem to stand most widely and irreconcilably asunder.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+But it was impossible that a mind of such activity should have gone
+over so much ground, and yet in the end returned to the same position
+as that from which it started.
+
+So far was this from being the case that the Christianity of his
+maturer life would be considered dangerously heterodox by those who
+belong to any of the more definite or precise schools of theological
+thought.  He was as one who has made the circuit of a mountain, and
+yet been ascending during the whole time of his doing so:  such a
+person finds himself upon the same side as at first, but upon a
+greatly higher level.  The peaks which had seemed the most important
+when he was in the valley were now dwarfed to their true proportions
+by colossal cloud-capped masses whose very existence could not have
+been suspected from beneath:  and again, other points which had
+seemed among the lowest turned out to be the very highest of all--as
+the Finster-Aarhorn, which hides itself away in the centre of the
+Bernese Alps, is never seen to be the greatest till one is high and
+far off.
+
+Thus he felt no sort of fear or repugnance in admitting that the New
+Testament writings, as we now have them, are not by any means
+accurate records of the events which they profess to chronicle.
+This, which few English Churchmen would be prepared to admit, was to
+him so much of an axiom that he despaired of seeing any sound
+theological structure raised until it was universally recognised.
+
+And here he would probably meet with sympathy from the more advanced
+thinkers within the body of the Church, but so far as I know, he
+stood alone as recognising the wisdom of the Divine counsels in
+having ordained the wide and apparently irreconcilable divergencies
+of doctrine and character which we find assigned to Christ in the
+Gospels, and as finding his faith confirmed, not by the supposition
+that both the portraits drawn of Christ are objectively true, but
+THAT BOTH ARE OBJECTIVELY INACCURATE, AND THAT THE ALMIGHTY INTENDED
+THEY SHOULD BE INACCURATE, inasmuch as the true spiritual conception
+in the mind of man could be indirectly more certainly engendered by a
+strife, a warring, a clashing, so to speak, of versions, all of them
+distorting slightly some one or other of the features of the
+original, than directly by the most absolutely correct impression
+which human language could convey.  Even the most perfect human
+speech, as has been often pointed out, is a very gross and imperfect
+vehicle of thought.  I remember once hearing him say that it was not
+till he was nearly thirty that he discovered "what thick and sticky
+fluids were air and water," how crass and dull in comparison with
+other more subtle fluids; he added that speech had no less deceived
+him, 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 discrepancies
+and inconsistencies; with him Christianity, as distinguished from a
+bare belief in the objectively historical character of each part of
+the Gospels, was true because of these very discrepancies; as his
+conceptions of the Divine manner of working became wider, the very
+forces which had at one time shaken his faith to its foundations
+established it anew upon a firmer and broader base.  He was gradually
+led to feel that the ideal presented by the life and death of our
+Saviour could never have been accepted by Jews at all, if its whole
+purport had been made intelligible during the Redeemer's life-time;
+that in order to insure its acceptance by a nucleus of followers it
+must have been endowed with a more local aspect than it was intended
+afterwards to wear; yet that, for the sake of its subsequent
+universal value, the destruction of that local complexion was
+indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from viva voce
+communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the
+Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth
+which could not be otherwise obtainable--and that thus the value of
+the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike
+by the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain
+by a certain amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder to fill
+in the details according to his own spiritual needs, and that no
+ideal can be truly universal and permanents unless it have an
+elasticity which will allow of this process in the minds of those who
+contemplate it; that it cannot become thus elastic unless by the loss
+of no inconsiderable amount of detail, and that thus the half, as Dr.
+Arnold used to say, "becomes greater than the whole," the sketch more
+preciously suggestive than the photograph.  Hence far from deploring
+the fragmentary, confused, and contradictory condition of the Gospel
+records, he saw in this condition the means whereby alone the human
+mind could have been enabled to conceive--not the precise nature of
+Christ--but THE HIGHEST IDEAL OF WHICH EACH INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN SOUL
+WAS CAPABLE.  As soon as he had grasped these conceptions, which will
+be found more fully developed in one of the later chapters of his
+book, the spell of unbelief was broken.
+
+But, once broken, it was dissolved utterly and entirely; he could
+allow himself to contemplate fearlessly all sorts of issues from
+which one whose experiences had been less varied would have shrunk.
+He was free of the enemy's camp, and could go hither and thither
+whithersoever he would.  The very points which to others were
+insuperable difficulties were to him foundation-stones of faith.  For
+example, to the objection that if in the present state of the records
+no clear conception of the nature of Christ's life and teaching could
+be formed, we should be compelled to take one for our model of whom
+we knew little or nothing certain, I have heard him answer, "And so
+much the better for us all.  The truth, if read by the light of man's
+imperfect understanding, would have been falser to him than any
+falsehood.  It would have been truth no longer.  BETTER BE LED ARIGHT
+BY AN ERROR WHICH IS SO ADJUSTED AS TO COMPENSATE FOR THE ERRORS IN
+MAN'S POWERS OF UNDERSTANDING, THAN BE MISLED BY A TRUTH WHICH CAN
+NEVER BE TRANSLATED FROM OBJECTIVITY TO SUBJECTIVITY.  In such a
+case, 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 was
+impatient of the subterfuges with which untenable interpretations of
+Scripture were defended, and of the disingenuousness of certain
+harmonists; indeed, the mention of the word harmony was enough to
+kindle an outbreak of righteous anger, which would sometimes go to
+the 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 music
+in the hands of their successors.  Which of the great musicians has
+not enriched his art not only by the discovery of new harmonies, but
+by proving that sounds which are actually inharmonious are
+nevertheless essentially and eternally delightful?  What an outcry
+has there not always been against the 'unwarrantable licence' with
+the rules of harmony whenever a Beethoven or a Mozart has broken
+through any of the trammels which have been regarded as the
+safeguards of the art, instead of in their true light of fetters, and
+how gratefully have succeeding musicians acquiesced in and adopted
+the innovation."  Then would follow a tirade with illustration upon
+illustration, comparison of this passage with that, and an exhaustive
+demonstration that one or other, or both, could have had no sort of
+possible foundation in fact; he could only see that the persons from
+whom he differed were defending something which was untrue and which
+they ought to have known to be untrue, but he could not see that
+people ought to know many things which they do not know.
+
+Had he himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see from
+his own standpoints?  Can any of us do so?  The force of early bias
+and education, the force of intellectual surroundings, the force of
+natural timidity, the force of dulness, were things which he could
+appreciate and make allowance for in any other age, and among any
+other people than his own; but as belonging to England and the
+Nineteenth Century they had no place in his theory of Nature; they
+were inconceivable, unnatural, unpardonable, whenever they came into
+contact with the subject of Christian evidences.  Deplorable, indeed,
+they are, but this was just the sort of word to which he could not
+confine himself.  The criticisms upon the late Dean Alford's notes,
+which will be given in the sequel, display this sort of temper; they
+are not entirely his own, but he adopted them and endorsed them with
+a warmth which we cannot but feel to be unnecessary, not to say more.
+Yet I am free to confess that whatever editorial licence I could
+venture 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 not
+unfrequently set the harmonists aside.  For example, in his notes
+upon the discrepancies between St. Luke's and St. Matthew's accounts
+of the early life of our Lord, the Dean openly avows that it is quite
+beyond his purpose to attempt to reconcile the two.  "This part of
+the Gospel history," he writes, "is one where the harmonists, by
+their arbitrary reconcilement of the two accounts, have given great
+advantage to the enemies of the faith.  AS THE TWO ACCOUNTS NOW
+STAND, it is wholly impossible to suggest any satisfactory method of
+UNITING THEM, every one who has attempted it has in some part or
+other of his hypothesis violated probability and common sense," but
+in spite of this, the Dean had no hesitation in accepting both the
+accounts.  With reference to this the author of The Jesus of History
+(Williams and Norgate, 1866)--a work to which my brother admitted
+himself to be under very great obligations, and which he greatly
+admired, in spite of his utter dissent from the main conclusion
+arrived at, has the following note:-
+
+"Dean Alford, N.T. for English readers, admits that the narratives as
+they stand are contradictory, but he believes both.  He is even
+severe upon the harmonists who attempt to frame schemes of
+reconciliation between the two, on account of the triumph they thus
+furnish to the 'enemies of the faith,' a phrase which seems to imply
+all who believe less than he does.  The Dean, however, forgets that
+the faith which can believe two (apparently) contradictory
+propositions in matters of fact is a very rare gift, and that for one
+who is so endowed there are thousands who can be satisfied with a
+plausible though demonstrably false explanation.  To the latter class
+the 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 expressed
+his concurrence with it as in the main just, my brother wrote:  "You
+are wrong about the note in The Jesus of History, there is more of
+the Christianity of the future in Dean Alford's indifference to the
+harmony between the discordant accounts of Luke and Matthew than
+there would have been EVEN IN THE MOST CONVINCING AND SATISFACTORY
+explanation of the way in which they came to differ.  No such
+explanation is possible; both the Dean and the author of The Jesus of
+History were very well aware of this, but the latter is unjust in
+assuming that his opponent was not alive to the absurdity of
+appearing to believe two contradictory propositions at one and the
+same time.  The Dean takes very good care that he shall not appear to
+do this, for it is perfectly plain to any careful reader that he must
+really believe that one or both narratives are inaccurate, inasmuch
+as the differences between them are too great to allow of
+reconciliation by a supposed suppression of detail.
+
+"This, though not said so clearly as it should have been, is yet
+virtually implied in the admission that no sort of fact which could
+by any possibility be admitted as reconciling them had ever occurred
+to human ingenuity; what, then, Dean Alford must have really felt was
+that the spiritual value of each account was no less precious for not
+being in strict accordance with the other; that the objective truth
+lies somewhere between them, and is of very little importance, being
+long dead and buried, and living in its results only, in comparison
+with the subjective truth conveyed by both the narratives, which
+lives in our hearts independently of precise knowledge concerning the
+actual facts.  Moreover, that though both accounts may perhaps be
+inaccurate, yet that A VERY LITTLE natural inaccuracy on the part of
+each writer would throw them apparently very wide asunder, that such
+inaccuracies are easily to be accounted for, and would, in fact, be
+inevitable in the sixty years of oral communication which elapsed
+between 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 that
+the details of the facts connected with the conception, birth,
+genealogy, and earliest history of our Saviour are irrecoverable--a
+general impression being alone possible, or indeed desirable.
+
+"It might perhaps have been more satisfactory if Dean Alford had
+expressed the above more plainly; but if he had done this, who would
+have read his book?  Where would have been that influence in the
+direction of truly liberal Christianity which has been so potent
+during the last twenty years?  As it was, the freedom with which the
+Dean wrote was the cause of no inconsiderable scandal.  Or, again, he
+may not have been fully conscious of his own position:  few men are;
+he had taken the right one, but more perhaps by spiritual instinct
+than by conscious and deliberate exercise of his intellectual
+faculties.  Finally, compromise is not a matter of good policy only,
+it is a solemn duty in the interests of Christian peace, and this not
+in minor matters only--we can all do this much--but in those
+concerning which we feel most strongly, for here the sacrifice is
+greatest and most acceptable to God.  There are, of course, limits to
+this, and Dean Alford may have carried compromise too far in the
+present instance, but it is very transparent.  The narrowness which
+leads the author of The Jesus of History to strain at such a gnat is
+the secret of his inability to accept the divinity and miracles of
+our Lord, and has marred the most exhaustively critical exegesis of
+the life and death of our Saviour with an impotent conclusion."
+
+It is strange that one who could write thus should occasionally have
+shown himself so little able to apply his own principles.  He seems
+to have been alternately under the influence of two conflicting
+spirits--at one time writing as though there were nothing precious
+under the sun except logic, consistency, and precision, and breathing
+fire and smoke against even very trifling deviations from the path of
+exact criticism--at another, leading the reader almost to believe
+that he disregarded the value of any objective truth, and speaking of
+endeavour after accuracy in terms that are positively contemptuous.
+Whenever he was in the one mood he seemed to forget the possibility
+of any other; so much so that I have sometimes thought that he did
+this deliberately and for the same reasons as those which led Adam
+Smith to exclude one set of premises in his Theory of Moral
+Sentiments and another in his Wealth of Nations.  I believe, however,
+that the explanation lies in the fact that my brother was inclined to
+underrate the importance of belief in the objective truth of any
+other individual features in the life of our Lord than his
+Resurrection and Ascension.  All else seemed dwarfed by the side of
+these events.  His whole soul was so concentrated upon the centre of
+the circle that he forgot the circumference, or left it out of sight.
+Nothing less than the strictest objective truth as to the main facts
+of the Resurrection and Ascension would content him; the other
+miracles and the life and teaching of our Lord might then be left
+open; whatever view was taken of them by each individual Christian
+was probably the one most desirable for the spiritual wellbeing of
+each.
+
+Even as regards the Resurrection and Ascension, he did not greatly
+value the detail.  Provided these facts were so established that they
+could never henceforth be controverted, he thought that the less
+detail the broader and more universally acceptable would be the
+effect.  Hence, when Dean Alford's notes seemed to jeopardise the
+evidences for these things, he could brook no trifling; for unless
+Christ actually died and actually came to life again, he saw no
+escape from an utter denial of any but natural religion.  Christ
+would have been no more to him than Socrates or Shakespeare, except
+in so far as his teaching was more spiritual.  The triune nature of
+the Deity--the Resurrection from the dead--the hope of Heaven and
+salutary fear of Hell--all would go but for the Resurrection and
+Ascension of Jesus Christ; nothing would remain except a sense of the
+Divine as a substitute for God, and the current feeling of one's
+peers as the chief moral check upon misconduct.  Indeed, we have seen
+this view openly advocated by a recent writer, and set forth in the
+very plainest terms.  My brother did not live to see it, but if he
+had, he would have recognised the fulfilment of his own prophecies as
+to what must be the inevitable sequel of a denial of our Lord's
+Resurrection.
+
+It will be seen therefore that he was in no danger of being carried
+away by a "pet theory."  Where light and definition were essential,
+he would sacrifice nothing of either; but he was jealous for his
+highest light, and felt "that the whole effect of the Christian
+scheme was indefinitely heightened by keeping all other lights
+subordinate"--this at least was the illustration which he often used
+concerning it.  But as there were limits to the value of light and
+"finding"--limits which had been far exceeded, with the result of an
+unnatural forcing of the lights, and an effect of garishness and
+unreality--so there were limits to the as yet unrecognised
+preciousness of "losing" and obscurity; these limits he placed at the
+objectivity of our Lord's Resurrection and Ascension.  Let there be
+light enough to show these things, and the rest would gain by being
+in half-tone and shadow.
+
+His facility of illustration was simply marvellous.  From his
+conversation any one would have thought that he was acquainted with
+all 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 practice
+in the art of painting, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the
+masterpieces of Raphael, Titian, Guido, Domenichino, and others; but
+he could never have been called a painter; for music he had
+considerable feeling; I think he must have known thorough-bass, but
+it was hard to say what he did or did not know.  Of science he was
+almost entirely ignorant, yet he had assimilated a quantity of stray
+facts, and whatever he assimilated seemed to agree with him and
+nourish his mental being.  But though his acquaintance with any one
+art or science must be allowed to have been superficial only, he had
+an astonishing perception of the relative bearings of facts which
+seemed at first sight to be quite beyond the range of one another,
+and of the relations between the sciences generally; it was this
+which gave him his felicity and fecundity of illustration--a gift
+which he never abused.  He delighted in its use for the purpose of
+carrying a clear impression of his meaning to the mind of another,
+but I never remember to have heard him mistake illustration for
+argument, nor endeavour to mislead an adversary by a fascinating but
+irrelevant simile.  The subtlety of his mind was a more serious
+source of danger to him, though I do not know that he greatly lost by
+it in comparison with what he gained; his sense, however, of
+distinctions was so fine that it would sometimes distract his
+attention from points of infinitely greater importance in connection
+with his subject than the particular distinction which he was trying
+to establish at the moment.
+
+The reader may be glad to know what my brother felt about retaining
+the unhistoric passages of Scripture.  Would he wish to see them
+sought for and sifted out?  Or, again, what would he propose
+concerning such of the parables as are acknowledged by every liberal
+Churchman to be immoral, as, for instance, the story of Dives and
+Lazarus and the Unjust Steward--parables which can never have been
+spoken by our Lord, at any rate not in their present shape?  And here
+we have a remarkable instance of his moderation and truly English
+good sense.  "Do not touch one word of them," was his often-repeated
+exclamation.  "If not directly inspired by the mouth of God they have
+been indirectly inspired by the force of events, and the force of
+events is the power and manifestation of God; they could not have
+been allowed to come into their present position if they had not been
+recognised in the counsels of the Almighty as being of indirect
+service to mankind; there is a subjective truth conveyed even by
+these parables to the minds of many, that enables them to lay hold of
+other and objective truths which they could not else have grasped.
+
+"There can be no question that the communistic utterances of the
+third gospel, as distinguished from St. Matthew's more spiritual and
+doubtless more historic rendering of the same teaching, have been of
+inestimable service to Christianity.  Christ is not for the whole
+only, but also for them that are sick, for the ill-instructed and
+what we are pleased to call 'dangerous' classes, as well as for the
+more 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 comfort
+which could never be given by the 'Blessed are the poor in spirit' of
+Matthew 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 shall
+inherit the earth.  Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after
+righteousness:  for they shall be filled.  Blessed are the merciful:
+for they shall obtain mercy.  Blessed are the pure in heart:  for
+they shall see God.  Blessed are the peacemakers:  for they shall be
+called the children of God.  Blessed are they which are persecuted
+for righteousness' sake:  for their's is the kingdom of heaven.
+Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and
+shall 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 Luke
+we read, 'Blessed are ye that hunger now:  for ye shall be filled.
+Blessed are ye that weep now:  for ye shall laugh. . . .  But woe
+unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.  Woe
+unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger.  Woe unto you that laugh
+now! for ye shall mourn and weep.  Woe unto you, when all men shall
+speak well of you! for so did THEIR fathers to the false prophets,'
+where even the grammar of the last sentence, independently of the
+substance, is such as it is impossible to ascribe to our Lord
+himself.
+
+"The 'upper' classes naturally turn to the version of Matthew, but
+the 'lower,' no less naturally to that of Luke, nor is it likely that
+the ideal of Christ would be one-tenth part so dear to them had not
+this provision for them been made, not by the direct teaching of the
+Saviour, but by the indirect inspiration of such events as were seen
+by the Almighty to be necessary for the full development of the
+highest ideal of which mankind was capable.  All that we have in the
+New Testament is the inspired word, directly or indirectly, of God,
+the unhistoric no less than the historic; it is for us to take
+spiritual sustenance from whatever meats we find prepared for us, not
+to order the removal of this or that dish; the coarser meats are for
+the coarser natures; as they grow in grace they will turn from these
+to the finer:  let us ourselves partake of that which we find best
+suited to us, but do not let us grudge to others the provision that
+God has set before them.  There are many things which though not
+objectively true are nevertheless subjectively true to those who can
+receive them; and subjective truth is universally felt to be even
+higher than objective, as may be shown by the acknowledged duty of
+obeying our consciences (which is the right TO US) rather than any
+dictate of man however much more objectively true.  It is that which
+is 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 less
+to sympathise with teaching so utterly foreign to anything which I
+had heard elsewhere, I said to him, "Either our Lord did say the
+words assigned to him by St. Luke or he did not.  If he did, as they
+stand they are bad, and any one who heard them for the first time
+would say that they were bad; if he did not, then we ought not to
+allow them to remain in our Bibles to the misleading of people who
+will thus believe that God is telling them what he never did tell
+them--to the misleading of the poor, whom even in low self-interest
+we 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 show
+the clearness of his present perception, nevertheless I was anxious
+to get to the root of the matter, and said that if our Lord never
+uttered these words their being attributed to him must be due to
+fraud; to pious fraud, but still to fraud.
+
+"Not so," he answered, "it is due to the weakness of man's powers of
+memory and communication, and perhaps in some measure to unconscious
+inspiration.  Moreover, even though wrong of some sort may have had
+its share in the origin of certain of the sayings ascribed to our
+Saviour, yet their removal now that they have been consecrated by
+time would be a still greater wrong.  Would you defend the spoliation
+of the monasteries, or the confiscation of the abbey lands?  I take
+it no--still less would you restore the monasteries or take back the
+lands; a consecrated change becomes a new departure; accept it and
+turn it to the best advantage.  These are things to which the theory
+of the Church concerning lay baptism is strictly applicable.  Fieri
+non debet, factum valet.  If in our narrow and unsympathetic
+strivings after precision we should remove the hallowed imperfections
+whereby time has set the glory of his seal upon the gospels as well
+as upon all other aged things, not for twenty generations will they
+resume that ineffable and inviolable aspect which our fussy
+meddlesomeness will have disturbed.  Let them alone.  It is as they
+stand that they have saved the world.
+
+"No change is good unless it is imperatively called for.  Not even
+the Reformation was good; it is good now; I acquiesce in it, as I do
+in anything which in itself not vital has received the sanction of
+many generations of my countrymen.  It is sanction which sanctifieth
+in matters of this kind.  I would no more undo the Reformation now
+than I would have helped it forward in the sixteenth century.  Leave
+the historic, the unhistoric, and the doubtful to grow together until
+the harvest:  that which is not vital will perish and rot unnoticed
+when it has ceased to have vitality; it is living till it has done
+this.  Note how the very passages which you would condemn have died
+out of the regard of any but the poor.  Who quotes them?  Who appeals
+to them?  Who believes in them?  Who indeed except the poorest of the
+poor attaches the smallest weight to them whatever?  To us they are
+dead, and other passages will die to us in like manner, noiselessly
+and almost imperceptibly, as the services for the fifth of November
+died out of the Prayer Book.  One day the fruit will be hanging upon
+the tree, as it has hung for months, the next it will be lying upon
+the ground.  It is not ripe until it has fallen of itself, or with
+the gentlest shaking; use no violence towards it, confident that you
+cannot hurry the ripening, and that if shaken down unripe the fruit
+will be worthless.  Christianity must have contained the seeds of
+growth within itself, even to the shedding of many of its present
+dogmas.  If the dogmas fall quietly in their maturity, the precious
+seed of truth (which will be found in the heart of every dogma that
+has been able to take living hold upon the world's imagination) will
+quicken and spring up in its own time:  strike at the fruit too soon
+and 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 I
+have here recorded.  I have given it in my capacity of editor and in
+some sort biographer, but am far from being prepared to maintain that
+it is likely, or indeed ought, to meet with the approval of any
+considerable number of Christians.  But, surely, in these days of
+self-mystification it is refreshing to see the boldness with which my
+brother thought, and the freedom with which he contemplated all sorts
+of issues which are too generally avoided.  What temptation would
+have been felt by many to soften down the inconsistencies and
+contradictions of the Gospels.  How few are those who will venture to
+follow the lead of scientific criticism, and admit what every scholar
+must well know to be indisputable.  Yet if a man will not do this, he
+shows 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 early
+commonplace books filled with sketches for articles; some of these
+are more developed than others, but they are all of them fragmentary.
+I do not think that the reader will fail to be interested with the
+insight into my brother's spiritual and intellectual progress which a
+few 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 are
+too exaggerated to be dangerous, being so obviously unfair as to
+carry their own antidote.  The reader will not fail to notice the
+growth not only in thought but also in literary style which is
+displayed by my brother's later writings.
+
+In reference to the very subject of the parables above alluded to, he
+had written during his time of unbelief:- "Why are we to interpret so
+literally all passages about the guilt of unbelief, and insist upon
+the historical character of every miraculous account, while we are
+indignant if any one demands an equally literal rendering of the
+precepts concerning human conduct?  He that hath two coats is not to
+give to him that hath none:  this would be 'visionary,' 'utopian,'
+'wholly unpractical,' and so forth.  Or, again, he that is smitten on
+the one cheek is not to turn the other to the smiter, but to hand the
+offender over to the law; nor are the commands relative to
+indifference as to the morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence to
+be taken as they stand; nor yet the warnings against praying in
+public; nor can the parables, any one of them, be interpreted
+strictly with advantage to human welfare, except perhaps that of the
+Good Samaritan; nor the Sermon on the Mount, save in such passages as
+were already the common property of mankind before the coming of
+Christ.  The parables which every one praises are in reality very
+bad:  the Unjust Steward, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Prodigal
+Son, Dives and Lazarus, the Sower and the Seed, the Wise and Foolish
+Virgins, the Marriage Garment, the Man who planted a Vineyard, are
+all either grossly immoral, or tend to engender a very low estimate
+of the character of God--an estimate far below the standard of the
+best earthly kings; where they are not immoral, or do not tend to
+degrade the character of God, they are the merest commonplaces
+imaginable, such as one is astonished to see people accept as having
+been first taught by Christ.  Such maxims as those which inculcate
+conciliation and a forgiveness of injuries (wherever practicable) are
+certainly 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 people
+forgive their enemies more freely now than the Romans did, we will
+say in the time of Augustus.  The value of generosity and magnanimity
+was perfectly well known among the ancients, nor do these qualities
+assume any nobler guise in the teaching of Christ than they did in
+that of the ancient heathen philosophers.  On the contrary, they have
+no direct equivalent in Christian thought or phraseology.  They are
+heathen words drawn from a heathen language, and instinct with the
+same heathen ideas of high spirit and good birth as belonged to them
+in the Latin language; they are no part or parcel of Christianity,
+and are not only independent of it, but savour distinctly of the
+flesh as opposed to the spirit, and are hence more or less
+antagonistic to it, until they have undergone a certain modification
+and transformation--until, that is to say, they have been mulcted of
+their more frank and genial elements.  The nearest approach to them
+in Christian phrase is 'self-denial,' but the sound of this word
+kindles no smile of pleasure like that kindled by the ideas of
+generosity and nobility of conduct.  At the thought of self-denial we
+feel good, but uncomfortable, and as though on the point of
+performing some disagreeable duty which we think we ought to pretend
+to like, but which we do not like.  At the thought of generosity, we
+feel as one who is going to share in a delightfully exhilarating but
+arduous pastime--full of the most pleasurable excitement.  On the
+mention of the word generosity we feel as if we were going out
+hunting; at the word 'self-denial,' as if we were getting ready to go
+to church.  Generosity turns well-doing into a pleasure, self-denial
+into a duty, as of a servant under compulsion.
+
+"There are people who will deny this, but there are people who will
+deny anything.  There are some who will say that St. Paul would not
+have condemned the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, A
+Midsummer Night's Dream, and almost everything that Shakspeare ever
+wrote; but there is no arguing against this.  'Every man,' said Dr.
+Johnson, 'has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has a
+right to knock him down for it.'  But even granting that generosity
+and high spirit have made some progress since the days of Christ,
+allowance must be made for the lapse of two thousand years, during
+which time it is only reasonable to suppose that an advance would
+have been made in civilisation--and hence in the direction of
+clemency and forbearance--whether Christianity had been preached or
+not, but no one can show that the modern English, if superior to the
+ancients in these respects, show any greater superiority than may be
+ascribed justly to centuries of established order and good
+government."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Again, as to the ideal presented by the character of Christ, about
+which so much has been written; is it one which would meet with all
+this admiration if it were presented to us now for the first time?
+Surely it offers but a peevish view of life and things in comparison
+with that offered by other highest ideals--the old Roman and Greek
+ideals, the Italian ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"As with the parables so with the Sermon on the Mount--where it is
+not commonplace it is immoral, and vice versa; the admiration which
+is so freely lavished upon the teachings of Jesus Christ turns out to
+be but of the same kind as that bestowed upon certain modern writers,
+who have made great reputations by telling people what they perfectly
+well knew; and were in no particular danger of forgetting.  There is,
+however, this excuse for those who have been carried away with such
+musical but untruthful sentences as 'Blessed are they that mourn:
+for they shall be comforted,' namely, that they have not come to the
+subject with unbiassed minds.  It is one thing to see no merit in a
+picture, and another to see no merit in a picture when one is told
+that it is by Raphael; we are few of us able to stand against the
+PRESTIGE of a great name; our self-love is alarmed lest we should be
+deficient in taste, or, worse still, lest we should be considered to
+be so; as if it could matter to any right-minded person whether the
+world considered him to be of good taste or not, in comparison with
+the keeping of his own soul truthful to itself.
+
+"But if this holds good about things which are purely matters of
+taste, how much more does it do so concerning those who make a
+distinct claim upon us for moral approbation or the reverse?  Such a
+claim is most imperatively made by the teaching of Jesus Christ:  are
+we then content to answer in the words of others--words to which we
+have no title of our own--or shall we strip ourselves of preconceived
+opinion, 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, the
+worst and most dangerous of liars.  He is as one who sits in an
+impregnable citadel and trembles in a time of peace--so great a
+coward as not even to feel safe when he is in his own keeping.  How
+loose of soul if he knows that his own keeping is worthless, how
+aspen-hearted if he fears lest others should find him out and hurt
+him for communing truthfully with himself!
+
+* * * * *
+
+"That a man should lie to others if he hopes to gain something
+considerable--this is reckoned cheating, robbing, fraudulent dealing,
+or whatever it may be; but it is an intelligible offence in
+comparison with the allowing oneself to be deceived.  So in like
+manner with being bored.  The man who lets himself be bored is even
+more contemptible than the bore.  He who puts up with shoddy
+pictures, shoddy music, shoddy morality, shoddy society, is more
+despicable than he who is the prime agent in any of these things.  He
+has less to gain, and probably deceives himself more; so that he
+commits the greater crime for the less reward.  And I say
+emphatically that the morality which most men profess to hold as a
+Divine revelation was a shoddy morality, which would neither wash nor
+wear, 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 would
+but learn the sacredness of their own likes and dislikes, and
+exercise their moral discrimination, making it clear to themselves
+what it is that they really love and venerate.  There is no such
+enemy to mankind as moral cowardice.  A downright vulgar self-
+interested and unblushing liar is a higher being than the moral cur
+whose likes and dislikes are at the beck and call of bullies that
+stand between him and his own soul; such a creature gives up the most
+sacred of all his rights for something more unsubstantial than a mess
+of pottage--a mental serf too abject even to know that he is being
+wronged.  Wretched emasculator of his own reason, whose jejune
+timidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the most secret
+chambers of his heart!
+
+"We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided we feel that
+he was under strong temptation and well knew that he was deceiving.
+He has done wrong--still we can understand it, and he may yet have
+some useful stuff about him--but what can we feel towards one who for
+a small motive tells lies even to himself, and does not know that he
+is lying?  What useless rotten fig-wood lumber must not such a thing
+be made of, and what lies will there not come out of it, falling in
+every direction upon all who come within its reach.  The common self-
+deceiver of modern society is a more dangerous and contemptible
+object than almost any ordinary felon, a matter upon which those who
+do not deceive themselves need no enlightenment."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"But why insist so strongly on the literal interpretation of one part
+of the sayings of Christ, and be so elastic about that of the
+passages which inculcate more than those ordinary precepts which all
+had 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 our
+own conventions; but we have not altered our conventions so as to
+bring them into harmony with Christianity.  We do not give to him
+that asketh; we take good care to avoid him; yet if the precept meant
+only that we should be liberal in assisting others--it wanted no
+enforcing:  the probability is that it had been enforced too much
+rather than too little already; the more literally it has been
+followed the more terrible has the mischief been; the saying only
+becomes harmless when regarded as a mere convention.  So with most
+parts of Christ's teaching.  It is only conventional Christianity
+which will stand a man in good stead to live by; true Christianity
+will 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 ever
+been mad enough to carry it out in such a manner as would have
+satisfied its founders.  So said Dean Swift in his Argument against
+abolishing Christianity.  'I hope,' he writes, 'no reader imagines me
+so weak as to stand up in defence of real Christianity, such as used
+in primitive times' (if we may believe the authors of those ages) 'to
+have an influence upon men's beliefs and actions.  To offer at the
+restoring of that would be, indeed, a wild project; it would be to
+dig up foundations, to destroy at one blow all the wit and half the
+learning of the kingdom, to break the entire frame and constitution
+of things, to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the
+professors of them; in short, to turn our courts of exchange and
+shops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal of
+Horace 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 of
+cure for the corruption of their manners.
+
+"'Therefore, I think this caution was in itself altogether
+unnecessary (which I have inserted only to prevent all possibility of
+cavilling), since every candid reader will easily understand my
+discourse to be intended only in defence of nominal Christianity, the
+other having been for some time wholly laid aside by general consent
+as utterly inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth and
+power.'
+
+"Yet but for these schemes of wealth and power the world would
+relapse into barbarianism; it is they and not Christianity which have
+created and preserved civilisation.  And what if some unhappy wretch,
+with a serious turn of mind and no sense of the ridiculous, takes all
+this talk about Christianity in sober earnest, and tries to act upon
+it?  Into what misery may he not easily fall, and with what life-long
+errors may he not embitter the lives of his children!
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Again, we do not cut off our right hand nor pluck out our eyes if
+they offend us; we conventionalise our interpretations of these
+sayings at our will and pleasure; we do take heed for the morrow, and
+should be inconceivably wicked and foolish were we not to do so; we
+do gather up riches, and indeed we do most things which the
+experience of mankind has taught us to be to our advantage, quite
+irrespectively of any precept of Christianity for or against.  But
+why say that it is Christianity which is our chief guide, when the
+words of Christ point in such a very different direction from that
+which we have seen fit to take?  Perhaps it is in order to compensate
+for our laxity of interpretation upon these points that we are so
+rigid in stickling for accuracy upon those which make no demand upon
+our comfort or convenience?  Thus, though we conventionalise
+practice, we never conventionalise dogma.  Here, indeed, we stickle
+for the letter most inflexibly; yet one would have thought that we
+might 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 to
+its import--why give it so much importance?  Teaching by exaggeration
+is not a satisfactory method, nor one worthy of a being higher than
+man; it might have been well once, and in the East, but it is not
+well now.  It induces more and more of that jarring and straining of
+our moral faculties, of which much is unavoidable in the existing
+complex condition of affairs, but of which the less the better.  At
+present the tug of professed principles in one direction, and of
+necessary practice in the other, causes the same sort of wear and
+tear in our moral gear as is caused to a steam-engine by continually
+reversing it when it is going it at full speed.  No mechanism can
+stand 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.  His
+mind was indeed in darkness!  Who could have hoped that so brilliant
+a day should have succeeded to the gloom of such mistrust?  Yet as
+upon a winter's morning in November when the sun rises red through
+the smoke, and presently the fog spreads its curtain of thick
+darkness over the city, and then there comes a single breath of wind
+from some more generous quarter, whereupon the blessed sun shines
+again, and the gloom is gone; or, again, as when the warm south-west
+wind comes up breathing kindness from the sea, unheralded, suspected,
+when the earth is in her saddest frost, and on the instant all the
+lands are thawed and opened to the genial influences of a sweet
+springful whisper--so thawed his heart, and the seed which had lain
+dormant in its fertile soil sprang up, grew, ripened, and brought
+forth an abundant harvest.
+
+Indeed now that the result has been made plain we can perhaps feel
+that his scepticism was precisely of that nature which should have
+given the greatest ground for hope.  He was a genuine lover of truth
+in so far as he could see it.
+
+His lights were dim, but such as they were he walked according to
+them, and hence they burnt ever more and more clearly, till in later
+life they served to show him what is vouchsafed to such men and to
+such only--the enormity of his own mistakes.  Better that a man
+should feel the divergence between Christian theory and Christian
+practice, that he should be shocked at it--even to the breaking away
+utterly from the theory until he has arrived at a wider comprehension
+of its scope--than that he should be indifferent to the divergence
+and make no effort to bring his principles and practice into harmony
+with one another.  A true lover of consistency, it was intolerable to
+him to say one thing with his lips and another with his actions.  As
+long as this is true concerning any man, his friends may feel sure
+that the hand of the Lord is with him, though the signs thereof be
+hidden 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 utterly
+unable to realise the importance even of such a self-evident fact as
+that our Lord addressing an Eastern people would speak in such a way
+as Eastern people would best understand; it took him years to
+appreciate this.  He could not see that modes of thought are as much
+part of a language as the grammar and words which compose it, and
+that before a passage can be said to be translated from one language
+into another it is often not the words only which must be rendered,
+but the thought itself which must be transformed; to a people
+habituated to exaggeration a saying which was not exaggerated would
+have been pointless--so weak as to arrest the attention of no one; in
+order to translate it into such words as should carry precisely the
+same meaning to colder and more temperate minds, the words would
+often have to be left out of sight altogether, and a new sentence or
+perhaps even simile or metaphor substituted; this is plainly out of
+the question, and therefore the best course is that which has been
+taken, i.e., to render the words as accurately as possible, and leave
+the reader to modify the meaning.  But it was years before my brother
+could be got to feel this, nor did he ever do so fully, simple and
+obvious though it must appear to most people, until he had learned to
+recognise the value of a certain amount of inaccuracy and
+inconsistency in everything which is not comprehended in mechanics or
+the exact sciences.  "It is this," he used to say, "which gives
+artistic 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 regarding
+things as rigidly and immutably fixed which are not yet fully
+understood, and perhaps may never be so while we are in our present
+state of probation.  Life is not one of the exact sciences, living is
+essentially an art and not a science.  Every thing addressed to human
+minds at all must be more or less of a compromise; thus, to take a
+very old illustration, even the definitions of a point and a line--
+the fundamental things in the most exact of the sciences--are mere
+compromises.  A point is supposed to have neither length, breadth,
+nor thickness--this in theory, but in practice unless a point have a
+little of all these things there is nothing there.  So with a line; a
+line is supposed to have length, but no breadth, yet in practice we
+never saw a line which had not breadth.  What inconsistency is there
+here, in requiring us to conceive something which we cannot conceive,
+and which can have no existence, before we go on to the investigation
+of the laws whereby the earth can alone be measured and the orbits of
+the planets determined.  I do not think that this illustration was
+presented to my brother's mind while he was young, but I am sure that
+if it had been it would have made him miserable.  He would have had
+no confidence in mathematics, and would very likely have made a
+furious attack upon Newton and Galileo, and been firmly convinced
+that he was discomfiting them.  Indeed I cannot forget a certain look
+of bewilderment which came over his face when the idea was put before
+him, I imagine, for the first time.  Fortunately he had so grown that
+the right inference was now in no danger of being missed.  He did not
+conclude that because the evidences for mathematics were founded upon
+compromises and definitions which are inaccurate--therefore that
+mathematics were false, or that there were no mathematics, but he
+learnt to feel that there might be other things which were no less
+indisputable than mathematics, and which might also be founded on
+facts for which the evidences were not wholly free from
+inconsistencies and inaccuracies.
+
+To some he might appear to be approaching too nearly to the "Sed tu
+vera puta" argument of Juvenal.  I greatly fear that an attempt may
+be made to misrepresent him as taking this line; that is to say, as
+accepting Christianity on the ground of the excellence of its moral
+teaching, and looking upon it as, indeed, a superstition, but
+salutary for women and young people.  Hardly anything would have
+shocked him more profoundly.  This doctrine with its plausible show
+of morality appeared to him to be, perhaps, the most gross of all
+immoralities, inasmuch as it cuts the ground from under the feet of
+truth, luring the world farther and farther from the only true
+salvation--the careful study of facts and of the safest inferences
+that 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 being
+the expression of Divine will.  It was through facts that he saw God;
+to tamper with facts was, in his view, to deface the countenance of
+the Almighty.  To say that such and such was so and so, when the
+speaker did not believe it, was to lead people to worship a false God
+instead of a true one; an e?d????; setting them, to quote the words
+of the Psalmist, "a-whoring after their own imaginations."  He saw
+the Divine presence in everything--the evil as well as the good; the
+evil being the expression of the Divine will that such and such
+courses should not go unpunished, but bring pain and misery which
+should deter others from following them, and the good being his sign
+of approbation.  There was nothing good for man to know which could
+not be deduced from facts.  This was the only sound basis of
+knowledge, and to found things upon fiction which could be made to
+stand upon facts was to try and build upon a quicksand.
+
+He, therefore, loathed the reasoning of Juvenal with all the
+intensity of his nature.  It was because he believed that the
+Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord were just as much matters of
+actual history as the assassination of Julius Caesar, and that they
+happened precisely in the same way as every daily event happens at
+present--that he accepted the Christian scheme in its essentials.
+Then came the details.  Were these also objectively true?  He
+answered, "Certainly not in every case."  He would not for the world
+have had any one believe that he so considered them; but having made
+it perfectly clear that he was not going to deceive himself, he set
+himself to derive whatever spiritual comfort he could from them, just
+as he would from any noble fiction or work of art, which, while not
+professing to be historical, was instinct with the soul of genius.
+That there were unhistorical passages in the New Testament was to him
+a fact; therefore it was to be studied as an expression of the Divine
+will.  What could be the meaning of it?  That we should consider them
+as true?  Assuredly not this.  Then what else?  This--that we should
+accept as subjectively true whatever we found spiritually precious,
+and be at liberty to leave all the rest alone--the unhistoric element
+having been introduced purposely for the sake of giving greater scope
+and latitude to the value of the ideal.
+
+Of course one who was so firmly persuaded of the objective truth of
+the Resurrection and Ascension could be in no sort of danger of
+relapsing into infidelity as long as his reason remained.  During the
+years of his illness his mind was clearly impaired, and no longer
+under his own control; but while his senses were his own it was
+absolutely impossible that he could be shaken by discrepancies and
+inconsistencies in the gospels.  What small and trifling things are
+such discrepancies by the side of the great central miracle of the
+Resurrection!  Nevertheless their existence was indisputable, and was
+no less indisputably a cause of stumbling to many, as it had been to
+himself.  His experience of his own sufferings as an unbeliever gave
+him a keener sympathy with those who were in that distressing
+condition than could be felt by any one who had not so suffered, and
+fitted him, perhaps, more than any one who has yet lived to be the
+interpreter of Christianity to the Rationalist, and of Rationalism to
+the Christian.  This, accordingly, was the task to which he set
+himself, having been singularly adapted for it by Nature, and as
+singularly disciplined by events.
+
+It seemed to him that the first thing was to make the two parties
+understand one another--a thing which had never yet been done, but
+which was not at all impossible.  For Protestantism is raised
+essentially upon a Rationalistic base.  When we come to a definition
+of Rationalism nothing can be plainer than that it demands no
+scepticism from any one which an English Protestant would not approve
+of.  It is another matter with the Church of Rome.  That Church
+openly declares it as an axiom that religion and reason have nothing
+to do with one another, and that religion, though in flat
+contradiction to reason, should yet be accepted from the hands of a
+certain order as an act of unquestioning faith.  The line of
+separation therefore between the Romanist and the Rationalist is
+clear, and definitely bars any possibility of arrangement between the
+two.  Not so with the Protestant, who as heartily as the Rationalist
+admits that nothing is required to be believed by man except such
+things as can be reasonably proved--i.e., proved to the satisfaction
+of the reason.  No Protestant would say that the Christian scheme
+ought to be accepted in spite of its being contrary to reason; we say
+that Christianity is to be believed because it can be shewn to follow
+as the necessary consequence of using our reason rightly.  We should
+be shocked at being supposed to maintain otherwise.  Yet this is pure
+Rationalism.  The Rationalist would require nothing more; he demurs
+to Christianity because he maintains that if we bring our reason to
+bear upon the evidences which are brought forward in support of it,
+we are compelled to reject it; but he would accept it without
+hesitation if he believed that it could be sustained by arguments
+which ought to carry conviction to the reason.  Thus both are agreed
+in principle that if the evidences of Christianity satisfy human
+reason, then Christianity should be received, but that on any other
+supposition it should be rejected.
+
+Here then, he said, we have a common starting-point and the main
+principle of Rationalism turns out to be nothing but what we all
+readily admit, and with which we and our fathers have been as
+familiar for centuries as with the air we breathe.  Every Protestant
+is a Rationalist, or else he ought to be ashamed of himself.  Does he
+want to be called an "Irrationalist"?  Hardly--yet if he is not a
+Rationalist what else can he be?  No:  the difference between us is
+one of detail, not of principle.  This is a great step gained.
+
+The next thing therefore was to make each party understand the view
+which the other took concerning the position which they had agreed to
+hold in common.  There was no work, so far as he knew, which would be
+accepted both by Christians and unbelievers as containing a fair
+statement of the arguments of the two contending parties:  every book
+which he had yet seen upon either side seemed written with the view
+of maintaining that its own side could hold no wrong, and the other
+no right:  neither party seemed to think that they had anything to
+learn from the other, and neither that any considerable addition to
+their knowledge of the truth was either possible or desirable.  Each
+was in possession of truth already, and all who did not see and feel
+this must be either wilfully blinded, or intensely stupid, or
+hypocrites.
+
+So long as people carried on a discussion thus, what agreement was
+possible between them?  Yet where, upon the Christian side, was the
+attempt to grapple with the real difficulties now felt by
+unbelievers?  Simply nowhere.  All that had been done hitherto was
+antiquated.  Modern Christianity seemed to shrink from grappling with
+modern Rationalism, and displayed a timidity which could not be
+accounted for except by the supposition of secret misgiving that
+certain things were being defended which could not be defended
+fairly.  This was quite intolerable; a misgiving was a warning voice
+from God, which should be attended to as a man valued his soul.  On
+the other hand, the conviction reasonably entertained by unbelievers
+that they were right on many not inconsiderable details of the
+dispute, and that so-called orthodox Christians in their hearts knew
+it but would not own it--or that if they did not know it, they were
+only in ignorance because it suited their purpose to be so--this
+conviction gave an overweening self-confidence to infidels, as though
+they must be right in the whole because they were so in part; they
+therefore blinded themselves to all the more fundamental arguments in
+support of Christianity, because certain shallow ones had been put
+forward in the front rank, and been far too obstinately defended.
+They thus regarded the question too superficially, and had erred even
+more through pride of intellect and conceit than their opponents
+through timidity.
+
+What then was to be done?  Surely this; to explain the two contending
+parties to one another; to show to Rationalists that Christians are
+right upon Rationalistic principles in all the more important of
+their allegations; that is to say, to establish the Resurrection and
+Ascension of the Redeemer upon a basis which should satisfy the most
+imperious demands of modern criticism.  This would form the first and
+most important part of the task.  Then should follow a no less
+convincing proof that Rationalists are right in demurring to the
+historical accuracy of much which has been too obstinately defended
+by so-called orthodox writers.  This would be the second part.  Was
+there not reason to hope that when this was done the two parties
+might understand one another, and meet in a common Christianity?  He
+believed that there was, and that the ground had been already cleared
+for such mutual compromise as might be accepted by both sides, not
+from policy but conviction.  Therefore he began writing the book
+which it has devolved upon myself to edit, and which must now speak
+for itself.  For him it was to suffer and to labour; almost on the
+very instant of his having done enough to express his meaning he was
+removed from all further power of usefulness.
+
+The happy change from unbelief to faith had already taken place some
+three or four years before my return from America.  With it had also
+come that sudden development of intellectual and spiritual power
+which so greatly astonished even those who had known him best.  The
+whole man seemed changed--to have become possessed of an unusually
+capacious mind, instead of one which was acute, but acute only.  On
+looking over the earlier letters which I received from him when I was
+in America, I can hardly believe that they should have been written
+by the same person as the one to whom, in spite of not a few great
+mental defects, I afterwards owed more spiritual enrichment than I
+have owed to any other person.  Yet so it was.  It came upon me
+imperceptibly that I had been very stupid in not discovering that my
+brother was a genius; but hardly had I made the discovery, and hardly
+had the fragment which follows this memoir received its present
+shape, when his overworked brain gave way and he fell into a state
+little better than idiocy.  His originally cheerful spirits left him,
+and were succeeded by a religious melancholy which nothing could
+disturb.  He became incapable either of mental or physical exertion,
+and was pronounced by the best physicians to be suffering from some
+obscure disease of the brain brought on by excitement and undue
+mental tension:  in this state he continued for about four years, and
+died peacefully, but still as one in the profoundest melancholy, on
+the 15th of March, 1872, aged 40.
+
+Always hopeful that his health would one day be restored, I never
+ventured to propose that I should edit his book during his own life-
+time.  On his death I found his papers in the most deplorable
+confusion.  The following chapters had alone received anything like a
+presentable shape--and these providentially are the most essential.
+
+A dream is a dream only, yet sometimes there follows a fulfilment
+which bears a strange resemblance to the thing dreamt of.  No one now
+believes that the Book of Revelation is to be taken as foretelling
+events which will happen in the same way as the massacre, for
+instance, of St. Bartholomew, indeed it is doubtful how far the whole
+is not to be interpreted as an allegory, descriptive of spiritual
+revolutions; yet surely my mother's dream as to the future of one, at
+least, of her sons has been strangely verified, and it is believed
+that the reader when he lays down this volume will feel that there
+have been few more potent witnesses to the truth of Christ than John
+Pickard Owen.
+
+
+
+
+THE FAIR HAVEN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION
+
+
+
+It is to be feared that there is no work upon the evidences of our
+faith, which is as satisfactory in its completeness and convincing
+power as we have a right to expect when we consider the paramount
+importance of the subject and the activity of our enemies.  Otherwise
+why should there be no sign of yielding on the part of so many
+sincere and eminent men who have heard all that has been said upon
+the Christian side and are yet not convinced by it?  We cannot think
+that the many philosophers who make no secret of their opposition to
+the Christian religion are unacquainted with the works of Butler and
+Paley--of Mansel and Liddon.  This cannot be:  they must be
+acquainted with them, and find them fail.
+
+Now, granting readily that in some minds there is a certain wilful
+and prejudiced self-blindness which no reasoning can overcome, and
+granting also that men very much preoccupied with any one pursuit
+(more especially a scientific one) will be apt to give but scant and
+divided attention to arguments upon other subjects such as religion
+or politics, nevertheless we have so many opponents who profess to
+have made a serious study of Christian evidences, and against whose
+opinion no exception can be fairly taken, that it seems as though we
+were bound either to admit that our demonstrations require
+rearrangement and reconsideration, or to take the Roman position, and
+maintain that revelation is no fit subject for evidence but is to be
+accepted upon authority.  This last position will be rejected at once
+by nine-tenths of Englishmen.  But upon rejecting it we look in vain
+for a work which shall appear to have any such success in arresting
+infidelity as attended the works of Butler and Paley in the last
+century.  In their own day these two great men stemmed the current of
+infidelity:  but no modern writers have succeeded in doing so, and it
+will scarcely be said that either Butler or Paley set at rest the
+many serious and inevitable questions in connection with Christianity
+which have arisen during the last fifty years.  We could hardly
+expect one of the more intelligent students at Oxford or Cambridge to
+find his mind set once and for ever free from all rising doubt either
+by the Analogy or the Evidences.  Suppose, for example, that he has
+been misled by the German writers of the Tubingen school, how will
+either of the above-named writers help him?  On the contrary, they
+will do him harm, for they will not meet the requirements of the
+case, and the inference is too readily drawn that nothing else can do
+so.  It need hardly be insisted upon that this inference is a most
+unfair one, but surely the blame of its being drawn rests in some
+measure at the door of those whose want of thoroughness has left
+people under the impression that no more can be said than what has
+been said already.
+
+It is the object, therefore, of this book to contribute towards
+establishing Christian evidences upon a more secure and self-evident
+base 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 of
+Christian evidence can tend towards so great a consummation.  In
+spite of the narrow limits within which I have resolved to keep my
+treatment of the subject, I trust that I may be able to produce such
+an effect upon the minds of those who are in doubt concerning the
+evidences for the hope that is in them, that henceforward they shall
+never doubt again.  I am not sanguine enough to suppose that I shall
+be able to induce certain eminent naturalists and philosophers to
+reopen a question which they have probably long laid aside as
+settled; unfortunately it is not in any but the very noblest
+Christian natures to do this, nevertheless, could they be persuaded
+to read these pages I believe that they would find so much which
+would be new to them, that their prejudices would be greatly shaken.
+To the younger band of scientific investigators I appeal more
+hopefully.
+
+It may be asked why not have undertaken the whole subject and devoted
+a life-time to writing an exhaustive work?  The answer suggests
+itself that the believer is in no want of such a book, while the
+unbeliever would be repelled by its size.  Assuredly there can be no
+doubt as to the value of a great work which should meet objections
+derived from certain recent scientific theories, and confute
+opponents who have arisen since the death of our two great
+apologists, but as a preliminary to this a smaller and more
+elementary book seems called for, which shall give the main outlines
+of our position with such boldness and effectiveness as to arrest the
+attention of any unbeliever into whose hands it may fall, and induce
+him to look further into what else may be urged upon the Christian
+side.  We are bound to adapt our means to our ends, and shall have a
+better chance of gaining the ear of our adversaries if we can offer
+them a short and pregnant book than if we come to them with a long
+one from which whole chapters might be pruned.  We have to bring the
+Christian religion to men who will look at no book which cannot be
+read in a railway train or in an arm-chair; it is most deplorable
+that 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 in
+bringing about a better state of things.  And let me add that never
+yet was there a time when it so much behoved all who are impressed
+with the vital power of religion to bestir themselves; for the
+symptoms of a general indifference, not to say hostility, must be
+admitted to be widely diffused, in spite of an imposing array of
+facts which can be brought forward to the contrary; and not only
+this, but the stream of infidelity seems making more havoc yearly, as
+it might naturally be expected to do, when met by no new works of any
+real strength or permanence.
+
+Bearing in mind, therefore, the necessity for prompt action, it
+seemed best to take the most overwhelming of all miracles--the
+Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and show that it can be so
+substantiated that no reasonable man should doubt it.  This I have
+therefore attempted, and I humbly trust that the reader will feel
+that I have not only attempted it, but done it, once and for all so
+clearly and satisfactorily and with such an unflinching examination
+of the most advanced arguments of unbelievers, that the question can
+never be raised hereafter by any candid mind, or at any rate not
+until science has been made to rest on different grounds from those
+on which she rests at present.
+
+But the truth of our Lord's resurrection having been once
+established, what need to encumber this book with further evidences
+of the miraculous element in his ministry?  The other miracles can be
+no insuperable difficulty to one who accepts the Resurrection.  It is
+true that as Christians we cannot dwell too minutely upon every act
+and incident in the life of the Redeemer, but unhappily we have to
+deal with those who are not Christians, and must consider rather what
+we can get them to take than what we should like to give them:  "Be
+ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves," saith the Saviour.  A
+single miracle is as good as twenty, provided that it be well
+established, and can be shewn to be so:  it is here that even the
+ablest of our apologists have too often failed; they have professed
+to substantiate the historical accuracy of all the recorded miracles
+and sayings of our Lord, with a result which is in some instances
+feeble and conventional, and occasionally even unfair (oh! what
+suicidal folly is there in even the remotest semblance of
+unfairness), instead of devoting themselves to throwing a flood of
+brilliancy upon the most important features and leaving the others to
+shine out in the light reflected from these.  Even granting that some
+of the miracles recorded of our Lord are apocryphal, what of that?
+We do not rest upon them:  we have enough and more than enough
+without them, and can afford to take the line of saying to the
+unbeliever, "Disbelieve this miracle or that if you find that you
+cannot accept it, but believe in the Resurrection, of which we will
+put forward such ample proofs that no healthy reason can withstand
+them, and, having accepted the Resurrection, admit it as the
+manifestation of supernatural power, the existence of which can thus
+no longer be denied."
+
+Does not the reader feel that there is a ring of truth and candour
+about this which must carry more weight with an opponent than any
+strained defence of such a doubtful miracle as the healing of the
+impotent man at the pool of Bethesda?  We weight ourselves as against
+our opponents by trying to defend too much; no matter how sound and
+able the defence of one part of the Christian scheme may have been,
+its effect is often marred by contiguity with argument which the
+writer himself must have suspected, or even known, to be ingenious
+rather than sound:  the moment that this is felt in any book its
+value with an opponent is at an end, for he must be continually in
+doubt whether the spirit which he has detected here or there may not
+be existing and at work in a hundred other places where he has not
+detected it.  What carries weight with an antagonist is the feeling
+that his position has been mastered and his difficulties grasped with
+thoroughness and candour.
+
+On this point I am qualified to speak from long and bitter
+experience.  I say that want of candour and the failure to grasp the
+position occupied, however untenably, by unbelievers is the chief
+cause of the continuance of unbelief.  When this cause has been
+removed unbelief will die a natural death.  For years I was myself a
+believer in nothing beyond the personality and providence of God:
+yet I feel (not without a certain sense of bitterness, which I know
+that I should not feel but cannot utterly subdue) that if my first
+doubts had been met with patient endeavour to understand their nature
+and if I had felt that the one in whom I confided had been ready to
+go to the root of the matter, and even to yield up the convictions of
+a life-time could it be shewn that they were unsafely founded, my
+doubts would have been resolved in an hour or two's quiet
+conversation, and would at once have had the effect, which they have
+only had after long suffering and unrest, of confirming me in my
+allegiance to Christ.  But I was met with anger and impatience.
+There was an instinct which told me that my opponent had never heard
+a syllable against his own convictions, and was determined not to
+hear one:  on this I assumed rashly that he must have good reason for
+his resolution; and doubt ripened into unbelief.  Oh! what years of
+heart-burning and utter drifting followed.  Yet when I was at last
+brought within the influence of one who not only believed all that my
+first opponent did, but who also knew that the more light was thrown
+upon it the more clearly would its truth be made apparent--a man who
+talked with me as though he was anxious that I should convince him if
+he were in error, not as though bent on making me believe whatever
+habit and circumstances had imposed as a formula upon himself--my
+heart softened at once, and the dry places of my soul were watered.
+
+The above may seem too purely personal to warrant its introduction
+here, yet the experience is one which should not be without its value
+to others.  Its effect upon myself has been to give me an unutterable
+longing to save others from sufferings like my own; I know so well
+where it is that, to use a homely metaphor, the shoe pinches.  And it
+is chiefly here--in the fact that the unbeliever does not feel as
+though we really wanted to understand him.  This feeling is in many
+cases lamentably well founded.  No one likes hearing doubt thrown
+upon 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 intellectual
+effort; others are pained by coming into contact with anything which
+derogates from the glory due to the great sacrifice of Christ, or to
+his Divine nature, and lastly not a few are withheld by moral
+cowardice from daring to bestow the pains upon the unbeliever which
+his condition requires.  But from whichever of these sources the
+disinclination to understand him comes, its effect is equally
+disastrous to the unbeliever.  People do not mind a difference of
+opinion, if they feel that the one who differs from them has got a
+firm grasp of their position; or again, if they feel that he is
+trying to understand them but fails from some defect either of
+intellect or education, even in this case they are not pained by
+opposition.  What injures their moral nature and hardens their hearts
+is the conviction that another could understand them if he chose, but
+does not choose, and yet none the less condemns them.  On this they
+become imbued with that bitterness against Christianity which is
+noticeable in so many free-thinkers.
+
+Can we greatly wonder?  For, sad though the admission be, it is only
+justice to admit that we Christians have been too often contented to
+accept our faith without knowing its grounds, in which case it is
+more by luck than by cunning that we are Christians at all, and our
+faith will be in continual danger.  The greater number even of those
+who have undertaken to defend the Christian faith have been sadly
+inclined to avoid a difficulty rather than to face it, unless it is
+so easy as to be no real difficulty at all.  I do not say that this
+is unnatural, for the Christian writer must be deeply impressed with
+the sinfulness of unbelief, and will therefore be anxious to avoid
+raising doubts which will probably never yet have occurred to his
+reader, and might possibly never do so; nor does there at first sight
+appear to be much advantage in raising difficulties for the sole
+purpose of removing them; nevertheless I cannot think that if either
+Butler or Paley could have foreseen the continuance of unbelief, and
+the ruin of so many souls whom Christ died to save, they would have
+been contented to act so almost entirely upon the defensive.
+
+Yet it is impossible not to feel that we in their place should have
+done as they did.  Infidelity was still in its infancy:  the nature
+of the disease was hardly yet understood; and there seemed reason to
+fear lest it might be aggravated by the very means taken to cure it;
+it seemed safer therefore in the first instance to confine attention
+to the matter actually in debate, and leave it to time to suggest a
+more active treatment should the course first tried prove
+unsatisfactory.  Who can be surprised that the earlier apologists
+should have felt thus in the presence of an enemy whose novelty made
+him appear more portentous than he can ever seem to ourselves?  They
+were bound to venture nothing rashly; what they did they did, for
+their own age, thoroughly; we owe it to their cautious pioneering
+that we so know the weakness of our opponents and our own strength as
+to be able to do fearlessly what may well have seemed perilous to our
+forefathers:  nevertheless it is easy to be wise after the event, and
+to regret that a bolder course was not taken at the outset.  If
+Butler and Paley had fought as men eager for the fray, as men who
+smelt the battle from afar, it is impossible to believe that
+infidelity could have lasted as long as it has.  What can be done now
+could have been done just as effectively then, and though we cannot
+be surprised at the caution shewn at first, we are bound to deplore
+it as short-sighted.
+
+The question, however, for ourselves is not what dead men might have
+done better long ago, but what living men and women can do most
+wisely now; and in answer to it I would say that there is no policy
+so unwise as fear in a good cause:  the bold course is also the wise
+one; it consists in being on the lookout for objections, in finding
+the very best that can be found and stating them in their most
+intelligible form, in shewing what are the logical consequences of
+unbelief, and thus carrying the war into the enemy's country; in
+fighting with the most chivalrous generosity and a determination to
+take no advantage which is not according to the rules of war most
+strictly interpreted against ourselves, but within such an
+interpretation showing no quarter.  This is the bold course and the
+true course:  it will beget a confidence which can never be felt in
+the wariness, however well-intentioned, of the old defenders.
+
+Let me, therefore, beg the reader to follow me patiently while I do
+my best to put before him the main difficulties felt by unbelievers.
+When he is once acquainted with these he will run in no danger of
+confirming doubt through his fear in turning away from it in the
+first instance.  How many die hardened unbelievers through the
+treatment which they have received from those to whom their
+Christianity has been a matter of circumstances and habit only?  Hell
+is no fiction.  Who, without bitter sorrow, can reflect upon the
+agonies even of a single soul as being due to the selfishness or
+cowardice of others?  Awful thought!  Yet it is one which is daily
+realised in the case of thousands.
+
+In the commonest justice to brethren, however sinful, each one of us
+who tries to lead them to the Saviour is bound not only to shew them
+the whole strength of our own arguments, but to make them see that we
+understand the whole strength of theirs; for men will not seriously
+listen to those whom they believe to know one side of a question
+only.  It is this which makes the educated infidel so hard to deal
+with; he knows very well that an intelligent apprehension of the
+position held by an opponent is indispensable for profitable
+discussion; but he very rarely meets with this in the case of those
+Christians who try to argue with him; he therefore soon acquires a
+habit of avoiding the subject of religion, and can seldom be induced
+to 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 who
+would convert an infidel must know what it is that he is to be
+converted from, as well as what he is to be led to; nothing can be
+laid hold of unless its whereabouts is known.  It is deplorable that
+such commonplaces should be wanted; but, alas! it is impossible to do
+without them.  People have taken a panic on the subject of infidelity
+as though it were so infectious that the very nurses and doctors
+should run away from those afflicted with it; but such conduct is no
+less absurd than cruel and disgraceful.  INFIDELITY IS ONLY
+INFECTIOUS WHEN IT IS NOT UNDERSTOOD.  The smallest reflection should
+suffice to remind us that a faith which has satisfied the most
+brilliant and profound of human intellects for nearly two thousand
+years must have had very sure foundations, and that any digging about
+them for the purpose of demonstrating their depth and solidity, will
+result, not in their disturbance, but in its being made clear to
+every eye that they are laid upon a rock which nothing can shake--
+that they do indeed satisfy every demand of human reason, which
+suffers violence not from those who accept the scheme of the
+Christian redemption, but from those who reject it.
+
+This being the case, and that it is so will, I believe, appear with
+great clearness in the following pages, what need to shrink from the
+just and charitable course of understanding the nature of what is
+urged by those who differ from us?  How can we hope to bring them to
+be of one mind in Christ Jesus with ourselves, unless we can resolve
+their difficulties and explain them?  And how can we resolve their
+difficulties until we know what they are?  Infidelity is as a reeking
+fever den, which none can enter safely without due precautions, but
+the taking these precautions is within our own power; we can all rely
+upon the blessed promises of the Saviour that he will not desert us
+in our hour of need if we will only truly seek him; there is more
+infidelity in this shrinking and fear of investigation than in almost
+any open denial of Christ; the one who refuses to examine the doubts
+felt by another, and is prevented from making any effort to remove
+them through fear lest he should come to share them, shews either
+that he has no faith in the power of Christianity to stand
+examination, or that he has no faith in the promises of God to guide
+him into all truth.  In either case he is hardly less an unbeliever
+than those whom he condemns.
+
+Let the reader therefore understand that he will here find no attempt
+to conceal the full strength of the arguments relied on by
+unbelievers.  This manner of substantiating the truth of Christianity
+has unhappily been tried already; it has been tried and has failed as
+it was bound to fail.  Infidelity lives upon concealment.  Shew it in
+broad daylight, hold it up before the world and make its hideousness
+manifest to all--then, and not till then, will the hours of unbelief
+be numbered.  WE have been the mainstay of unbelief through our
+timidity.  Far be it from me, therefore, that I should help any
+unbeliever by concealing his case for him.  This were the most cruel
+kindness.  On the contrary, I shall insist upon all his arguments and
+state them, if I may say so without presumption, more clearly than
+they have ever been stated within the same limits.  No one knows what
+they are better than I do.  No one was at one time more firmly
+persuaded that they were sound.  May it be found that no one has so
+well known how also to refute them.
+
+The reader must not therefore expect to find fictitious difficulties
+in the way of accepting Christianity set up with one hand in order to
+be knocked down again with the other:  he will find the most powerful
+arguments against all that he holds most sacred insisted on with the
+same clearness as those on his own side; it is only by placing the
+two contending opinions side by side in their utmost development that
+the strength of our own can be made apparent.  Those who wish to cry
+peace, peace, when there is no peace, those who would take their
+faith by fashion as the take their clothes, those who doubt the
+strength of their own cause and do not in their heart of heart
+believe that Christianity will stand investigation, those, again, who
+care not who may go to Hell provided they are comfortably sure of
+going to Heaven themselves, such persons may complain of the line
+which I am about to take.  They on the other hand whose faith is such
+that it knows no fear of criticism, and they whose love for Christ
+leads them to regard the bringing of lost souls into his flock as the
+highest earthly happiness--such will admit gladly that I have been
+right in tearing aside the veil from infidelity and displaying it
+uncloaked by the side of faith itself.
+
+At the same time I am bound to confess that I never should have been
+able to see the expediency, not to say the absolute necessity for
+such a course, unless I had been myself for many years an unbeliever.
+It is this experience, so bitterly painful, that has made me feel so
+strongly as to the only manner in which others can be brought from
+darkness into light.  The wisdom of the Almighty recognised that if
+man was to be saved it must be done by the assumption of man's nature
+on the part of the Deity.  God must make himself man, or man could
+never learn the nature and attributes of God.  Let us then follow the
+sublime example of the incarnation, and make ourselves as unbelievers
+that we may teach unbelievers to believe.  If Paley and Butler had
+only been REAL INFIDELS for a single year, instead of taking the
+thoughts and reasonings of their opponents at second-hand, what a
+difference should we not have seen in the nature of their work.
+Alas! their clear and powerful intellects had been trained early in
+the severest exercises; they could not be misled by any of the
+sophistries of their opponents; but, on the other hand, never having
+been misled they knew not the thread of the labyrinth as one who has
+been shut up therein.
+
+I should also warn the reader of another matter.  He must not expect
+to find that I can maintain everything which he could perhaps desire
+to see maintained.  I can prove, to such a high degree of presumption
+as shall amount virtually to demonstration, that our Lord died upon
+the cross, rose again from the dead upon the third day, and ascended
+into Heaven:  but I cannot prove that none of the accounts of these
+events which have come down to us have suffered from the hand of
+time:  on the contrary, I must own that the reasons which led me to
+conclude that there must be confusion in some of the accounts of the
+Resurrection continue in full force with me even now.  I see no way
+of escaping from this conclusion:  but it seems equally strange that
+the Christian should have such an indomitable repugnance to accept
+it, and that the unbeliever should conceive that it inflicts any
+damage whatever upon the Christian evidences.  Perhaps the error of
+each confirms that of the other, as will appear hereafter.
+
+I have spoken hitherto as though I were writing only for men, but the
+help of good women can never be so precious as in the salvation of
+human souls; if there is one work for which women are better fitted
+than another, it is that of arresting the progress of unbelief.  Can
+there be a nobler one?  Their superior tact and quickness give them a
+great advantage over men; men will listen to them when they would
+turn away from one of their own sex; and though I am well aware that
+courtesy is no argument, yet the natural politeness shewn by a man to
+a woman will compel attention to what falls from her lips, and will
+thus perhaps be the means of bringing him into contact with Divine
+truths which would never otherwise have reached him.  Yet this is a
+work from which too many women recoil in horror--they know that they
+can do nothing unless they are intimately acquainted with the
+opinions of those from whom they differ, and from such an intimacy
+they believe that they are right in shrinking.
+
+Oh, my sisters, my sisters, ye who go into the foulest dens of
+disease and vice, fearless of the pestilence and of man's brutality,
+ye whose whole lives bear witness to the cross of Christ and the
+efficacy of the Divine love, did one of you ever fear being corrupted
+by the vice with which you came in contact?  Is there one of you who
+fears to examine why it is that even the most specious form of vice
+is vicious?  You fear not infection here, for you know that you are
+on sure ground, and that there is no form of vice of which the
+viciousness is not clearly provable; but can you doubt that the
+foundation of your faith is sure also, and can you not see that your
+cowardice in not daring to examine the foul and soul-destroying den
+of infidelity is a stumbling-block to those who have not yet known
+their Saviour?  Your fear is as the fear of children who dare not go
+in 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, and
+that you dare not search lest you should find that which would make
+against you.  Hideous blasphemy against the Lord!  But is not the sin
+to be laid partly at the door of those whose cowardice has given
+occasion for it?
+
+Is there none of you who knows that as to the pure all things are
+pure, so to the true and loyal heart all things will confirm its
+faith?  You shrink from this last trial of your allegiance, partly
+from the pain of even seeing the wounds of your Redeemer laid open--
+of even hearing the words of those enemies who have traduced him and
+crucified him afresh--but you lose the last and highest of the
+prizes, for great as is your faith now, be very sure that from this
+crowning proof of your devotion you would emerge with greater still.
+
+Has none of you seen a savage dog barking and tearing at the end of
+his chain as though he were longing to devour you, and yet if you
+have gone bravely up to him and bade him be still, he is cowed and
+never barks again?  Such is the genius of infidelity; it loves to
+threaten those who retreat, yet it shrinks daunted back from those
+who meet it boldly; it is the lack of boldness on the part of the
+Christian which gives it all its power; when Christians are strong in
+the strength of their own cause infidels will know their impotence,
+but as long as there are cowards there will be those who prey upon
+cowardice, and as long as those who should defend the cross of Christ
+hide themselves behind battlements, so long will the enemy come up to
+the very walls of the defence and trouble them that are within.  The
+above words must have sounded harsh and will I fear have given pain
+to many a tender heart which is conscious of the depth of its own
+love for the Redeemer, and would be shocked at the thought that
+anything had been neglected in his service, but has not the voice of
+such a heart returned answer to itself that what I have written is
+just?
+
+Again, I have been told by some that they have been aware of the
+necessity of doing their best towards putting a stop to infidelity,
+and that they have been unceasing in their prayers for friends or
+husbands or relations who know not Christ, but that with prayers
+their efforts have ended.  Now, there can be no one in the whole
+world who has had more signal proofs of the efficacy of prayer than
+the writer of these pages, but he would lie if he were to say that
+prayer was ever answered when it was only another name for idleness,
+a cloak for the avoidance of obvious duty.  God is no helper of the
+indolent 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 the
+women who have prayed, and prayed only, the answer is ready at hand,
+that work without prayer is bad, but prayer without work worse.  Let
+them do their own utmost in the way of sowing, planting, and
+watering, and then let them pray to God that he will vouchsafe them
+the increase; but they can no more expect the increase to be of God's
+free gift without the toil of sowing than did the blessed Apostle St.
+Paul.  If God did not convert the heathen for Paul and Apollos in
+answer to their prayers alone, how can we expect that he will convert
+the infidel for ourselves, unless we have first followed in the
+footsteps of the Apostles?  The sin of infidelity will rest upon us
+and our children until we have done our best to shake it off; and
+this not timidly and disingenuously as those who fear for the result,
+but with the certainty that it is the infidel and not the Christian
+who need fear investigation, if the investigation only goes deep
+enough.  Herein has lain our error, we have feared to allow the
+unbeliever to put forth all his strength lest it should prove
+stronger than we thought it was, when in truth the world would only
+have known the sooner of its weakness; and this shall now at last be
+abundantly shewn, for, as I said above, I will help no infidel by
+concealing his case; it shall appear in full, and as nearly in his
+own words as the limits at my disposal will allow.  Out of his own
+mouth shall he be condemned, and yet, I trust, not condemned alone;
+but converted as I myself, and by the same irresistible chain of
+purest reason; one thing only is wanted on the part of the reader, it
+is this, the desire to attain truth regardless of past prejudices.
+
+If an unbeliever has made up his mind that we must be wrong, without
+having heard our side, and if he presumes to neglect the most
+ordinary precaution against error--that of understanding the position
+of an opponent--I can do nothing with him or for him.  No man can
+make another see, if the other persists in shutting his eyes and
+bandaging them:  if it is a victory to be able to say that they
+cannot see the truth under these circumstances, the victory is with
+our opponents; but for those who can lay their hands upon their heart
+and say truly before God and man that they care nothing for the
+maintenance of their own opinions, but only that they may come to
+know the truth, for such I can do much.  I can put the matter before
+them in so clear a light that they shall never doubt hereafter.
+
+Never was there a time when such an exposition was wanted so much as
+now.  The specious plausibilities of a pseudo-science have led
+hundreds of thousands into error; the misapplication of geology has
+ensnared a host of victims, and a still greater misapplication of
+natural history seems likely to devour those whom the perversion of
+geology has spared.  Not that I have a word to say against TRUE
+science:  true science can never be an enemy of the Bible, which is
+the text-book of the science of the salvation of human souls as
+written by the great Creator and Redeemer of the soul itself, but the
+Enemy of Mankind is never idle, and no sooner does God vouchsafe to
+us any clearer illumination of his purposes and manner of working,
+than the Evil One sets himself to consider how he can turn the
+blessing into a curse; and by the all-wise dispensation of Providence
+he is allowed so much triumph as that he shall sift the wise from the
+foolish, the faithful from the traitors.  God knoweth his own.  Still
+there is no surer mark that one is among the number of those whom he
+hath chosen than the desire to bring all to share in the gracious
+promises which he has vouchsafed to those that will take advantage of
+them; and there are few more certain signs of reprobation than
+indifference as to the existence of unbelief, and faint-heartedness
+in trying to remove it.  It is the duty of all those who love Christ
+to lead their brethren to love him also; but how can they hope to
+succeed in this until they understand the grounds on which he is
+rejected?
+
+For there ARE grounds, insufficient ones, untenable ones, grounds
+which a little loving patience and, if I may be allowed the word,
+ingenuity, will shew to be utterly rotten; but as long as their
+rottenness is only to be asserted and not proved, so long will
+deluded people build upon them in fancied security.  As yet the proof
+has never been made sufficiently clear.  If displayed sufficiently
+for 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 fallacies
+have reappeared in another shape.  It is not too much to say that it
+has never yet been so clearly proved that Christ rose again from the
+dead, that a jury of educated Englishmen should be compelled to
+assent to it, even though they had never before heard of
+Christianity.  This therefore it is my object to do once and for ever
+now.
+
+It is not for me to pry into the motives of the Almighty, nor to
+inquire why it is that for nearly two thousand years the perfection
+of proof should never have been duly produced, but if I dare hazard
+an opinion I should say that such proof was never necessary until
+now, but that it has lain ready to be produced at a moment's notice
+on the arrival of the fitting time.  In the early stages of the
+Church the viva voce testimony of the Apostles was still so near that
+its force was in no way spent; from those times until recently the
+universality of belief was such that proof was hardly needed; it is
+only for a hundred years or so (which in the sight of God are but as
+yesterday) that infidelity has made real progress.  Then God raised
+his hand in wrath; revolution taught men to see the nature of
+unbelief and the world shrank back in horror; the time of fear passed
+by; unbelief has again raised itself; whereon we can see that other
+and even more fearful revolutions {1} are daily threatening.  What
+country is safe?  In what part of the world do not men feel an uneasy
+foreboding of the wrath which will surely come if they do not repent
+and turn unto the Lord their God?  Go where we will we are conscious
+of that heaviness and oppression which is the precursor of the
+hurricane and the earthquake; none escape it:  an all-pervading sense
+of rottenness and fearful waiting upon judgment is upon the hearts of
+all men.  May it not be that this awe and silence have been ordained
+in order that the still small voice of the Lord may be the more
+clearly heard and welcomed as salvation?  Is it not possible that the
+infinite mercy of God is determined to give mankind one last chance,
+before the day of that coming which no creature may abide?  I dare
+not answer:  yet I know well that the fire burneth within me, and
+that night and day I take no rest but am consumed until the work
+committed to me is done, that I may be clear from the blood of all
+men.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--STRAUSS AND THE HALLUCINATION THEORY
+
+
+
+It has been well established by Paley, and indeed has seldom been
+denied, that within a very few years of Christ's crucifixion a large
+number of people believed that he had risen from the dead.  They
+believed that after having suffered actual death he rose to actual
+life, as a man who could eat and drink and talk, who could be seen
+and handled.  Some who held this were near relations of Christ, some
+had known him intimately for a considerable time before his
+crucifixion, many must have known him well by sight, but all were
+unanimous in their assertion that they had seen him alive after he
+had been dead, and in consequence of this belief they adopted a new
+mode of life, abandoning in many cases every other earthly
+consideration save that of bearing witness to what they had known and
+seen.  I have not thought it worth while to waste time and space by
+introducing actual proof of the above.  This will be found in Paley's
+opening chapters, to which the reader is referred.
+
+How then did this intensity of conviction come about?  Differ as they
+might and did upon many of the questions arising out of the main fact
+which they taught, as to the fact itself they differed not in the
+least degree.  In their own life-time and in that of those who could
+confute them their story gained the adherence of a very large and
+ever increasing number.  If it could be shewn that the belief in
+Christ's reappearance did not arise until after the death of those
+who were said to have seen him, when actions and teachings might have
+been imputed to them which were not theirs, the case would then be
+different; but this cannot be done; there is nothing in history
+better established than that the men who said that they had seen
+Christ alive after he had been dead, were themselves the first to lay
+aside all else in order to maintain their assertion.  If it could be
+maintained that they taught what they did in order to sanction laxity
+of morals, the case would again be changed.  But this too is
+impossible.  They taught what they did because of the intensity of
+their own conviction and from no other motive whatsoever.
+
+What then can that thing have been which made these men so beyond all
+measure and one-mindedly certain?  Were they thus before the
+Crucifixion?  Far otherwise.  Yet the men who fled in the hour of
+their master's peril betrayed no signs of flinching when their own
+was no less imminent.  How came it that the cowardice and fretfulness
+of the Gospels should be transformed into the lion-hearted
+steadfastness of the Acts?
+
+The Crucifixion had intervened.  Yes, but surely something more than
+the Crucifixion.  Can we believe that if their experience of Christ
+had ended with the Cross, the Apostles would have been in that state
+of mind which should compel them to leave all else for the sake of
+preaching what he had taught them?  It is a hard thing for a man to
+change the scheme of his life; yet this is not a case of one man but
+of many, who became changed as if struck with an enchanter's wand,
+and who, though many, were as one in the vehemence with which they
+protested that their master had reappeared to them alive.  Their
+converse with Christ did not probably last above a year or two, and
+was interrupted by frequent absence.  If Christ had died once and for
+all upon the Cross, Christianity must have died with him; but it did
+not die; nay, it did not begin to live with full energy until after
+its founder had been crucified.  We must ask again, what could that
+thing have been which turned these querulous and faint-hearted
+followers into the most earnest and successful body of propagandists
+which the world has ever seen, if it was not that which they said it
+was--namely, that Christ had reappeared to them alive after they had
+themselves known him to be dead?  This would account for the change
+in them, but is there anything else that will?
+
+They had such ample opportunities of knowing the truth that the
+supposition of mistake is fraught with the greatest difficulties;
+they gave such guarantees of sincerity as that none have given
+greater; their unanimity is perfect; there is not the faintest trace
+of any difference of opinion amongst them as to the main fact of the
+Resurrection.  These are things which never have been and never can
+be denied, but if they do not form strong prima facie ground for
+believing in the truth and actuality of Christ's Resurrection, what
+is there which will amount to a prima facie case for anything
+whatever?
+
+Nevertheless the matter does not rest here.  While there exists the
+faintest possibility of mistake we may be sure that we shall deal
+most wisely by examining its character and value.  Let us inquire
+therefore whether there are any circumstances which seem to indicate
+that the early Christians might have been mistaken, and been firmly
+persuaded that they had seen Christ alive, although in point of fact
+they had not really seen him?  Men have been very positive and very
+sincere about things wherein we should have conceived mistake
+impossible, and yet they have been utterly mistaken.  A strong
+predisposition, a rare coincidence, an unwonted natural phenomenon, a
+hundred other causes, may turn sound judgments awry, and we dare not
+assume forthwith that the first disciples of Christ were superior to
+influences which have misled many who have had better chances of
+withstanding them.  Visions and hallucinations are not uncommon even
+now.  How easily belief in a supernatural occurrence obtains among
+the peasantry of Italy, Ireland, Belgium, France, and Spain; and how
+much more easily would it do so among Jews in the days of Christ,
+when belief in supernatural interferences with this world's economy
+was, so to speak, omnipresent.  Means of communication, that is to
+say of verification, were few, and the tone of men's minds as regards
+accuracy 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; few
+could read and fewer write, so that a story could seldom be confined
+to its original limits; error, therefore, had much chance and truth
+little as compared with our own times.  What more is needed to make
+us feel how possible it was for the purest and most honest of men to
+become parents of all fallacy?
+
+Strauss believes this to have been the case.  He supposes that the
+earliest Christians were under hallucination when they thought that
+they had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion; in other words,
+that they never saw him at all, but only thought that they had done
+so.  He does not imagine that they conceived this idea at once, but
+that it grew up gradually in the course of a few years, and that
+those who came under its influence antedated it unconsciously
+afterwards.  He appears to believe that within a few months of the
+Crucifixion, and in consequence of some unexplained combination of
+internal and external causes, some one of the Apostles came to be
+impressed with the notion that he had seen Christ alive; the
+impression, however made, was exceedingly strong, and was
+communicated as soon as might be to some other or others of the
+Apostles:  the idea was welcome--as giving life to a hope which had
+been fondly cherished; each inflamed the imagination of the other,
+until the original basis of the conception slipped unconsciously from
+recollection, while the intensity of the conviction itself became
+stronger and stronger the more often the story was repeated.  Strauss
+supposes that on seeing the firm conviction of two or three who had
+hitherto been leaders among them, the other Apostles took heart, and
+that thus the body grew together again perhaps within a twelve-month
+of the Crucifixion.  According to him, the idea of the Resurrection
+having been once started, and having once taken root, the soil was so
+congenial that it grew apace; the rest of the Apostles, perhaps
+assembled together in a high state of mental enthusiasm and
+excitement, conceived that they saw Christ enter the room in which
+they were sitting and afford some manifest proof of life and
+identity; or some one else may have enlarged a less extraordinary
+story to these dimensions, so that in a short time it passed current
+everywhere (there have been instances of delusions quite as
+extraordinary gaining a foothold among men whose sincerity is not to
+be disputed), and finally they conceived that these appearances of
+their master had commenced a few months--and what is a few months?--
+earlier than they actually had, so that the first appearance was soon
+looked upon as having been vouchsafed within three days of the
+Crucifixion.
+
+The above is not in Strauss's words, but it is a careful resume of
+what I gather to be his conception of the origin of the belief in the
+Resurrection of Christ.  The belief, and the intensity of the belief,
+need explanation; the supernatural explanation, as we should
+ourselves readily admit, cannot be accepted unless all others are
+found wanting; he therefore, if I understand him rightly, puts
+forward the above as being a reasonable and natural solution of the
+difficulty--the only solution which does not fail upon examination,
+and therefore the one which should be accepted.  It is founded upon
+the affection which the Apostles had borne towards their master, and
+their 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 would
+readily welcome its renewal; it was easy in the then intellectual
+condition of Palestine for hallucination to originate, and still
+easier for it to spread; the story touched the hearts of men too
+nearly to render its propagation difficult.  Men and women like
+believing in the marvellous, for it brings the chance of good fortune
+nearer to their own doors; but how much more so when they are
+themselves closely connected with the central figure of the marvel,
+and when it appears to give a clue to the solution of that mystery
+which all would pry into if they could--our future after death?
+There can be no great cause for wonder that an hallucination which
+arose under such conditions as these should have gained ground and
+conquered all opposition, even though its origin may be traced to the
+brain 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, we
+collect most certainly from the Gospel records that the Apostles were
+NOT a compact and devoted body of adherents at the time of the
+Crucifixion; yet it is hard to see how Strauss's hallucination theory
+can be accepted, unless this was the case.  If Strauss believed the
+earliest followers of Christ to have been already immovably fixed in
+their belief that he was the Son of God--the promised Messiah, of
+whom they were themselves the especially chosen ministers--if he
+considered that they believed in their master as the worker of
+innumerable miracles which they had themselves witnessed; as one whom
+they had seen raise others from death to life, and whom, therefore,
+death could not be expected to control--if he held the followers of
+Christ to have been in this frame of mind at the time of the
+Crucifixion, it might be intelligible that he should suppose the
+strength of their faith to have engendered an imaginary reappearance
+in order to save them from the conclusion that their hopes had been
+without foundation; that, in point of fact, they should have accepted
+a new delusion in order to prop up an old one; but we know very well
+that Strauss does not accept this position.  He denies that the
+Apostles had seen any miracles; independently therefore of the many
+and unmistakable traces of their having been but partial and wavering
+adherents, which have made it a matter of common belief among those
+who have studied the New Testament that the faith of the Apostles was
+unsteadfast before the Crucifixion, he must have other and stronger
+reasons for thinking that this was so, inasmuch as he does not look
+upon 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 power
+over the insane, and temporary alleviations of sickness, due perhaps
+to mental excitement, may have taken place in their presence and
+passed for miracles; he would doubt how far they had even seen this
+much, for he would insist on many passages in the Gospels which would
+point in the direction of our Lord's never having professed to work a
+single miracle; but even though he granted that they had seen certain
+extraordinary cases of healing, there is no amount of testimony which
+would for a moment satisfy him of their having seen more.  WE see the
+Apostles as men who before the Crucifixion had seen Lazarus raised
+from death to life after the corruption of the grave had begun its
+work, and who had seen sight given to one that had been born
+sightless; as men who had seen miracle after miracle, with every
+loophole for escape from a belief in the miraculous carefully
+excluded; who had seen their master walking upon the sea, and bidding
+the winds be still; our difficulty therefore is to understand the
+incredulity of the Apostles as displayed abundantly in the Gospels;
+but Strauss can have none such; for he must see them as men over whom
+the influence of their master had been purely personal, and due to
+nothing more than to a strength and beauty of character which his
+followers very imperfectly understood.  HE does not believe that
+Lazarus was raised at all, or that the man who had been born blind
+ever existed; he considers the fourth gospel, which alone records
+these events, to be the work of a later age, and not to be depended
+on for facts, save here and there; certainly not where the facts
+recorded are miraculous.  He must therefore be even more ready than
+we are to admit that the faith of the Apostles was weak before the
+Crucifixion; but whether he is or not, we have it on the highest
+authority that their faith was not strong enough to maintain them at
+the very first approach of danger, nor to have given them any hope
+whatever that our Lord should rise again; whereas for Strauss's
+theory to hold good, it must already have been in a white heat of
+enthusiasm.
+
+But even granting that this was so--in the face of all the evidence
+we can reach--men so honest and sincere as the Apostles proved
+themselves to be, would have taken other ground than the assertion
+that their master had reappeared to them alive, unless some very
+extraordinary occurrences had led them to believe that they had
+indeed seen him.  If their faith was glowing and intense at the time
+of the Crucifixion--so intense that they believed in Christ as much,
+or nearly as much, after the Crucifixion as before it (and unless
+this were so the hallucinations could never have arisen at all, or at
+any rate could never have been so unanimously accepted)--it would
+have been so intense as to stand in no need of a reappearance.  In
+this case, if they had found that their master did not return to
+them, the Apostles would probably have accepted the position that he
+had, contrary to their expectation, been put to a violent death; they
+would, perhaps, have come sooner or later to the conclusion that he
+was immediately on death received into Heaven, and was sitting on the
+right hand of God; while some extraordinary dream might have been
+construed into a revelation of the fact with the manner of its
+occurrence, and been soon generally believed; but the idea of our
+Lord's return to earth in a gross material body whereon the wounds
+were still unhealed, was perhaps the last thing that would have
+suggested itself to them by way of hallucination.  If their faith had
+been great enough, and their spirits high enough to have allowed
+hallucination to originate at all, their imagination would have
+presented them at once with a glorious throne, and the splendours of
+the highest Heaven as appearing through the opened firmament; it
+would not surely have rested satisfied with a man whose hands and
+side were wounded, and who could eat of a piece of broiled fish and
+of an honeycomb.  A fabric so utterly baseless as the reappearances
+of our Lord (on the supposition of their being unhistoric) would have
+been built of gaudier materials.  To repeat, it seems impossible that
+the Apostles should have attempted to connect their hallucinations
+circumstantially and historically with the events which had
+immediately preceded them.  Hallucination would have been conscious
+of a hiatus and not have tried to bridge it over.  It would not have
+developed the idea of our Lord's return to this grovelling and
+unworthy earth prior to his assumption into glory, unless those who
+were under its influence had either seen other resurrections from the
+dead--in which case there is no difficulty attaching to the
+Resurrection of our Lord himself--or been forced into believing it by
+the evidence of their own senses; this, on the supposition that the
+devotion of the first disciples was intense before the Crucifixion;
+but if, on the other hand, they were at that time anything but
+steadfast, as both a priori and a posteriori evidence would seem to
+indicate, if they were few and wavering, and if what little faith
+they had was shaken to its foundations and apparently at an end for
+ever with the death of Christ, it becomes indeed difficult to see how
+the idea of his return to earth alive could have ever struck even a
+single one of them, much less that hallucinations which could have
+had no origin but in the disordered brain of some one member of the
+Apostolic body, should in a short time have been accepted by all as
+by one man without a shadow of dissension, and been strong enough to
+convert them, as was said above, into the most earnest and successful
+body of propagandists that the world has ever seen.
+
+Truly this is not too much to say of them; and yet we are asked to
+believe that this faith, so intensely energetic, grew out of one
+which can hardly be called a faith at all, in consequence of day-
+dreams whose existence presupposes a faith hardly if any less intense
+than that which it is supposed to have engendered.  Are we not
+warranted in asserting that a movement which is confined to a few
+wavering followers, and which receives any very decisive check, which
+scatters and demoralises the few who have already joined it, will be
+absolutely sure to die a speedy natural death unless something
+utterly strange and new occurs to give it a fresh impetus?  Such a
+resuscitating influence would have been given to the Christian
+religion by the reappearance of Christ alive.  This would meet the
+requirements of the case, for we can all feel that if we had already
+half believed in some gifted friend as a messenger from God, and if
+we had seen that friend put to death before our eyes, and yet found
+that the grave had no power over him, but that he could burst its
+bonds and show himself to us again unmistakably alive, we should from
+that moment yield ourselves absolutely his; but our faith would die
+with him unless it had been utter before his death.
+
+The devotion of the Apostles is explained by their belief in the
+Resurrection, but their belief in the Resurrection is not explained
+by a supposed hallucination; for their minds were not in that state
+in which alone such a delusion could establish itself firmly, and
+unless it were established firmly by the most apparently irrefragable
+evidence of many persons, it would have had no living energy.  How an
+hallucination could occur in the requisite strength to the requisite
+number of people is neither explained nor explicable, except upon the
+supposition that the Apostles were in a very different frame of mind
+at the time of Christ's Crucifixion from that which all the evidence
+we can get would seem to indicate.  If Strauss had first made this
+point clear we could follow him.  But he has not done so.
+
+Strauss says, the conception that Christ's body had been reawakened
+and changed, "a double miracle, exceeding far what had occurred in
+the case of Enoch and Elijah, could only be credible to one who saw
+in him a prophet far superior to them"--i.e., to one who
+notwithstanding his death was persuaded that he was the Messiah:
+"this conviction" (that a double miracle had been performed) "was the
+first to which the Apostles had to attain in the days of their
+humiliation after the Crucifixion."  Yes--but how were they to attain
+to it, being now utterly broken down and disillusioned?  Strauss
+admits that before they could have come to hold what he supposes them
+to have held, they must have seen in Christ even after his
+Crucifixion a prophet far greater than either Moses or Elias; whereas
+in point of fact it is very doubtful whether they ever believed this
+much of their master even before the Crucifixion, and hardly
+questionable that after it they disbelieved in him almost entirely,
+until he shewed himself to them alive.  Is it possible that from the
+dead embers of so weak a faith, so vast a conflagration should have
+been kindled?
+
+I submit, therefore, that independently of any direct evidence as to
+the when and where of Christ's reappearances, the fact that the
+Apostles before the Crucifixion were irresolute, and after it
+unspeakably resolute, affords strong ground for believing that they
+must have seen something, or come to know something, which to their
+minds was utterly overwhelming in its convincing power:  when we find
+the earliest and most trustworthy records unanimously asserting that
+that something was the reappearance of Christ alive, we feel that
+such a reappearance was an adequate cause for the result actually
+produced; and when we think over the condition of mind which both
+probability and evidence assign to the Apostles, we also feel that no
+other circumstance would have been adequate, nor even this unless the
+proof had been such as none could reasonably escape from.
+
+Again, Strauss's supposition that the Apostles antedated their
+hallucinations suggests no less difficulty.  Suppose that, after all,
+Strauss is right, and that there was no actual reappearance; whatever
+it was that led the Apostles to believe in such reappearance must
+have been, judging by its effect, intense and memorable:  it must
+have been as a shock obliterating everything save the memory of
+itself and the things connected with it:  the time and manner of such
+a shock could never have been forgotten, nor misplaced without
+deliberate intention to deceive, and no one will impute any such
+intention to the Apostles.
+
+It may be said that if they were capable of believing in the reality
+of their visions they would be also capable of antedating them; this
+is true; but the double supposition of self-delusion, first in seeing
+the visions at all, and then in unconsciously antedating them,
+reduces the Apostles to such an exceedingly low level of intelligence
+and trustworthiness, that no good and permanent work could come from
+such persons; the men who could be weak enough, and crazed enough, if
+the 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 in
+the perils which awaited it upon every side; they would have become
+victims of their own fancies and desires, with little or no other
+grounds than these for any opinions they might hold or teach:  from
+such 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 at
+once, it is inconceivable that they should have happened at all.
+Strauss believes that the disciples fled in their first terror to
+their homes:  that when there, "outside the range to which the power
+of the enemies and murderers of their master extended, the spell of
+terror and consternation which had been laid upon their minds gave
+way," and that under the circumstances a reaction up to the point at
+which they might have visions of Christ is capable of explanation.
+The answer to this is that it is indeed likely that the spell of
+terror would give way when they found themselves safe at home, but
+that it is not at all likely that any reaction would take place in
+favour of one to whom their allegiance had never been thorough, and
+whom they supposed to have met with a violent and accursed end.  It
+might be easy to imagine such a reaction if we did not also attempt
+to imagine the circumstances that must have preceded it; the moment
+we try to do this, we find it to be an impossibility.  If once the
+Apostles had been dispersed, and had returned home to their former
+avocations without having seen or heard anything of their master's
+return to earth, all their expectations would have been ended; they
+would 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, and
+bereaved of that master mind which had kept them from falling out
+with one another, would have remained a united and enthusiastic body?
+Strauss admits that their enthusiasm was for the time ended.  Is it
+then likely that they would have remained in any sense united, or is
+it not much more likely that they would have shunned each other and
+disliked allusions to the past?  What but Christ's actual
+reappearance could rekindle this dead enthusiasm, and fan it to such
+a burning heat?  Suppose that one or two disciples recovered faith
+and courage, the majority would never do so.  If Christ himself with
+the magic of his presence could not weld them into a devoted and
+harmonious company, would the rumour arising at a later time that
+some one had seen him after death, be acceptable enough to make the
+others believe that they too had actually seen and handled him?
+Perhaps--if the rumour was believed.  But WOULD it have been
+believed?  Or at any rate have been believed so utterly?
+
+We cannot think it.  For the belief and assertion are absolutely
+without trace of dissent within the Christian body, and that body was
+in the first instance composed entirely of the very persons who had
+known and followed Christ before the Crucifixion.  If some of the
+original twelve had remained aloof and disputed the reappearances of
+Christ, is it possible that no trace of such dissension should appear
+in the Epistles of St. Paul?  Paul differed widely enough from those
+who were Apostles before him, and his language concerning them is
+occasionally that of ill-concealed contempt and hatred rather than of
+affection; but is there a word or hint which would seem to indicate
+that a single one of those who had the best means of knowing doubted
+the Resurrection?  There is nothing of the kind; on the contrary,
+whatever we find is such as to make us feel perfectly sure that none
+of them DID doubt it.  Is it then possible that this unanimity should
+have sprung from the original hallucinations of a small minority?
+True--it is plain from the Epistle to the Corinthians that there were
+some of Paul's contemporaries who denied the Resurrection.  But who
+were they?  We should expect that many among the more educated
+Gentile converts would throw doubt upon so stupendous a miracle, but
+is there anything which would point in the direction of these doubts
+having been held within the original body of those who said that they
+had seen Christ alive?  By the eleven, or by the five hundred who saw
+him at once?  There is not one single syllable.  Those who heard the
+story second-hand would doubtless some of them attempt to explain
+away its miraculous character, but if it had been founded on
+hallucination it is not from these alone that the doubts would have
+come.
+
+Something is imperatively demanded in order to account for the
+intensity of conviction manifested by the earliest Christians shortly
+after the Crucifixion; for until that time they were far from being
+firmly convinced, and the Crucifixion was the very last thing to have
+convinced them.  Given (to speak of our Lord as he must probably
+appear to Strauss) an unusually gifted teacher of a noble and
+beautiful character:  given also, a small body of adherents who were
+inclined to adopt him as their master and to regard him as the coming
+liberator, but who were nevertheless far from settled in their
+conviction:  given such a man and such followers:  the teacher is put
+to a shameful death about two years after they had first known him,
+and the followers forsake him instantly:  surely without his
+reappearing in some way upon the scene they would have concluded that
+their doubts had been right and their hopes without foundation:  but
+if he reappeared, their faith would, for the first time, become
+intense, all-absorbing.  Surely also they might be trusted to know
+whether they had really seen their master return to them or not, and
+not to sacrifice themselves in every way, and spend their whole lives
+in 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 objective
+character of Christ's Resurrection as derivable from the conversion
+and testimony of St. Paul.  It is this.  Strauss and those who agree
+with him will perhaps maintain that the Apostles were in truth wholly
+devoted to Christ before the Crucifixion, but that the Evangelists
+have represented them as being only half-hearted, in order to
+heighten the effect of their subsequent intense devotion.  But this
+looks like falling into the very error which Rationalists condemn
+most loudly when it comes from so-called orthodox writers.  They
+complain, and with too much justice, that our apologists have made
+"anything out of anything."  Yet if the Apostles were not
+unsteadfast, and did not desert their master in his hour of peril,
+and if all the accounts of Christ's reappearances are the creations
+of disordered fancy, we may as well at once declare the Evangelists
+to be worthless as historians, and had better give up all attempt at
+the construction of history with their assistance.  We cannot take
+whatever we wish, and leave whatever we wish, and alter whatever we
+wish.  If we admit that upon the whole the Gospel writings or at any
+rate the first three Gospels, contain a considerable amount of
+historic matter, we should also arrive at some general principles by
+which we will consistently abide in separating the historic from the
+unhistoric.  We cannot deal with them arbitrarily, accepting whatever
+fits in with our fancies, and rejecting whatever is at variance with
+them.
+
+Now can it be maintained that the Evangelists would be so likely to
+overrate the half-heartedness of the Apostles, that we should look
+with suspicion upon the many and very plain indications of their
+having been only half-hearted?  Certainly not.  If there was any
+likelihood of a tendency one way or the other it would be in the
+direction of overrating their faith.  Would not the unbelief of the
+Apostles in the face of all the recorded miracles be a most damaging
+thing in the eyes of the unconverted?  Would not the Apostles
+themselves, after they were once firmly convinced, be inclined to
+think that they had from the first believed more firmly than they
+really had done?  This at least would be in accordance with the
+natural promptings of human instinct:  we are all of us apt to be
+wise after the event, and are far more prone to dwell upon things
+which seem to give some colour to a pretence of prescience, than upon
+those which force from us a confession of our own stupidity.  It
+might seem a damaging thing that the Apostles should have doubted as
+much as long as they clearly did; would then the Evangelists go out
+of their way to introduce more signs of hesitation?  Would any one
+suggest that the signs of doubt and wavering had been overrated,
+unless there were some theory or other to be supported, in order to
+account for which this overrating was necessary?  Would the opinion
+that the want of faith had been exaggerated arise prior to the
+formation 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 to
+believe that, before the Resurrection, the Apostles were less
+convinced than is generally supposed, but it would be dangerous to
+depart either to the right hand or to the left of that which we find
+actually recorded, namely, that in the main the Apostles were
+prepared to accept Christ before the Crucifixion, but that they were
+by no means resolute and devoted followers.  I submit that this is a
+fair rendering of the spirit of what we find in the Gospels.  It is
+just because Strauss has chosen to depart from it that he has found
+himself involved in the maze of self-contradiction through which we
+have been trying to follow him.  There is no position so absurd that
+it cannot be easily made to look plausible, if the strictly
+scientific method of investigation is once departed from.
+
+But if I had been in Strauss's place, and had wished to make out a
+case against Christianity without much heed of facts, I should not
+have done it by a theory of hallucinations.  A much prettier, more
+novel and more sensational opening for such an attempt is afforded by
+an attack upon the Crucifixion itself.  A very neat theory might be
+made, that there may have been some disturbance at one of the Jewish
+passovers, during which some persons were crucified as an example by
+the 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 he
+had been absent during the tumult, little by little worked themselves
+up into the belief that on his reappearance they had seen wounds upon
+him, and that the details of the Crucifixion were afterwards revealed
+in a vision to some favoured believer, until in the course of a few
+years the narrative assumed its present shape:  that then the
+reappearance of Christ was denied among the Jews, while the
+Crucifixion as attaching disgrace to him was not disputed, and that
+it thus became so generally accepted as to find its way into Pliny
+and Josephus.  This tissue of absurdity may serve as an example of
+what the unlicensed indulgence of theory might lead to; but truly it
+would be found quite as easy of belief as that the early Christian
+faith in the Resurrection was due to hallucination only.
+
+Considering, then, that Christianity was not crushed but overran the
+most civilised portions of the world; that St. Paul was undoubtedly
+early told, in such a manner as for him to be thoroughly convinced of
+the fact, that on some few but sufficient occasions Christ was seen
+alive after he had been crucified; that the general belief in the
+reappearance of our Lord was so strong that those who had the best
+means of judging gave up all else to preach it, with a unanimity and
+singleness of purpose which is irreconcilable with hallucination;
+that all our records most definitely insist upon this belief and that
+there is no trace of its ever having been disputed among the Jewish
+Christians, it seems hard to see how we can escape from admitting
+that Jesus Christ was crucified, dead, and buried, and yet that he
+was verily and indeed seen alive again by those who expected nothing
+less, but who, being once convinced, turned the whole world after
+them.
+
+It is now incumbent upon us to examine the testimony of St. Paul, to
+which 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 as
+given in the Acts of the Apostles--for I am bound to admit that there
+are circumstances in connection with that account which throw doubt
+upon its historical accuracy--and looking at the broad facts only, we
+are struck at once with the following obvious reflection, namely,
+that Paul was an able man, a cultivated man, and a bitter opponent of
+Christianity; but that in spite of the strength of his original
+prejudices, he came to see what he thought convincing reasons for
+going over to the camp of his enemies.  He went over, and with the
+result we are all familiar.
+
+Now even supposing that the miraculous account of Paul's conversion
+is entirely devoid of foundation, or again, as I believe myself, that
+the story given in the Acts is not correctly placed, but refers to
+the vision alluded to by Paul himself (I. Cor. xv.), and to events
+which happened, not coincidently with his conversion, but some years
+after it--does not the importance of the conversion itself rather
+gain than lose in consequence?  A charge of unimportant inaccuracy
+may be thus sustained against one who wrote in a most inaccurate age;
+but what is this in comparison with the testimony borne to the
+strength of the Christian evidences by the supposition that OF THEIR
+OWN WEIGHT ALONE, AND WITHOUT MIRACULOUS ASSISTANCE, THEY SUCCEEDED
+IN CONVINCING THE MOST BITTER, AND AT THE SAME TIME THE ABLEST, OF
+THEIR OPPONENTS?  This is very pregnant.  No man likes to abandon the
+side which he has once taken.  The spectacle of a man committing
+himself deeply to his original party, changing without rhyme or
+reason, and then remaining for the rest of his life the most devoted
+and courageous adherent of all that he had opposed, without a single
+human inducement to make him do so, is one which has never been
+witnessed since man was man.  When men who have been committed deeply
+and spontaneously to one cause, leave it for another, they do so
+either because facts have come to their knowledge which are new to
+them and which they cannot resist, or because their temporal
+interests urge them, or from caprice:  but if they change from
+caprice in important matters and after many pledges given, they will
+change from caprice again:  they will not remain for twenty-five or
+thirty years without changing a jot of their capriciously formed
+opinions.  We are therefore warranted in assuming that St. Paul's
+conversion to Christianity was not dictated by caprice:  it was not
+dictated by self-interest:  it must therefore have sprung from the
+weight of certain new facts which overbore all the resistance which
+he could make to them.
+
+What then could these facts have been?
+
+Paul's conduct as a Jew was logical and consistent:  he did what any
+seriously-minded man who had been strictly brought up would have done
+in his situation.  Instead of half believing what he had been taught,
+he believed it wholly.  Christianity was cutting at the root of what
+was in his day accepted as fundamental:  it was therefore perfectly
+natural that he should set himself to attack it.  There is nothing
+against him in this beyond the fact of his having done it, as far as
+we can see, with much cruelty.  Yet though cruel, he was cruel from
+the best of motives--the stamping out of an error which was harmful
+to the service of God; and cruelty was not then what it is now:  the
+age was not sensitive and the lot of all was harder.  From the first
+he proved himself to be a man of great strength of character, and
+like many such, deeply convinced of the soundness of his opinions,
+and deeply impressed with the belief that nothing could be good which
+did not also commend itself as good to him.  He tested the truth of
+his earlier convictions not by external standards, but by the
+internal standard of their own strength and purity--a fearful error
+which but for God's mercy towards him would have made him no less
+wicked than well-intentioned.
+
+Even after having been convinced by a weight of evidence which no
+prejudice could resist, and after thus attaining to a higher
+conception of right and truth and goodness than was possible to him
+as a Jew, there remained not a few traces of the old character.
+Opposition beyond certain limits was a thing which to the end of his
+life he could not brook.  It is not too much to say that he regarded
+the other Apostles--and was regarded by them--with suspicion and
+dislike; even if an angel from Heaven had preached any other doctrine
+than what Paul preached, the angel was to be accursed (Gal. i., 8),
+and it is not probable that he regarded his fellow Apostles as
+teaching the same doctrine as himself, or that he would have allowed
+them greater licence than an angel.  It is plain from his undoubted
+Epistles to the Corinthians and Galatians that the other Apostles, no
+less than his converts, exceedingly well knew that he was not a man
+to be trifled with.  If the arm of the law had been as much on his
+side after his conversion as before it, it would have gone hardly
+with dissenters; they would have been treated with politic tenderness
+the moment that they yielded, but woe betide them if they presumed on
+having any very decided opinions of their own.
+
+On the other hand, his sagacity is beyond dispute; it is certain that
+his perception of what the Gentile converts could and could not bear
+was the main proximate cause of the spread of Christianity.  He
+prevented it from becoming a mere Jewish sect, and it has been well
+said that but for him the Jews would now be Christians, and the
+Gentiles unbelievers.  Who can doubt his tact and forbearance, where
+matters not essential were concerned?  His strength in not yielding a
+fraction upon vital points was matched only by his suppleness and
+conciliatory bearing upon all others.  To use his own words, he did
+indeed become "all things to all men" if by any means he could gain
+some, and the probability is that he pushed this principle to its
+extreme (see Acts xxi., 20-26).
+
+Now when we see a man so strong and yet so yielding--the writer
+moreover of letters which shew an intellect at once very vigorous and
+very subtle (not to say more of them), and when we know that there
+was no amount of hardship, pain, and indignity, which he did not bear
+and count as gain in the service of Jesus Christ; when we also
+remember that he continued thus for all the known years of his life
+after his conversion, can we think that that conversion could have
+been the result of anything even approaching to caprice?  Or again,
+is it likely that it could have been due to contact with the
+hallucinations of his despised and hated enemies?  Paul the Christian
+appears to be the same sort of man in most respects as Paul the Jew,
+yet can we imagine Paul the Christian as being converted from
+Christianity to some other creed, by the infection of hallucinations?
+On the contrary, no man would more quickly have come to the bottom of
+them, and assigned them to diabolical agency.  What then can that
+thing have been, which wrenched the strong and able man from all that
+had the greatest hold upon him, and fixed him for the rest of his
+life as the most self-sacrificing champion of Christianity?  In
+answer to this question we might say, that it is of no great
+importance how the change was made, inasmuch as the fact of its
+having been made at all is sufficiently pregnant.  Nevertheless it
+will be interesting to follow Strauss in his remarks upon the account
+given in the Acts, and I am bound to add that I think he has made out
+his case.  Strange! that he should have failed to see that the
+evidences in support of the Resurrection are incalculably
+strengthened by his having done so.  How short-sighted is mere
+ingenuity!  And how weak and cowardly are they who shut their eyes to
+facts because they happen to come from an opponent!
+
+Strauss, however, writes as follows:- "That we are not bound to the
+individual features of the account in the Acts is shewn by comparing
+it with the substance of the statement twice repeated in the language
+of Paul himself:  for there we find that the author's own account is
+not accurate, and that he attributed no importance to a few
+variations more or less.  Not only is it said on one occasion that
+the attendants stood dumb-foundered:  on another that they fell with
+Paul to the ground; on one occasion that they heard the voice but saw
+no one; on another that they saw the light but did not hear the voice
+of him who spoke with Paul:  but also the speech of Jesus himself, in
+the third repetition, gets the well known addition about "kicking
+against the pricks," to say nothing of the fact that the appointment
+to the Apostleship of the Gentiles, which according to the two
+earlier accounts was made partly by Ananias, partly on the occasion
+of a subsequent vision in the Temple at Jerusalem, is in this last
+account incorporated in the speech of Jesus.  There is no occasion to
+derive the three accounts of this occurrence in the Acts from
+different sources, and even in this case one must suppose that the
+author of the Acts must have remarked and reconciled the
+discrepancies; that he did not do so, or rather that without
+following his own earlier narrative he repeated it in an arbitrary
+form, proves to us how careless the New Testament writers are about
+details of this kind, important as they are to one who strives after
+strict 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 the
+history from the narrative of an eye witness.  Even if we consider
+the person who in different places comprehends himself and the
+Apostle Paul under the word 'we' or 'us' to have been the composer of
+the whole work, that person was not on the occasion of the occurrence
+before Damascus as yet in the company of the Apostle.  Into this he
+did not enter until much later, in the Troad, on the Apostle's second
+missionary journey (Acts xvi., 10).  But that hypothesis with regard
+to the author of the Acts of the Apostles is, moreover, as we have
+seen above, erroneous.  He only worked up into different passages of
+his composition the memoranda of a temporary companion of the Apostle
+about the journeys performed in his company, and we are therefore not
+justified in considering the narrator to have been an eye witness in
+those passages and sections in which the 'we' is wanting.  Now among
+these is found the very section in which appear the two accounts of
+his conversion which Paul gives, first, to the Jewish people in
+Jerusalem, secondly, to Agrippa and Festus in Caesarea.  The last
+occasion on which the 'we' was found was xxi., 18, that of the visit
+of Paul to James, and it does not appear again until xxvii., 1, when
+the subject is the Apostle's embarkation for Italy.  Nothing
+therefore compels us to assume that we have in the reports of these
+speeches the account of any one who had been a party to the hearing
+of them, and, in them, Paul's own narrative of the occurrences that
+took place on his conversion."
+
+The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures having been
+long given up by all who have considered the awful consequences which
+it 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 in
+with the feelings and customs of their own times, and must
+accordingly be allowed to have been occasionally guilty of what would
+in our own age be called inaccuracies.  There is no dependence to be
+placed on the verbal, or indeed the substantial, accuracy of any
+ancient speeches, except those which we know to have been reported
+verbatim, they were (as with the Herodotean and Thucydidean speeches)
+in most cases the invention of the historian himself, as being what
+seemed most appropriate to be said by one in the position of the
+speaker.  Reporting was a rare art among the ancients, and was
+confined to a few great centres of intellectual activity; accuracy,
+moreover, was not held to be of the same importance as at the present
+day.  Yet without accurate reporting a speech perishes as soon as it
+is uttered, except in so far as it lives in the actions of those who
+hear it.  Even a hundred years ago the invention of speeches was
+considered a matter of course, as in the well-known case of Dr.
+Johnson, than whom none could be more conscientious, and--according
+to his lights--accurate.  I may perhaps be pardoned for quoting the
+passage in full from Boswell, who gives it on the authority of Mr.
+John Nichols; the italics are mine.  "He said that the Parliamentary
+debates were the only part of his writings which then gave him any
+compunction:  BUT THAT AT THE TIME HE WROTE THEM HE HAD NO CONCEPTION
+THAT HE WAS IMPOSING UPON THE WORLD, THOUGH THEY WERE FREQUENTLY
+WRITTEN FROM VERY SLENDER MATERIALS, AND OFTEN FROM NONE AT ALL--THE
+MERE COINAGE OF HIS OWN IMAGINATION.  HE never wrote any part of his
+works with equal velocity.  (Boswell's Life of Johnson, chap.
+lxxxii.)
+
+This is an extreme case, yet there can be no question about its
+truth.  It is only one among the very many examples which could be
+adduced in order to shew that the appreciation of the value of
+accuracy is a thing of modern date only--a thing which we owe mainly
+to the chemical and mechanical sciences, wherein the inestimable
+difference between precision and inaccuracy became most speedily
+apparent.  If the reader will pardon an apparent digression, I would
+remark that that sort of care is wanted on behalf of Christianity
+with 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 enough
+before he allowed it to leave his hands.  This caution would have
+saved the wasting of many lives, and the breaking of many hearts.
+
+We, on the other hand, however reckless we may be ourselves, are in
+the habit of assuming that any historian whom we may have occasion to
+consult, and on whose testimony we would fain rely, must have himself
+weighed and re-weighed his words as the cashier his money; an error
+which arises from want of that sympathy which should make us bear
+constantly in mind what lights men had, under what influences they
+wrote, and what we should ourselves have done had we been so placed
+as they.  But if any will maintain that though the general run of
+ancient speeches were, as those supposed to have been reported by
+Johnson, pure invention, yet that it is not likely that one reporting
+the words of Almighty God should have failed to feel the awful
+responsibility of his position, we can only answer that the writer of
+the Acts did most indisputably so fail, as is shewn by the various
+reports of those words which he has himself given:  if he could in
+the innocency of his heart do this, and at one time report the
+Almighty as saying this, and at another that, as though, more or
+less, this or that were a matter of no moment, what certainty can we
+have concerning such a man that inaccuracy shall not elsewhere be
+found in him?  None.  He is a warped mirror which will distort every
+object that it reflects.
+
+It follows, then, that from the Acts of the Apostles we have no data
+for arriving at any conclusion as to the manner of Paul's change of
+faith, nor the circumstances connected with it.  To us the accounts
+there given should be simply non-existent; but this is not easy, for
+we have heard them too often and from too early an age to be able to
+escape their influence; yet we must assuredly ignore them if we are
+anxious to arrive at truth.  We cannot let the story told in the Acts
+enter into any judgement which we may form concerning Paul's
+character.  The desire to represent him as having been converted by
+miracle was very natural.  He himself tells us that he saw visions,
+and received his apostleship by revelation--not necessarily at the
+time of, or immediately after, his conversion, but still at some
+period or other in his life; it would be the most natural thing in
+the world for the writer of the Acts to connect some version of one
+of these visions with the conversion itself:  the dramatic effect
+would be heightened by making the change, while the change itself
+would be utterly unimportant in the eyes of such a writer; be this
+however as it may, we are only now concerned with the fact that we
+know nothing about Paul's conversion from the Acts of the Apostles,
+which should make us believe that that conversion was wrought in him
+by any other means, than by such an irresistible pressure of evidence
+as no sane person could withstand.
+
+From the Apostle's own writings we can glean nothing about his
+conversion which would point in the direction of its having been
+sudden or miraculous.  It is true that in the Epistle to the
+Galatians he says, "After it had pleased God to reveal his Son in
+me," but this expression does not preclude the supposition that his
+conversion may have been led up to by a gradual process, the
+culmination of which (if that) he alone regarded as miraculous.  Thus
+we are forced to admit that we know nothing from any source
+concerning the manner and circumstances of St. Paul's change from
+Judaism to Christianity, and we can only conclude therefore that he
+changed because he found the weight of the evidence to be greater
+than he could resist.  And this, as we have seen, is an exceedingly
+telling fact.  The probability is, that coming much into contact with
+Christians through his persecution of them, and submitting them to
+the severest questioning, he found that they were in all respects
+sober plainspoken men, that their conviction was intense, their story
+coherent, and the doctrines which they had received simple and
+ennobling; that these results of many inquisitions were so unvarying
+that he found conviction stealing gradually upon him against his
+will; common honesty compelled him to inquire further; the answers
+pointed invariably in one direction only; until at length he found
+himself utterly unable to resist the weight of evidence which he had
+collected, and resolved, perhaps at the last suddenly, to yield
+himself a convert to Christianity.
+
+Strauss says that, "in the presence of the believers in Jesus," the
+conviction that he was a false teacher--an impostor--"must have
+become every day more doubtful to him.  They considered it not only
+publicly honourable to be as convinced of his Resurrection as they
+were of their own life--but they shewed also a state of mind, a quiet
+peace, a tranquil cheerfulness, even under suffering, which put to
+shame the restless and joyless zeal of their persecutor.  Could HE
+have been a false teacher who had adherents such as these?  Could
+that have been a false pretence which gave such rest and security? on
+the one hand, he saw the new sect, in spite of all persecutions, nay,
+in consequence of them, extending their influence wider and wider
+round them; on the other, as their persecutor, he felt that inward
+tranquillity growing less and less which he could observe in so many
+ways in the persecuted.  We cannot therefore be surprised if in hours
+of inward despondency and unhappiness he put to himself the question,
+'Who after all is right, thou, or the crucified Galilean about whom
+these men are so enthusiastic?'  And when he had got as far as this,
+the result, with his bodily and mental characteristics, naturally
+followed in an ecstasy in which the very same Christ whom up to this
+time he had so passionately persecuted, appeared to him in all the
+glory of which his adherents spoke so much, shewed him the perversity
+and folly of his conduct, and called him to come over to his
+service."
+
+The above comes simply to this, that Paul in his constant contact
+with Christians found that they had more to say for themselves than
+he could answer, and should, one would have thought, have suggested
+to Strauss what he supposes to have occurred to Paul, namely, that it
+was not likely that these men had made a mistake in thinking that
+they had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion.  There can be no
+doubt about Strauss's being right as to the Christian intensity of
+conviction, strenuousness of assertion, and readiness to suffer for
+the sake of their faith in Christ; and these are the main points with
+which we are concerned.  We arrive therefore at the conclusion that
+the first Christians were sufficiently unanimous, coherent and
+undaunted to convince the foremost of their enemies.  They were not
+so BEFORE the Crucifixion; they could not certainly have been made so
+by the Crucifixion alone; something beyond the Crucifixion must have
+occurred to give them such a moral ascendancy as should suffice to
+generate a revulsion of feeling in the mind of the persecuting Saul.
+Strauss asks us to believe that this missing something is to be found
+in the hallucinations of two or three men whose names have not been
+recorded and who have left no mark of their own.  Is there any
+occasion for answer?
+
+It is inconceivable that he who could write the Epistle to the Romans
+should not also have been as able as any man who ever lived to
+question the early believers as to their converse with Christ, and to
+report faithfully the substance of what they told him.  That he knew
+the other Apostles, that he went up to Jerusalem to hold conferences
+with 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 much
+out of anything that I hardly dare to say how strongly the use of the
+verb ?st??e?? suggests to me "getting at the facts of the case,"
+"questioning as to how things happened," yet such would be the most
+obvious meaning of the word from which our own "history" and "story"
+are derived.  Fifteen days was time enough to give Paul the means of
+coming to an understanding with Peter as to what the value of Peter's
+story was, nor can we believe that Paul should not both receive and
+transmit perfectly all that he was then told.  In fact, without
+supposing these men to be so utterly visionary that nothing durable
+could come out of them, there is no escape from holding that Peter
+was justified in firmly believing that he had seen Christ alive
+within a very few days of the Crucifixion, that he succeeded also in
+satisfying Paul that this belief was well-founded, and that in the
+account of Christ's reappearances, as given I. Cor. xv., we have a
+virtually verbatim report of what Paul heard from Peter and the other
+Apostles.  Of course the possibility remains that Paul may have been
+too easily satisfied, and not have cross-examined Peter as closely as
+he might have done.  But then Paul was converted BEFORE this
+interview; and this implies that he had already found a general
+consent among the Christians whom he had met with, that the story
+which he afterwards heard from Peter (or one to the same effect) was
+true.  Whence then the unanimity of this belief?  Strauss answers as
+before--from the hallucinations of an originally small minority.  We
+can only again reply that for the reasons already given we find it
+quite 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 brother
+intended to make a fresh translation from the original passages, but
+he never carried out his intention, and in his MS. the page of the
+English translation with the first and last words of each passage are
+alone given.  I could hardly venture to undertake the responsibility
+of making a fresh translation myself, and have therefore adhered
+almost word for word to the published English translation--here and
+there, however, a trifling alteration was really irresistible on the
+scores 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 the
+view of St. Paul's conversion taken above--that is to say, to make
+him regard the conversion as mainly, if not entirely, due to the
+weight of evidence afforded by the courage and consistency of the
+early Christians.
+
+But, the change in Paul's mind being thus referred to causes which
+preclude all possibility of hallucination or ecstasy on his own part,
+it becomes unnecessary to discuss the attempts which have been made
+to explain away the miraculous character of the account given in the
+Acts.  I believe that this account is founded upon fact, and that it
+is derived from some description furnished by St. Paul himself of the
+vision mentioned, I. Cor. xv., which again is very possibly the same
+as that of II. Cor. xii.  For the purposes of the present
+investigation, however, the whole story must be set aside.  At the
+same time it should be borne in mind, that any detraction from the
+historical accuracy of the writer of the Acts, is more than
+compensated for, by the additional weight given to the conversion of
+St. Paul, whom we are now able to regard as having been converted by
+evidence which was in itself overpowering, and which did not stand in
+need of any miraculous interference in order to confirm it.
+
+It is important to observe that the testimony of Paul should carry
+more weight with those who are bent upon close critical investigation
+than that even of the Evangelists.  St. Paul is one whom we know, and
+know well.  No syllable of suspicion has ever been breathed, even in
+Germany, against the first four of the Epistles which have been
+generally assigned to him; friends and foes of Christianity are alike
+agreed to accept them as the genuine work of the Apostle.  Few
+figures, therefore, in ancient history stand out more clearly
+revealed to us than that of St. Paul, whereas a thick veil of
+darkness 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 highest
+authority), and how far it has been modified in translation, are
+things 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 more
+hotly contested than those of the other three, and all that can be
+affirmed with certainty concerning it is, that no trace of its
+existence 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's
+Epistles to have been a pillar of Judaism.
+
+With St. Paul all is changed:  we not only know him better than we
+know nine-tenths of our own most eminent countrymen of the last
+century, but we feel a confidence in him which grows greater and
+greater the more we study his character.  He combines to perfection
+the qualities that make a good witness--capacity and integrity:  add
+to this that his conclusions were forced upon him.  We therefore feel
+that, whereas from a scientific point of view, the Gospel narratives
+can only be considered as the testimony of early and sincere writers
+of whom we know little or nothing, yet that in the evidence of St.
+Paul we find the missing link which connects us securely with actual
+eye-witnesses and gives us a confidence in the general accuracy of
+the Gospels which they could never of themselves alone have imparted.
+We could indeed ill spare either the testimony of the Evangelists or
+that of St. Paul, but if we were obliged to content ourselves with
+one 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 preached
+unto you, which also ye have received and wherein ye stand.  By which
+also 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 of
+all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins
+according to the Scriptures:  and that He was buried, and that He
+rose again the third day according to the Scriptures; and that He was
+seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:  after that He was seen of above
+five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater portion remain
+unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.  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 due time."
+
+In the first place we must notice Paul's assertion that the Gospel
+which he was then writing was identical with that which he had
+originally preached.  We may assume that each of the appearances of
+Christ here mentioned had in Paul's mind a definite time and place,
+derived from the account which he had received and which probably led
+to his conversion; the words "that which I also received" surely
+imply "that which I also received IN THE FIRST INSTANCE":  now we
+know from his own mouth (Gal. i., 16, 17) that AFTER his conversion
+he "conferred not with flesh and blood"--"neither," he continues,
+"went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before me, but I
+went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus:  then after three
+years I went up to Jerusalem to see (?st???sa?) Peter, and abode with
+him fifteen days, but others of the Apostles saw I none, save James
+the Lord's brother."  Since, then, he must have heard SOME story
+concerning Christ's reappearances before his conversion and
+subsequent sojourn in Arabia, and since he had heard nothing from
+eye-witnesses until the time of his going up to Jerusalem three years
+later, it is probable that the account quoted above is the substance
+of what he found persisted in by the Christians whom he was
+persecuting at Damascus, and was at length compelled to believe.  But
+this is very unimportant:  it is more to the point to insist upon the
+fact 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 it
+was subsequently confirmed to him by Peter, and probably by James and
+John, during his stay of fifteen days in Peter's house.
+
+This account can have been nothing new even then, for it is plain
+that at the time of Paul's conversion the Christian Church had spread
+far:  Paul speaks of RETURNING to Damascus, as though the writer of
+the Acts was right as regards the place of his conversion; but the
+fact of there having been a church in Damascus of sufficient
+importance for Paul to go thither to persecute it, involves the lapse
+of considerable time since the original promulgation of our Lord's
+Resurrection, and throws back the origin of the belief in that event
+to a time closely consequent upon the Crucifixion itself.
+
+Now Paul informs us that he was told (we may assume by Peter and
+James) that Christ first reappeared WITHIN THREE DAYS OF THE
+CRUCIFIXION.  There is no sufficient reason for doubting this; and
+one fact of weekly recurrence even to this day, affords it striking
+confirmation--I refer to the institution of Sunday as the Lord's day.
+We know that the observance of this day in commemoration of the
+Resurrection was a very early practice, nor is there anything which
+would seem to throw doubt upon the fact of the first "Sunday" having
+been also the Sunday of the Resurrection.  Another confirmation of
+the early date assigned to the Resurrection by St. Paul, is to be
+found in the fact that every instinct would warn the Apostles AGAINST
+the third day as being dangerously early, and as opening a door for
+the denial of the completeness of the death.  The fortieth day would
+far more naturally have been chosen.
+
+Turning now from the question of the date of the first reappearance
+to what is told us of the reappearances themselves, we find that the
+earliest was vouchsafed to St. Peter, which is at first sight opposed
+to the Evangelistic records; but this is a discrepancy upon which no
+stress should be laid; St. Paul might well be aware that Mary
+Magdalene was the first to look upon her risen Lord, and yet have
+preferred to dwell upon the more widely known names of Peter and his
+fellow Apostles.  The facts are probably these, that our Lord first
+shewed Himself to the women, but that Peter was the first of the
+Apostolic body to see Him; it was natural that if our Lord did not
+choose to show Himself to the Apostles without preparation, Peter
+should have been chosen as the one best fitted to prepare them:
+Peter probably collected the other Apostles, and then the Redeemer
+shewed Himself alive to all together.  This is what we should gather
+from St. Paul's narrative; a narrative which it would seem arbitrary
+to set aside in the face of St. Paul's character, opportunities and
+antecedent prejudices against Christianity--in the face also of the
+unanimity of all the records we have, as well as of the fact that the
+Christian religion triumphed, and of the endless difficulties
+attendant on the hallucination theory.
+
+We conclude therefore that Paul was satisfied by sufficient evidence
+that our Lord had appeared to Peter on the third day after the
+Crucifixion, nor can any reasonable doubt be thrown upon the other
+appearances of which he tells us.  It is true that on the occasion of
+his visit to Peter he saw none other of the Apostles save James--but
+there is nothing to lead us to suppose that there was any want of
+unanimity among them:  no trace of this has come down to us, and
+would surely have done so if it had existed.  If any dependence at
+all is to be placed on the writers of the New Testament it did not
+exist.  Stronger evidence than this unanimity it would be hard to
+find.
+
+Another most noticeable feature is the fewness of the recorded
+appearances of Christ.  They commenced according to Paul (and this is
+virtually according to Peter and James) immediately after the
+Crucifixion.  Paul mentions only five appearances:  this does not
+preclude the supposition that he knew of more, nor that the women who
+came to the sepulchre had also seen Him, but it does seem to imply
+that the reappearances were few in number, and that they continued
+only for a very short time.  They were sufficient for their purpose:
+one of preparation to Peter--another to the Apostles--another to the
+outside world, and then one or two more--but still not more than
+enough to establish the fact beyond all possibility of dispute.  The
+writer of the Acts tells us that Christ was seen for a space of forty
+days--presumably not every day, but from time to time.  Now forty
+days is a mystical period, and one which may mean either more or
+less, within a week or two, than the precise time stated; it seems
+upon the whole most reasonable to conclude that the reappearances
+recorded by Paul, and some few others not recorded, extended over a
+period of one or two months after the Crucifixion, and that they then
+came to an end; for there can be no doubt that St. Paul conceived
+them as having ended with the appearance to the assembled Apostles
+mentioned I. Cor. xv., 7, and, though he does not say so expressly,
+there is that in the context which suggests their having been
+confined to a short space of time.
+
+It is perfectly clear that St. Paul did not believe that any one had
+seen Christ in the interval between the last recorded appearance to
+the eleven, and the vision granted to himself.  The words "and last
+of all he was seen also of me AS OF ONE BORN OUT OF DUE TIME" point
+strongly in the direction of a lapse of some years between the second
+appearance to the eleven and his own vision.  This confirms and is
+confirmed by the writer of the Acts.  St. Paul never could have used
+the words quoted above, if he had held that the appearances which he
+records had been spread over a space of years intervening between the
+Crucifixion and his own vision.  Where would be the force of "born
+out of due time" unless the time of the previous appearances had long
+passed by?  But if, at the time of St. Paul's conversion, it was
+already many years since the last occasion upon which Christ had been
+seen by his disciples, we find ourselves driven back to a time
+closely consequent upon the Crucifixion as the only possible date of
+the reappearances.  But this is in itself sufficient condemnation of
+Strauss's theory:  that theory requires considerable time for the
+development of a perfectly unanimous and harmonious belief in the
+hallucinations, while every particle of evidence which we can get
+points in the direction of the belief in the Resurrection having
+followed 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 end
+so soon.  When once the mind has begun to run riot in hallucination,
+it is prodigal of its own inventions.  Favoured believers would have
+been constantly seeing Christ even up to the time of Paul's letter to
+the Corinthians, and the Apostle would have written that even then
+Christ was still occasionally seen of those who trusted in him, and
+served him faithfully.  But we meet with nothing of the sort:  we are
+told that Christ was seen a few times shortly after the Crucifixion,
+then AFTER A LAPSE OF SEVERAL YEARS (I am surely warranted in saying
+this) Paul himself saw Him--but no one in the interval, and no one
+afterwards.  This is not the manner of the hallucinations of
+uneducated people.  It is altogether too sober:  the state of mind
+from which alone so baseless a delusion could spring, is one which
+never could have been contented with the results which were evidently
+all, or nearly all, that Paul knew of.  St. Paul's words cannot be
+set aside without more cause than Strauss has shewn:  instead of
+betraying a tendency towards exaggeration, they contain nothing
+whatever, with the exception of his own vision, that is not
+imperatively demanded in order to account for the rise and spread of
+Christianity.
+
+Concerning that vision Strauss writes as follows:
+
+"With regard to the appearance he (Paul) witnessed--he uses the same
+word (?f??) as with regard to the others:  he places it in the same
+category with them only in the last place, as he names himself the
+last of the Apostles, but in exactly the same rank with the others.
+Thus much, therefore, Paul knew--or supposed--that the appearances
+which the elder disciples had seen soon after the Resurrection of
+Jesus 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 not
+objective--that Paul thought he saw Christ, although he never really
+saw him.  But, says Strauss, he uses the same word for his own vision
+and for the appearances to the earlier Apostles:  it is plain
+therefore that he did not suppose the earlier Apostles to have seen
+Christ in the same sort of way in which they saw themselves and other
+people, but to have seen him as Paul himself did, i.e., by
+supernatural revelation.
+
+But would it not be more fair to say that Paul's using the same word
+for all the appearances--his own vision included--implies that he
+considered this last to have been no less real than those vouchsafed
+earlier, though he may have been perfectly well aware that it was
+different in kind?  The use of the same word for all the appearances
+is quite compatible with a belief in Paul's mind that the manner in
+which he saw Christ was different from that in which the Apostles had
+seen him:  indeed, so long as he believed that he had seen Christ no
+less really than the others, one cannot see why he should have used
+any other word for his own vision than that which he had applied to
+the others:  we should even expect that he would do so, and should be
+surprised at his having done otherwise.  That Paul did believe in the
+reality of his own vision is indisputable, and his use of the word
+?f?? was probably dictated by a desire to assert this belief in the
+strongest possible way, and to place his own vision in the same
+category with others, which were so universally known among
+Christians to have been material and objective, that there was no
+occasion to say so.  Nevertheless there is that in Paul's words on
+which Strauss does not dwell, but which cannot be passed over without
+notice.  Paul does not simply say, "and last of all he was seen also
+of me"--but he adds the words "as of one born out of due time."
+
+It is impossible to say decisively that this addition implies that
+Paul recognised a difference in kind between the appearances,
+inasmuch as the words added may only refer to time--still they would
+explain the possible use of [?f??] in a somewhat different sense, and
+I cannot but think that they will suggest this possibility to the
+reader.  They will make him feel, if he does not feel it without
+them, how strained a proceeding it is to bind Paul down to a
+rigorously identical meaning on every occasion on which the same word
+came from his pen, and to maintain that because he once uses it on
+the occasion of an appearance which he held to be vouchsafed by
+revelation, therefore, wherever else he uses it, he must have
+intended to refer to something seen by revelation:  the words "as of
+one born out of due time" imply the utterly unlooked for and
+transcendent nature of the favour, and suggest, even though they do
+not compel, the inference that while the other Apostles had seen
+Christ in the common course of nature, as a visible tangible being
+before their waking eyes, he had himself seen Him not less truly, but
+still only by special and unlooked for revelation.  If such thoughts
+were in his mind he would not probably have expressed them farther
+than by the touching words which he has added concerning his own
+vision.  So much for the objection that the evidence of Paul
+concerning the earlier appearances is impaired by his having used the
+same word for them, and for the appearance to himself.  It only
+remains therefore to review in brief the general bearings of Paul's
+testimony as given I. Cor. xv., 1-8.
+
+Firstly, there is the early commencement of the reappearances:  this
+is incompatible with hallucination, for the hallucination must be
+supposed to have occurred when most easy to refute, and when the
+spell of shame and fear was laid most heavily upon the Apostles.
+Strauss maintains that the appearances were unconsciously antedated
+by Peter; we can only say that the circumstances of the case, as
+entered into more fully above, render this very improbable; that if
+Peter told Paul that he saw Christ on the third day after the
+Crucifixion, he probably firmly believed that he did see Him; and
+that if he believed this, he was also probably right in so believing.
+
+Secondly, there is the fact that the reappearances were few, and
+extended over a short time only.  Had they been due to hallucination
+there would have been no limit either to their number or duration.
+Paul seems to have had no idea that there ever had been, or ever
+would be, successors to the five hundred brethren who saw Christ at
+one time.  Some were fallen asleep--the rest would in time follow
+them.  It is incredible that men should have so lost all count of
+fact, so debauched their perception of external objects, so steeped
+themselves in belief in dreams which had no foundation but in their
+own disordered brains, as to have turned the whole world after them
+by the sheer force of their conviction of the truth of their
+delusions, and yet that suddenly, within a few weeks from the
+commencement of this intoxication, they should have come to a dead
+stop and given no further sign of like extravagance.  The
+hallucinations must have been so baseless, and would argue such an
+utter subordination of judgement to imagination, that instead of
+ceasing they must infallibly have ended in riot and disorganisation;
+the fact that they did cease (which cannot be denied) and that they
+were followed by no disorder, but by a solemn sober steadfastness of
+purpose, as of reasonable men in deadly earnest about a matter which
+had come to their knowledge, and which they held it vital for all to
+know--this fact alone would be sufficient to overthrow the
+hallucination theory.  Such intemperance could never have begotten
+such temperance:  from such a frame of mind as Strauss assigns to the
+Apostles no religion could have come which should satisfy the highest
+spiritual needs of the most civilised nations of the earth for nearly
+two thousand years.
+
+When, therefore, we look at the want of faith of the Apostles before
+the Crucifixion, and to their subsequent intense devotion; at their
+unanimity at their general sobriety; at the fact that they succeeded
+in convincing the ablest of their enemies and ultimately the whole of
+Europe; at the undeviating consent of all the records we have; at the
+early date at which the reappearances commenced,--at their small
+number and short duration--things so foreign to the nature of
+hallucination; at the excellent opportunities which Paul had for
+knowing 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 its
+truth; at the impossibility of accounting for the rise of
+Christianity without the reappearance of its Founder after His
+Crucifixion; when we look at all these things we shall admit that it
+is impossible to avoid the belief that after having died, Christ DID
+reappear to his disciples, and that in this fact we have the only
+intelligible 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 the
+historic character of the Resurrection by the ablest of its
+impugners.  I know of nothing in any of Strauss's works which can be
+considered as doing better justice to his opinions than the passages
+which I have quoted and, I trust, refuted.  I have quoted fully, and
+have kept nothing in the background.  If I had known of anything
+stronger against the Resurrection from any other source, I should
+certainly have produced it.  I have answered in outline only, but I
+do not believe that I have passed any difficulty on one side.
+
+What then does the reader think?  Was the attack so dangerous, or the
+defence so far to seek?  I believe he will agree with me that the
+combat was one of no great danger when it was once fairly entered
+upon.  But the wonder, and, let me add, the disgrace, to English
+divines, is that the battle should have been shirked so long.  What
+is it that has made the name of Strauss so terrible to the ears of
+English Churchmen?  Surely nothing but the ominous silence which has
+been maintained concerning him in almost all quarters of our Church.
+For what can he say or do against the other miracles if he be
+powerless against the Resurrection?  He can make sentences which
+sound plausible, but that is no great feat.  Can he show that there
+is any a priori improbability whatever, in the fact of miracles
+having been wrought by one who died and rose from the dead?  If a man
+did this it is a small thing that he should also walk upon the waves
+and command the winds.  But if there is no a priori difficulty with
+regard to these miracles, there is certainly none other.
+
+Let this, however, for the present pass, only let me beg of the
+reader to have patience while I follow out the plan which I have
+pursued up to the present point, and proceed to examine certain
+difficulties of another character.  I propose to do so with the same
+unflinching examination as heretofore, concealing nothing that has
+been said, or that can be said; going out of my way to find arguments
+for opponents, if I do not think that they have put forward all that
+from their own point of view they might have done, and careless how
+many difficulties I may bring before the reader which may never yet
+have occurred to him, provided I feel that I can also shew him how
+little occasion there is to fear them.
+
+I must, however, maintain two propositions, which may perhaps be
+unfamiliar to some of those who have not as yet given more than a
+conventional and superficial attention to the Scriptural records, but
+which will meet with ready assent from all whose studies have been
+deeper.  Fain would I avoid paining even a single reader, but I am
+convinced that the arresting of infidelity depends mainly upon the
+general recognition of two broad facts.  The first is this--that the
+Apostles, even after they had received the gift of the Holy Spirit
+were still fallible though holy men; the second--that there are
+certain passages in each of the Gospels as we now have them, which
+were not originally to be found therein, and others which, though
+genuine, are still not historic.  This much of concession we must be
+prepared to make, and we shall find (as in the case of the conversion
+of St. Paul) that our position is indefinitely strengthened by doing
+so.
+
+When shall we Christians learn that the truest ground is also the
+strongest?  We may be sure that until we have done so we shall find a
+host of enemies who will say that truth is not ours.  It is we who
+have created infidelity, and who are responsible for it.  WE are the
+true infidels, for we have not sufficient faith in our own creed to
+believe that it will bear the removal of the incrustations of time
+and superstition.  When men see our cowardice, what can they think
+but that we must know that we have cause to be afraid?  We drive men
+into unbelief in spite of themselves, by our tenacious adherence to
+opinions which every unprejudiced person must see at a glance that we
+cannot rightfully defend, and then we pride ourselves upon our love
+for Christ and our hatred of His enemies.  If Christ accepts this
+kind 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 zeal
+against His enemies.  If those to whom the unfamiliarity of an
+opinion or its inconvenience to themselves is a test of its
+hatefulness to Christ, had been born Jews, they would have crucified
+Him whom they imagine that they are now serving:  if Turks, they
+would have massacred both Jew and Christian; if Papists at the time
+of the Reformation they would have persecuted Protestants:  if
+Protestants, under Elizabeth, Papists.  Truth is to them an accident
+of birth and training, and the Christian faith is in their eyes true
+because these accidents, as far as they are concerned, have decided
+in its favour.  But such persons are not Christians.  It is they who
+crucify Christ, who drive men from coming to Him whose every instinct
+would lead them to love and worship Him, but who are warned off by
+observing the crowd of sycophants and time-servers who presume to
+call Him Lord.
+
+But to look at the matter from another point of view; when there is a
+long sustained contest between two bodies of capable and seriously
+disposed people, (and none can deny that many of our adversaries have
+been both one and the other), and when this contest shews no sign of
+healing, but rather widens from generation to generation, and each
+party accuses the other of disingenuousness, obstinacy and other like
+serious defects of mind--it may be certainly assumed that the truth
+lies wholly with neither side, but that each should make some
+concessions to the other.  A third party sees this at a glance, and
+is amazed because neither of the disputants can perceive that his
+opponent must be possessed of some truths, in spite of his trying to
+defend other positions which are indefensible.  Strange! that a thing
+which it seems so easy to avoid, should so seldom be avoided!  Homer
+said 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.  We
+agree to this readily in the abstract, but we seldom do so when any
+given concession is in question.  We are all for concession in the
+general, but for none in the particular, as people who say that they
+will retrench when they are living beyond their income, but will not
+consent to any proposed retrenchment.  Thus many shake their heads
+and say that it is impossible to live in the present age and not be
+aware of many difficulties in connection with the Christian religion;
+they have studied the question more deeply than perhaps the
+unbeliever imagines; and having said this much they give themselves
+credit for being wide-minded, liberal and above vulgar prejudices:
+but when pressed as to this or that particular difficulty, and asked
+to own that such and such an objection of the infidel's needs
+explanation, they will have none of it, and will in nine cases out of
+ten betray by their answers that they neither know nor want to know
+what the infidel means, but on the contrary that they are resolute to
+remain in ignorance.  I know this kind of liberality exceedingly
+well, and have ever found it to harbour more selfishness, idleness,
+cowardice and stupidity than does open bigotry.  The bigot is
+generally better than his expressed opinions, these people are
+invariably worse than theirs.
+
+The above principle has been largely applied in the writings of so-
+called orthodox commentators, not unfrequently even by men who might
+have been assumed to be above condescending to such trickery.  A
+great preface concerning candour, with a flourish of trumpets in the
+praise of truth, seems to have exhausted every atom of truth and
+candour from the work that follows it.
+
+It will be said that I ought not to make use of language such as this
+without bringing forward examples.  I shall therefore adduce them.
+
+One of the most serious difficulties to the unbeliever is the
+inextricable confusion in which the accounts of the Resurrection have
+reached us:  no one can reconcile these accounts with one another,
+not only in minute particulars, but in matters on which it is of the
+highest importance to come to a clear understanding.  Thus, to omit
+all notice of many other discrepancies, the accounts of Mark, Luke,
+and John concur in stating that when the women came to the tomb of
+Jesus 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.  There
+is nothing in any of these three accounts to preclude the possibility
+of the stone's having been removed within an hour or two of the
+body's having been laid in the tomb.
+
+But when we turn to Matthew we find all changed:  we are told that
+the stone was gone NOT when the women came, but that on their arrival
+there was a great earthquake, and that an angel came down from
+Heaven, and rolled away the stone, AND SAT UPON IT, and that the
+guard who had been set over the tomb (of whom we hear nothing from
+any of the other evangelists) became as dead men while the angel
+addressed the women.
+
+Now this is not one of those cases in which the supposition can be
+tolerated that all would be clear if the whole facts of the case were
+known to us.  No additional facts can make it come about that the
+tomb should have been sealed and guarded, and yet NOT sealed and
+guarded; that the same women, at the same time and place, should have
+witnessed an earthquake, and yet NOT witnessed one; have found a
+stone already gone from a tomb, and yet NOT found it gone; have seen
+it rolled away, and NOT seen it, and so on; those who say that we
+should find no difficulty if we knew ALL the facts are still careful
+to abstain from any example (so far as I know) of the sort of
+additional facts which would serve their purpose.  They cannot give
+one; any mind which is truly candid--white--not scrawled and
+scribbled over till no character is decipherable--will feel at once
+that the only question to be raised is, which is the more correct
+account of the Resurrection--Matthew's or those given by the other
+three Evangelists?  How far is Matthew's account true, and how far is
+it exaggerated?  For there must be either exaggeration or invention
+somewhere.  It is inconceivable that the other writers should have
+known the story told by Matthew, and yet not only made no allusion to
+it, but introduced matter which flatly contradicts it, and it is also
+inconceivable that the story should be true, and yet that the other
+writers should not have known it.
+
+This is how the difficulty stands--a difficulty which vanishes in a
+moment if it be rightly dealt with, but which, when treated after our
+unskilful English method, becomes capable of doing inconceivable
+mischief to the Christian religion.  Let us see then what Dean
+Alford--a writer whose professions of candour and talk about the duty
+of unflinching examination leave nothing to be desired--has to say
+upon this point.  I will first quote the passage in full from
+Matthew, and then give the Dean's note.  I have drawn the greater
+part of the comments that will follow it from an anonymous pamphlet
+{2} upon the Resurrection, dated 1865, but without a publisher's
+name, so that I presume it must have been printed for private
+circulation only.
+
+St. Matthew's account runs:-
+
+"Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation, the
+chief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate, saying, 'Sir,
+we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, "After
+three days I will rise again."  Command therefore that the sepulchre
+be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night
+and steal him away and say unto the people, "He is risen from the
+dead:" so the last error shall be worse than the first.'  Pilate said
+unto them, 'Ye have 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.  In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn
+towards the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other
+Mary to see the sepulchre.  And, behold, there was a great
+earthquake:  for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and
+came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.  His
+countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow:  And
+for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men.  And
+the angel answered and said unto the women, 'Fear not ye:  for I know
+that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.  He is not here:  for he is
+risen, as he said.  Come, see the place where the Lord lay.  And go
+quickly, 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 sepulchre
+with fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples word.
+And as they went to tell his disciples, Jesus met them, saying, 'All
+hail.'  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 they
+see me.'  Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came
+into the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that
+were done.  And when they were assembled with the elders, and had
+taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, 'Say
+ye, 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 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."
+
+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, he
+tells us that the narrative following (i.e., the account of the guard
+and the earthquake) "has been much impugned and its historical
+accuracy very generally given up even by the best of the German
+commentators (Olshausen, Meyer; also De Wette, Hase, and others).
+The chief difficulties found in it seem to be:  (1) How should the
+chief priests, &c., KNOW OF HIS HAVING SAID 'in three days I will
+rise 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 SAID
+could be no secret.  Not to lay any stress on John ii., 19 (Jesus
+answered and said unto them, 'Destroy this temple and in three days I
+will 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 heart
+of the earth):  besides this there would be a rumour current, through
+the intercourse of the Apostles with others, that He had been in the
+habit of so saying.  (From what source can Dean Alford know that our
+Lord WAS in the habit of so saying?  What particle of authority is
+there for this alleged habit of our Lord?)  As to the UNDERSTANDING
+of the words we must remember that HATRED IS KEENER SIGHTED THAN
+LOVE:  that the RAISING OF LAZARUS would shew WHAT SORT OF A THING
+RISING FROM THE DEAD WAS TO BE; and the fulfilment of the Lord's
+announcement of his CRUCIFIXION would naturally lead them to look
+further to WHAT MORE he had announced. (2) How should the women who
+were solicitous about the REMOVAL of the stone not have been still
+more so about its being sealed and a guard set?  The answer to this
+last has been given above--THEY WERE NOT AWARE OF THE CIRCUMSTANCE
+BECAUSE THE GUARD WAS NOT SET TILL THE EVENING BEFORE.  There would
+be 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 not
+probable that the circumstance would transpire that night--certainly
+it 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) had
+really happened, he need not have expressed himself doubtfully (Acts
+v., 39), but would have been certain that this was from God.  But,
+first, it does not necessarily follow that EVERY MEMBER of the
+Sanhedrim was present, and applied to Pilate, or even had they done
+so, that all bore a part in the act of xxviii., 12" (the bribing of
+the guard to silence).  "One who like Joseph had not consented to the
+deed before--and we may safely say that there were others such--would
+naturally withdraw himself from further proceedings against the
+person of Jesus. (4) Had this been so the three other Evangelists
+would not have passed over so important a testimony to the
+Resurrection.  But surely we cannot argue in this way--for thus every
+important fact narrated by ONE EVANGELIST ALONE must be rejected,
+e.g. (which stands in much the same relation), THE SATISFACTION OF
+THOMAS--ANOTHER SUCH NARRATIONS.  TILL WE KNOW MORE ABOUT THE
+CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH, AND THE SCOPE WITH WHICH, EACH GOSPEL WAS
+COMPILED, ALL A PRIORI ARGUMENTS OF THIS KIND ARE GOOD FOR NOTHING."
+
+(The italics in the above, and throughout the notes quoted, are the
+Dean's, unless it is expressly stated otherwise.)
+
+I will now proceed to consider this defence of Matthew's accuracy
+against the objections of the German commentators.
+
+I.  The German commentators maintain that the chief priests are not
+likely to have known of any prophecy of Christ's Resurrection when
+His 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 not
+reveal to the understanding of the Apostles.  True, according to
+Matthew, Christ had said that as Jonah was three days and three
+nights in the whale's belly, so the Son of Man should be three days
+and three nights in the heart of the earth; but it would be only
+hatred which would suggest the interpretation of so obscure a
+prophecy:  love would not be sufficiently keen-sighted to understand
+it.
+
+But in the first place I would urge that if the Apostles had ever
+heard any words capable of suggesting the idea that Christ should
+rise, after they had already seen the raising of Lazarus, on whom
+corruption had begun its work, they MUST have expected the
+Resurrection.  After having seen so stupendous a miracle, any one
+would expect anything which was even suggested by the One who had
+performed it.  And, secondly, hatred is not keener sighted than love.
+
+2.  Dean Alford says that the raising of Lazarus would shew the chief
+priests what sort of a thing the Resurrection from the dead was to
+be, and that the fulfilment of Christ's prophecy concerning his
+Crucifixion would naturally lead them to look further to what else he
+had announced.
+
+But, if the raising of Lazarus would shew the chief priests what sort
+of thing the Resurrection was to be, it would shew the Apostles also;
+and again if the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Crucifixion would
+lead the chief priests to look further to the fulfilment of the
+prophecy of the Resurrection, so would it lead the Apostles; this
+supposition of one set of men who can see everything, and of another
+with precisely the same opportunities and no less interest, who can
+see nothing, is vastly convenient upon the stage, but it is not
+supported by a reference to Nature; self-interest would have opened
+the eyes of the Apostles.
+
+II.  The German commentators ask how was it possible that the women
+who were solicitous about the removal of the stone, should not be
+still more so about "its being sealed and a guard set?"  If the
+German commentators have asked their question in this shape, they
+have asked it badly, and Dean Alford's answer is sufficient:  they
+might have asked, how the other three writers could all tell us that
+the stone was already gone when the women got there, and yet
+Matthew's story be true? and how Matthew's story could be true
+without the other writers having known it? and how the other writers
+could have introduced matter contradictory to it, if they had known
+it to be true?
+
+III.  The German commentators say that in the Acts of the Apostles we
+find Gamaliel expressing himself as doubtful whether or no
+Christianity was of God, whereas had he known the facts related by
+Matthew he could have had no doubt at all.  He must have KNOWN that
+Christianity was of God.
+
+Dean Alford answers that perhaps Gamaliel was not there.  To which I
+would rejoin that though Gamaliel might have had no hand in the
+bribery, supposing it to have taken place, it is inconceivable that
+such a story should have not reached him; the matter could never have
+been kept so quiet but that it must have leaked out.  Men are not so
+utterly bad or so utterly foolish as Dean Alford seems to imply; and
+whether Gamaliel was or was not present when the guard were bribed,
+he must have been equally aware of the fact before making the speech
+which is assigned to him in the Acts.
+
+IV.  The German commentators argue from the silence of the other
+Evangelists:  Dean Alford replies by denying that this silence is any
+argument:  but I would answer, that on a matter which the other three
+writers must have known to have been of such intense interest, their
+silence is a conclusive proof either of their ignorance or their
+indolence as historians.  Dean Alford has well substantiated the
+independence of the four narratives, he has well proved that the
+writer of the fourth Gospel could never have seen the other Gospels,
+and yet he supposes that that writer either did not know the facts
+related by Matthew, or thought it unnecessary to allude to them.
+Neither of these suppositions is tenable:  but there would
+nevertheless be a shadow of ground for Dean Alford to stand upon if
+the other Evangelists were simply silent:  but why does he omit all
+notice of their introducing matter which is absolutely incompatible
+with Matthew's accuracy?
+
+There is one other consideration which must suggest itself to the
+reader in connection with this story of the guard.  It refers to the
+conduct of the chief priests and the soldiers themselves.  The
+conduct assigned to the chief priests in bribing the guard to lie
+against one whom they must by this time have known to be under
+supernatural protection, is contrary to human nature.  The chief
+priests (according to Matthew) knew that Christ had said he should
+rise:  in spite of their being well aware that Christ had raised
+Lazarus from the dead but very recently they did not believe that he
+WOULD rise, but feared (so Matthew says) that the Apostles would
+steal the body and pretend a resurrection:  up to this point we admit
+that the story, though very improbable, is still possible:  but when
+we read of their bribing the guards to tell a lie under such
+circumstances as those which we are told had just occurred, we say
+that such conduct is impossible:  men are too great cowards to be
+capable of it.  The same applies to the soldiers:  they would never
+dare to run counter to an agency which had nearly killed them with
+fright on that very selfsame morning.  Let any man put himself in
+their position:  let him remember that these soldiers were previously
+no enemies to Christ, nor, as far as we can judge, is it likely that
+they 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 on
+Matt. xxviii., 1-10) and referring to their "minor discrepancies,"
+the Dean says SUPPOSING US TO BE ACQUAINTED WITH EVERY THING SAID AND
+DONE IN ITS ORDER AND EXACTNESS, WE SHOULD DOUBTLESS BE ABLE TO
+RECONCILE, OR ACCOUNT FOR, THE PRESENT FORMS OF THE NARRATIVES; but
+not having this key to the harmonising of them, all attempts to do so
+in minute particulars must be full of arbitrary assumptions, and
+carry no certainty with them:  and I may remark that OF ALL HARMONIES
+those of the INCIDENTS OF THESE CHAPTERS are to me the MOST
+UNSATISFACTORY.  Giving their compilers all credit for the best
+intentions, I confess they seem to me to WEAKEN instead of
+strengthening the evidence, which now rests (speaking merely
+OBJECTIVELY) on the unexceptionable testimony of three independent
+narrators, and one who besides was an eye witness of much that
+happened.  If we are to compare the four and ask which is to be taken
+as most nearly reporting the EXACT words and incidents, on this there
+can, I think, be no doubt.  On internal as well as external ground
+THAT OF JOHN takes the HIGHEST PLACE, but not of course to the
+exclusion of those parts of the narrative which he DOES NOT TOUCH."
+
+Surely the above is a very extraordinary note.  The difficulty of the
+irreconcilable differences between the four narratives is not met nor
+attempted to be met:  the Dean seems to consider the attempt as
+hopeless:  no one, according to him, has been as yet successful,
+neither can he see any prospect of succeeding better himself:  the
+expedient therefore which he proposes is that the whole should be
+taken on trust; that it should be assumed that no discrepancy which
+could not be accounted for would be found, if the facts were known in
+the exact order in which they occurred.  In other words, he leaves
+the difficulty where it was.  Yet surely it is a very grave one.  The
+same events are recorded by three writers (one being professedly an
+eye-witness, and the others independent writers), in a way which is
+virtually the same, in spite of some unimportant variations in the
+manner of telling it, while a fourth gives a totally different and
+irreconcilable account; the matter stands in such confusion at
+present that even Dean Alford admits that any attempt to reconcile
+the differences leaves them in worse confusion than ever; the ablest
+and most spiritually minded of the German commentators suggest a way
+of escape; nevertheless, according to the Dean we are not to profit
+by 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 a
+subject treated thus.  What is trifling if this is not trifling?
+What is disingenuousness if not this?  It involves some trouble and
+apparent danger to admit that the same thing has happened to the
+Christian records which has happened to all others--i.e., that they
+have suffered--miraculously little, but still something--at the hands
+of 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 by
+all means and at all risks to be avoided.  Who can doubt that some
+such feeling as this was in Dean Alford's mind when the notes above
+criticised were written?  Yet what are the means taken to avoid the
+recognition of obvious truth?  They are disingenuous in the very
+highest degree.  Can this prosper?  Not if Christ is true.
+
+What is the practical result?  The loss of many souls who would
+gladly come to the Saviour, but who are frightened off by seeing the
+manner in which his case is defended.  And what after all is the
+danger 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 risk
+to this or that fundamental principle of our belief, nor yet with the
+possibility of lurid lights being thrown here or there.  What are
+these things to us?  They are not our business or concern, but rest
+with the Being who has required of US that we should reverently,
+patiently, unostentatiously, yet resolutely, strive to find out what
+things 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 we
+proceed to set aside the account of the Resurrection given in St.
+Matthew's Gospel.  That account must be looked upon as the invention
+of 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 of
+the Resurrection were becoming scarce, and when it was felt that some
+more unmistakably miraculous account than that given in the other
+three Gospels would be a comfort and encouragement to succeeding
+generations.  We, however, must now follow the example of "even the
+best" of the German commentators, and discard it as soon as possible.
+On having done this the whole difficulty of the confusion of the four
+accounts of the Resurrection vanishes like smoke, and we find
+ourselves with three independent writers whose differences are
+exactly those which we might expect, considering the time and
+circumstances in which they wrote, but which are still so trifling as
+to disturb no man's faith.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--MORE DISINGENUOUSNESS
+
+
+
+[Here, perhaps, will be the fittest place for introducing a letter to
+my brother from a gentleman who is well known to the public, but who
+does not authorise me to give his name.  I found this letter among my
+brother's papers, endorsed with the words "this must be attended to,"
+but with nothing more.  I imagine that my brother would have
+incorporated the substance of his correspondent's letter into this or
+the preceding chapter, but not venturing to do so myself, I have
+thought it best to give the letter and extract in full, and thus to
+let 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 of
+your argument.  I am sorry that you should be doing it, for I need
+not tell you that I do not and cannot sympathise with the great and
+unexpected change in your opinions.  You are the last man in the
+world from whom I should have expected such a change:  but, as you
+well know, you are also the last man in the world whose sincerity in
+making it I should be inclined to question.  May you find peace and
+happiness in whatever opinions you adopt, and let me trust also that
+you will never forget the lessons of toleration which you learnt as
+the disciple of what you will perhaps hardly pardon me for calling a
+freer and happier school of thought than the one to which you now
+believe yourself to belong.
+
+Your brother tells me that you are ill; I need not say that I am
+sorry, and that I should not trouble you with any personal matter--I
+write solely in reference to the work which I hear that you have
+undertaken, and which I am given to understand consists mainly in the
+endeavour to conquer unbelief, by really entering into the
+difficulties felt by unbelievers.  The scheme is a good one IF
+THOROUGHLY CARRIED OUT.  We imagine that we stand in no danger from
+any such course as this, and should heartily welcome any book which
+tried to grapple with us, even though it were to compel us to admit a
+great deal more than I at present think it likely that even you can
+extort from us.  Much more should we welcome a work which made people
+understand us better than they do; this would indeed confer a lasting
+benefit 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 pro
+tanto:  it is this:-Paley, in his third book, professes to give "a
+brief 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, and
+that people who are ill like being saved from small exertions.  I
+have, therefore, bought a second-hand Paley for a shilling, and have
+cut out the chapter to which I especially want to call your
+attention.  Will you kindly read it through from beginning to end?
+
+Is it fair?  Is the statement of our objections anything like what we
+should put forward ourselves?  And can you believe that Paley with
+his profoundly critical instinct, and really great knowledge of the
+New Testament, should not have been perfectly well aware that he was
+misrepresenting and ignoring the objections which he professed to be
+removing?
+
+He must have known very well that the principle of confirmation by
+discrepancy is one of very limited application, and that it will not
+cover anything approaching to such wide divergencies as those which
+are presented to us in the Gospels.  Besides, how CAN he talk about
+Matthew's object as he does, and yet omit all allusion to the wide
+and important differences between his account of the Resurrection,
+and those of Mark, Luke, and John?  Very few know what those
+differences really are, in spite of their having the Bible always
+open to them.  I suppose that Paley felt pretty sure that his readers
+would 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 to
+me) wicked.  Now don't do this yourself.  If you are going to meet
+us, meet us fairly, and let us have our say.  Don't pretend to let us
+have our say while taking good care that we get no chance of saying
+it.  I know you won't.
+
+However, will you point out Paley's unfairness in heading this part
+of his work "A brief consideration of some popular objections," and
+then proceeding to give a chapter on "the discrepancies between the
+several Gospels," without going into the details of any of those
+important discrepancies which can have been known to none better than
+himself?  This is the only place, so far as I remember, in his whole
+book, where he even touches upon the discrepancies in the Gospels.
+Does he do so as a man who felt that they were unimportant and could
+be approached with safety, or as one who is determined to carry the
+reader's attention away from them, and fix it upon something else by
+a coup de main?
+
+This chapter alone has always convinced me that Paley did not believe
+in his own book.  No one could have rested satisfied with it for
+moment, if he felt that he was on really strong ground.  Besides, how
+insufficient for their purpose are his examples of discrepancies
+which do not impair the credibility of the main fact recorded!
+
+How would it have been if Lord Clarendon and three other historians
+had each told us that the Marquis of Argyll CAME TO LIFE AGAIN AFTER
+BEING BEHEADED, and then set to work to contradict each other
+hopelessly as to the manner of his reappearance?  How if Burnet,
+Woodrow, and Heath had given an account which was not at all
+incompatible with a natural explanation of the whole matter, while
+Clarendon gave a circumstantial story in flat contradiction to all
+the others, and carefully excluded any but a supernatural
+explanation?  Ought we to, or should we, allow the discrepancies to
+pass unchallenged?  Not for an hour--if indeed we did not rather
+order the whole story out of court at once, as too wildly improbable
+to deserve a hearing.
+
+You will, I know, see all this, and a great deal more, and will point
+it better than I can.  Let me as an old friend entreat you not to
+pass this over, but to allow me to continue to think of you as I
+always have thought of you hitherto, namely, as the most impartial
+disputant in the world.--Yours, &c.
+
+
+(Extract from Paley's "Evidences."--Part III., Chapter 1.  "The
+Discrepancies between the Gospels.")
+
+
+"I know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of the
+understanding, than to reject the substance of a story, by reason of
+some diversity in the circumstances with which it is related.  The
+usual character of human testimony is substantial truth under
+circumstantial variety.  This is what the daily experience of courts
+of justice teaches.  When accounts of a transaction come from the
+mouths of different witnesses, it is seldom that it is not possible
+to pick out apparent or real inconsistencies between them.  These
+inconsistencies are studiously displayed by an adverse pleader, but
+oftentimes with little impression upon the minds of the judges.  On
+the contrary, close and minute agreement induces the suspicion of
+confederacy and fraud.  When written histories touch upon the same
+scenes of action, the comparison almost always affords ground for a
+like reflection.  Numerous and sometimes important variations present
+themselves; not seldom, also, absolute and final contradictions; yet
+neither one nor the other are deemed sufficient to shake the
+credibility of the main fact.  The embassy of the Jews to deprecate
+the execution of Claudian's order to place his statue in their temple
+Philo places in harvest, Josephus in seed-time, both contemporary
+writers.  No reader is led by this inconsistency to doubt whether
+such an embassy was sent, or whether such an order was given.  Our
+own history supplies examples of the same kind.  In the account of
+the Marquis of Argyll's death in the reign of Charles II., we have a
+very remarkable contradiction.  Lord Clarendon relates that he was
+condemned to be hanged, which was performed the same day; on the
+contrary, Burnet, Woodrow, Heath, Echard, concur in stating that he
+was condemned upon the Saturday, and executed upon a Monday. {3}  Was
+any reader of English history ever sceptic enough to raise from hence
+a question, whether the Marquis of Argyll was executed or not?  Yet
+this ought to be left in uncertainty, according to the principles
+upon which the Christian religion has sometimes been attacked.  Dr.
+Middleton contended that the different hours of the day assigned to
+the Crucifixion of Christ by John and the other Evangelists, did not
+admit of the reconcilement which learned men had proposed; and then
+concludes the discussion with this hard remark:  'We must be forced,
+with several of the critics, to leave the difficulty just as we found
+it, chargeable with all the consequences of manifest inconsistency.'
+{4}  But what are these consequences?  By no means the discrediting
+of the history as to the principal fact, by a repugnancy (even
+supposing that repugnancy not to be resolvable into different modes
+of computation) in the time of the day in which it is said to have
+taken place.
+
+A great deal of the discrepancy observable in the Gospels arises from
+OMISSION; from a fact or a passage of Christ's life being noticed by
+one writer, which is unnoticed by another.  Now, omission is at all
+times a very uncertain ground of objection.  We perceive it not only
+in the comparison of different writers, but even in the same writer,
+when compared with himself.  There are a great many particulars, and
+some of them of importance, mentioned by Josephus in his Antiquities,
+which as we should have supposed, ought to have been put down by him
+in their place in the Jewish Wars. {5}  Suetonius, Tacitus, Dion
+Cassius have all three written of the reign of Tiberius.  Each has
+mentioned many things omitted by the rest, {6} yet no objection is
+from thence taken to the respective credit of their histories.  We
+have in our own times, if there were not something indecorous in the
+comparison, the life of an eminent person, written by three of his
+friends, in which there is very great variety in the incidents
+selected by them, some apparent, and perhaps some real,
+contradictions:  yet without any impeachment of the substantial truth
+of their accounts, of the authenticity of the books, of the competent
+information or general fidelity of the writers.
+
+But these discrepancies will be still more numerous, when men do not
+write histories, but MEMOIRS; which is perhaps the true name and
+proper description of our Gospels; that is, when they do not
+undertake, or ever meant to deliver, in order of time, a regular and
+complete account of ALL the things of importance which the person who
+is the subject of their history did or said; but only, out of many
+similar ones, to give such passages, or such actions and discourses,
+as offered themselves more immediately to their attention, came in
+the way of their enquiries, occurred to their recollection, or were
+suggested by their PARTICULAR DESIGN at the time of writing.
+
+This particular design may appear sometimes, but not always, nor
+often.  Thus I think that the particular design which St. Matthew had
+in view whilst he was writing the history of the Resurrection, was to
+attest the faithful performance of Christ's promise to his disciples
+to go before them into Galilee; because he alone, except Mark, who
+seems to have taken it from him, has recorded this promise, and he
+alone has confined his narrative to that single appearance to the
+disciples which fulfilled it.  It was the preconcerted, the great and
+most public manifestation of our Lord's person.  It was the thing
+which dwelt upon St. Matthew's mind, and he adapted his narrative to
+it.  But, that there is nothing in St. Matthew's language which
+negatives other appearances, or which imports that this his
+appearance 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 in
+Galilee as St. Matthew uses, yet itself records two other appearances
+prior to this:  'Go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he
+goeth before you into Galilee:  there shall ye see him, as he said
+unto you' (xvi., 7).  We might be apt to infer from these words, that
+this was the FIRST time they were to see him:  at least, we might
+infer it with as much reason as we draw the inference from the same
+words in Matthew; yet the historian himself did not perceive that he
+was leading his readers to any such conclusion, for in the twelfth
+and two following verses of this chapter, he informs us of two
+appearances, which, by comparing the order of events, are shown to
+have been prior to the appearance in Galilee.  'He appeared in
+another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the
+country:  and they went and told it unto the residue:  neither
+believed they them.  Afterward He appeared unto the eleven as they
+sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief, because they
+believed not them which had seen Him after He was risen.'  Probably
+the same observation, concerning the PARTICULAR DESIGN which guided
+the historian, may be of use in comparing many other passages of the
+Gospels."
+
+
+[My brother's work, which has been interrupted by the letter and
+extract just given, will now be continued.  What follows should be
+considered 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 should
+put an end to such a style of argument, and get into a manner which
+shall commend itself to sincere and able adversaries, that I shall
+not apologise for giving them in full here.  They refer to the spear
+wound recorded in St. John's Gospel as having been inflicted upon the
+body 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 the
+other which was crucified with Him.  But when they came to Jesus and
+saw that He was dead already they brake not His legs:  but one of the
+soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and forthwith came there out
+blood and water.  And he that saw it bare record, and we know that
+his record is true, and he knoweth that he saith true that ye might
+believe.  For these things were done that the Scripture should be
+fulfilled, 'A bone of Him shall not be broken' and again another
+Scripture saith, 'They shall look on Him whom they pierced.'
+
+In his note upon the thirty-fourth verse Dean Alford writes--"The
+lance must have penetrated deep, for the object was to ENSURE death."
+Now what warrant is there for either of these assertions?  We are
+told that the soldiers saw that our Lord was dead already, and that
+for this reason they did not break his legs:  if there had been any
+doubt about His being dead can we believe that they would have
+hesitated?  There is ample proof of the completeness of the death in
+the fact that those whose business it was to assure themselves of its
+having taken place were so satisfied that they would be at no further
+trouble; what need to kill a dead man?  If there had been any
+question as to the possibility of life remaining, it would not have
+been resolved by the thrust of the spear, but in a way which we must
+shudder to think of.  It is most painful to have had to write the
+foregoing lines, but are they not called for when we see a man so
+well intentioned and so widely read as the late Dean Alford
+condescending to argument which must only weaken the strength of his
+cause in the eyes of those who have not yet been brought to know the
+blessings and comfort of Christianity?  From the words of St. John no
+one 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 that
+the wound must have been large enough for Thomas to get his hand into
+it, because our Lord says, "reach hither thine hand and thrust it
+into my side."  This is simply shocking.  Words cannot be pressed in
+this way.  Dean Alford then says that the spear was thrust "probably
+into the LEFT side on account of the position of the soldier" (no one
+can arrive at the position of the soldier, and no one would attempt
+to do so, unless actuated by a nervous anxiety to direct the spear
+into the heart of the Redeemer), "and of what followed" (the Dean
+here implies that the water must have come from the pericardium; yet
+in his next note we are led to infer that he rejects this
+supposition, inasmuch as the quantity of water would have been "so
+small as to have scarcely been observed").  Is this fair and manly
+argument, and can it have any other effect than to increase the
+scepticism of those who doubt?
+
+Here this note ends.  The next begins upon the words "blood and
+water."
+
+"The spear," says the Dean, "perhaps pierced the pericardium or
+envelope of the heart" (but why introduce a "perhaps" when there is
+ample proof of the death without it?), "in which case a liquid
+answering to the description of water may have" (MAY have) "flowed
+with the blood, but the quantity would have been so small as scarcely
+to have been observed" (yet in the preceding note he has led us to
+suppose that he thinks the water "probably came from near the heart).
+"It is scarcely possible that the separation of the blood into
+placenta and serum should have taken place so soon, or that if it
+had, it should have been described by an observe as blood and water.
+It is more probable that the fact here so strongly testified was a
+consequence of the extreme exhaustion of the body of the Redeemer."
+(Now if this is the case, the spear-wound does not prove the death of
+Him on whom it was inflicted, and Dean Alford has weakened a strong
+case for nothing.)  "The medical opinions on the subject are very
+various and by no means satisfactory."  Satisfactory!  What does Dean
+Alford mean by satisfactory?  If the evidence does not go to prove
+that the spear-wound must have been necessarily fatal why not have
+said so at once, and have let the whole matter rest in the obscurity
+from which no human being can remove it.  The wound may have been
+severe or may not have been severe, it may have been given in mere
+wanton mockery of the dead King of the Jews, for the indignity's
+sake:  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 the
+object of its having been recorded is no mystery, for we are
+expressly told that it was in order to shew THAT PROPHECY WAS THUS
+FULFILLED:  the Evangelist tells us so in the plainest language:  he
+even goes farther, for he says that these things were DONE for this
+end (not only that they were RECORDED)--so that the primary motive of
+the Almighty in causing the soldier to be inspired with a desire to
+inflict the wound is thus graciously vouchsafed to us, and we have no
+reason to harrow our feelings by supposing that a deeper thrust was
+given than would suffice for the fulfilment of the prophecy.  May we
+not then well rest thankful with the knowledge which the Holy Spirit
+has seen fit to impart to us, without causing the weak brother to
+offend by our special pleading?
+
+The reader has now seen the two first of Dean Alford's notes upon
+this subject, and I trust he will feel that I have used no greater
+plainness, and spoken with no greater severity than the case not only
+justifies but demands.  We can hardly suppose that the Dean himself
+is not firmly convinced that our Lord died upon the Cross, but there
+are millions who are not convinced, and whose conviction should be
+the nearest wish of every Christian heart.  How deeply, therefore,
+should we not grieve at meeting with a style of argument from the pen
+of one of our foremost champions, which can have no effect but that
+of making the sceptic suspect that the evidences for the death of our
+Lord are felt, even by Christians, to be insufficient.  For this is
+what it comes to.
+
+Let us, however, go on to the note on John xix., 35, that is to say
+on St. John's emphatic assertion of the truth of what he is
+recording.  The note stands thus, "This emphatic assertion of the
+fact seems rather to regard the whole incident than the mere
+outflowing of the blood and water.  It was the object of John to shew
+that the Lord's body was a REAL BODY and UNDERWENT REAL DEATH.  (This
+is not John's own account--supposing that John is the writer of the
+fourth Gospel--either of his own object in recording, or yet of the
+object of the wound's having been inflicted; his words, as we have
+seen above, run thus:- "and he that saw it bare record, and we know
+that his record is true; and he knoweth that he saith true that ye
+might believe.  FOR THESE THINGS WERE DONE THAT THE SCRIPTURE SHOULD
+BE FULFILLED which saith 'a bone of him shall not be broken,' and,
+again, another Scripture saith, 'they shall look upon' him whom they
+pierced.'"  Who shall dare to say that St. John had any other object
+than to show that the event which he relates had been long foreseen,
+and foretold by the words of the Almighty?)  And both these were
+shewn by what took place, NOT SO MUCH BY THE PHENOMENON OF THE WATER
+AND BLOOD" (then here we have it admitted that so much
+disingenuousness has been resorted to for no advantage, inasmuch as
+the fact of the water and blood having flowed is not per se proof of
+a necessarily fatal wound) "as by the infliction of such a wound"
+(Such a wound!  What can be the meaning of this?  What has Dean
+Alford made clear about the wound?  We know absolutely nothing about
+the severity or intention of the wound, and it is mere baseless
+conjecture and assumption to say that we do; neither do we know
+anything concerning its effect unless it be shewn that the issuing of
+the blood and water PROVE that death must have ensued, and this Dean
+Alford has just virtually admitted to be not shewn), after which,
+EVEN IF DEATH HAD NOT TAKEN PLACE BEFORE (this is intolerable), THERE
+COULD NOT BY ANY POSSIBILITY BE LIFE REMAINING."  (The italics on
+this page are mine.)
+
+With this climax of presumptuous assertion these disgraceful notes
+are ended.  They have shewn clearly that the wound does not in itself
+prove the death:  they shew no less clearly that the Dean does not
+consider that the death is proved beyond possibility of doubt WITHOUT
+the wound; what therefore should be the legitimate conclusion?
+Surely that we have no proof of the completeness of Christ's death
+upon 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 Jesuitical
+unbeliever, who was trying to undermine our faith in our most
+precious convictions under the guise of defending them, than in those
+of 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 any
+scientific cause which we found thus defended?  We should exceedingly
+well know that it was lost.  And yet our leading theologians are to
+be applauded and set in high places for condescending to such sharp
+practice as would be despised even by a disreputable attorney, as too
+transparently 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's
+body was wounded more severely, or less severely, as the case may be,
+with the point of a spear, that from this wound there flowed
+something which to the eyes of the writer resembled blood and water,
+and that the whole was done in order that a well-known prophecy might
+be fulfilled.  Yet his sentences in reference to this fact being
+ended, without his having added one iota to our knowledge upon the
+subject, the Dean gravely winds up by throwing a doubt upon the
+certainty of our Lord's death which was not felt by a single one of
+those upon the spot, and resting his clenching proof of its having
+taken place upon a wound, which he has just virtually admitted to
+have not been necessarily fatal.  Nothing can be more deplorable
+either as morality or policy.
+
+Yet the Dean is justified by the event.  One would have thought he
+could have been guilty of nothing short of infatuation in hoping that
+the above notes would pass muster with any ordinarily intelligent
+person, but he knew that he might safely trust to the force of habit
+and prejudice in the minds of his readers, and his confidence has not
+been misplaced.  Of all those engaged in the training of our young
+men for Holy Orders, of all our Bishops and clergy and tutors at
+colleges, whose very profession it is to be lovers of truth and
+candour, who are paid for being so, and who are mere shams and wolves
+in sheep's clothing if they are not ever on the look-out for
+falsehood, 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 in
+protest.  If a man has not lost his power of weeping let him weep for
+this; if there is any who realises the crime of self-deception, as
+perhaps the most subtle and hideous of all forms of sin, let him lift
+up his voice and proclaim it now; for the times are not of peace, but
+of a sowing of wind for the reaping of whirlwinds, and of the calm
+that is the centre of the hurricane.
+
+Either Christianity is the truth of truths--the one which should in
+this world overmaster all others in the thoughts of all men, and
+compared with which all other truths are insignificant except as
+grouping themselves around it--or it is at the best a mistake which
+should 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 Him
+so--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 admit
+that the death of Christ must be ever a matter of doubt, should so
+great a sacrifice be demanded of us, than go near to the handling of
+a lie in order to make assurance doubly sure.  No truthful mind can
+doubt that the cause of Christ is far better served by exposing an
+insufficient argument than by silently passing it over, or else that
+the 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 circumstances
+attendant upon the death of our Lord, using the plea that however
+excellent a quality intellect may be, and however desirable that the
+facts connected with the Crucifixion should be intelligently
+considered, yet that after all it is spiritual insight which is
+wanted for a just appreciation of spiritual truths, and that the way
+to be preserved from error is to cultivate holiness and purity of
+life.  This is well for those who are already satisfied with the
+evidences for their convictions.  We could hardly give them any
+better advice than simply to "depart from evil, do good, seek peace
+and ensue it" (Psalm xxxiv., 14), if we could only make sure that
+their duty would never lead them into contact with those who hold the
+external evidences of Christianity to be insufficient.  When,
+however, they meet with any of these unhappy persons they will find
+their influence for good paralysed; for unbelievers do not understand
+what is meant by appealing to their spiritual insight as a thing
+which can in any way affect the evidence for or against an alleged
+fact in history--or at any rate as forming evidence for a fact which
+they believe to be in itself improbable and unsupported by external
+proof.  They have not got any spiritual insight in matters of this
+sort; nor, indeed, do they recognise what is meant by the words at
+all, unless they be interpreted as self-respect and regard for the
+feelings and usages of other people.  What spiritual insight they
+have, they express by the very nearly synonymous terms, "current
+feeling," or "common sense," and however deep their reverence for
+these things may be, they will never admit that goodness or right
+feeling can guide them into intuitive accuracy upon a matter of
+history.  On the contrary, in any such case they believe that
+sentiment is likely to mislead, and that the well-disciplined
+intellect is alone trustworthy.  The question is, whether it is worth
+while to try and rescue those who are in this condition or not.  If
+it IS worth while, we must deal with them according to their sense of
+right and not ours:  in other words, if we meet with an unbeliever we
+must not expect him to accept our faith unless we take much pains
+with him, and are prepared to make great sacrifice of our own peace
+and patience.
+
+Yet how many shrink from this, and think that they are doing God
+service by shrinking; the only thing from which they should really
+shrink, is the falsehood which has overlaid the best established fact
+in all history with so much sophistry, that even our own side has
+come to fear that there must be something lurking behind which will
+not bear daylight; to such a pass have we been brought by the desire
+to 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 the
+Crucifixion might end in suggesting a natural instead of a miraculous
+explanation of the Resurrection, for the comfort of such--and they
+indeed stand in need of comfort--let me say at once that the ablest
+of our adversaries would tell them that they need be under no such
+fear.  Strauss himself admits that our Lord died upon the Cross; he
+does not even attempt to dispute it, but writes as though he were
+well aware that there was no room for any difference of opinion about
+the matter.  He has therefore been compelled to adopt the
+hallucination theory, with a result which we have already considered.
+Yet who can question that Strauss would have maintained the position
+that our Lord did not die upon the Cross, unless he had felt that it
+was one in which he would not be able to secure the support even of
+those who were inclined to disbelieve?  We cannot doubt that the
+conviction of the reality of our Lord's death has been forced upon
+him by a weight of testimony which, like St. Paul, he has found
+himself utterly unable to resist.
+
+Here then, we might almost pause.  Strauss admits that our Lord died
+upon the Cross.  Yet can the reader help feeling that the vindication
+of the reality of our Lord's reappearances, and the refutation of
+Strauss's theories with which this work opened, was triumphant and
+conclusive?  Then what follows?  That Christ died and rose again!
+The central fact of our faith is proved.  It is proved externally by
+the most solid and irrefragable proofs, such as should appeal even to
+minds which reject all spiritual evidence, and recognise no canons of
+investigation but those of the purest reason.
+
+But anything and everything is believable concerning one whose
+resurrection from death to life has been established.  What need,
+then, to enter upon any consideration of the other miracles?  Of the
+Ascension?  Of the descent of the Holy Spirit?  Who can feel
+difficulty about these things?  Would not the miracle rather be that
+they should NOT have happened!  May we not now let the wings of our
+soul expand, and soar into the heaven of heavens, to the footstool of
+the Throne of Grace, secure that we have earned the right to hope and
+to glory by having consented to the pain of understanding?
+
+We may:  and I have given the reader this foretaste of the prize
+which he may justly claim, lest he should be swallowed up in overmuch
+grief at the journey which is yet before him ere he shall have done
+all which may justly be required of him.  For it is not enough that
+his own sense of security should be perfected.  This is well; but let
+him also think of others.
+
+What then is their main difficulty, now that it has been shewn that
+the reappearances of our Lord were not due to hallucination?
+
+I propose to shew this by collecting from all the sources with which
+I was familiar in former years, and throwing the whole together as if
+it were my own.  I shall spare no pains to make the argument tell
+with as much force as fairness will allow.  I shall be compelled to
+be very brief, but the unbeliever will not, I hope, feel that
+anything of importance to his side has been passed over.  The
+believer, on the other hand, will be thankful both to know the worst
+and to see how shallow and impotent it will appear when it comes to
+be tested.  Oh! that this had been done at the beginning of the
+controversy, instead of (as I heartily trust) at the end of it.
+
+Our opponents, therefore, may be supposed to speak somewhat after the
+following manner:- "Granted," they will say, "for the sake of
+argument, that Jesus Christ did reappear alive after his Crucifixion;
+it does not follow that we should at once necessarily admit that his
+reappearance was due to miracle.  What was enough, and reasonably
+enough, to make the first Christians accept the Resurrection, and
+hence the other miracles of Christ, is not enough and ought not to be
+enough to make men do so now.  If we were to hear now of the
+reappearance of a man who had been believed to be dead, our first
+impulse would be to learn the when and where of the death, and the
+when and where of the first reappearance.  What had been the nature
+of the death?  What conclusive proof was there that the death had
+been actual and complete?  What examination had been made of the
+body?  And to whom had it been delivered on the completeness of the
+death having been established?  How long had the body been in the
+grave--if buried?  What was the condition of the grave on its being
+first revisited?  It is plain to any one that at the present day we
+should ask the above questions with the most jealous scrutiny and
+that our opinion of the character of the reappearance would depend
+upon the answers which could be given to them.
+
+"But it is no less plain that the distance of the supposed event from
+our own time and country is no bar to the necessity for the same
+questions being as jealously asked concerning it, as would be asked
+if it were alleged to have happened recently and nearer home.  On the
+contrary, distance of time and space introduces an additional
+necessity for caution.  It is one thing to know that the first
+Christians unanimously believed that their master had miraculously
+risen from death to life; it is another to know their reasons for so
+thinking.  Times have changed, and tests of truth are infinitely
+better understood, so that the reasonable of those days is reasonable
+to us no longer.  Nor would it be enough that the answers given could
+be just strained into so much agreement with one another as to allow
+of a modus vivendi between them, AND NOT TO EXCLUDE THE POSSIBILITY
+OF DEATH, THEY MUST EXCLUDE ALL POSSIBILITY OF LIFE HAVING REMAINED,
+or we should not hesitate for a moment about refusing to believe that
+the reappearance had been miraculous:  indeed, so long as any chink
+or cranny or loophole for escape from the miraculous was afforded to
+us, we should unhesitatingly escape by it; this, at least, is the
+course which would be adopted by any judge and jury of sensible men
+if such a case were to come before their unprejudiced minds in the
+common course of affairs.
+
+"We should not refuse to believe in a miracle even now, if it were
+supported by such evidence as was considered to be conclusive by the
+bench of judges and by the leading scientific men of the day:  in
+such a case as this we should feel bound to accept it; but we cannot
+believe in a miracle, no matter how deeply it has been engrained into
+the creeds of the civilised world, merely because it was believed by
+'unlettered fishermen' two thousand years ago.  This is not a source
+from which such an event as a miracle should be received without the
+closest investigation.  We know, indeed, that the Apostles were
+sincere men, and that they firmly believed that Jesus Christ had
+risen from the dead; their lives prove their faith; but we cannot
+forget that the fact itself of Christ's having been crucified and
+afterwards seen alive, would be enough, under the circumstances, to
+incline the men of that day to believe that he had died and had been
+miraculously restored to life, although we should ourselves be bound
+to make a far more searching inquiry before we could arrive at any
+such conclusion.  A miracle was not and could not be to them, what it
+is and ought to be to ourselves--a matter to be regarded a priori
+with the very gravest suspicion.  To them it was what it is now to
+the lower and more ignorant classes of Irish, French, Spanish and
+Italian peasants:  that is to say, a thing which was always more or
+less likely to happen, and which hardly demanded more than a prima
+facie case in order to establish its credibility.  If we would know
+what the Apostles felt concerning a miracle, we must ask ourselves
+how the more ignorant peasants of to-day feel:  if we do this we
+shall have to admit that a miracle might have been accepted upon very
+insufficient grounds, and that, once accepted, it would not have had
+one-hundredth part so good a chance of being refuted as it would have
+now.
+
+"It should be borne in mind, and is too often lost sight of, that WE
+HAVE NO ACCOUNT OF THE RESURRECTION FROM ANY SOURCE WHATEVER.  We
+have accounts of the visit of certain women to a tomb which they
+found empty; but this is not an account of a resurrection.  We are
+told that Jesus Christ was seen alive after being thought to have
+been dead, but this again is not an account of a resurrection.  It is
+a statement of a fact, but it is not an account of the circumstances
+which attended that fact.  In the story told by Matthew we have what
+comes nearest to an account of the Resurrection, but even here the
+principal figure is wanting; the angel rolls away the stone and sits
+upon it, but we hear nothing about the body of Christ emerging from
+the tomb; we only meet with this, when we come to the Italian
+painters.
+
+"Moreover, St. Matthew's account is utterly incredible from first to
+last; we are therefore thrown back upon the other three Evangelists,
+none of whom professes to give us the smallest information as to the
+time and manner of Christ's Resurrection.  THERE IS NOTHING IN ANY OF
+THEIR ACCOUNTS TO PRECLUDE HIS HAVING RISEN WITHIN TWO HOURS FROM HIS
+HAVING BEEN LAID IN THE TOMB.
+
+"If a man of note were condemned to death, crucified and afterwards
+seen alive, the almost instantaneous conclusion in the days of the
+Apostles, and in such minds as theirs, would be that he had risen
+from the dead; but the almost instantaneous conclusion now, among all
+whose judgement would carry the smallest weight, would be that he had
+never died--that there must have been some mistake.  Children and
+inexperienced persons believe readily in all manner of
+improbabilities and impossibilities, which when they become older and
+wiser they cannot conceive their having ever seriously accepted.  As
+with men, so with ages; an unusual train of events brings about
+unusual results, whereon the childlike age turns instinctively to
+miracle for a solution of the difficulty.  In the days of Christ men
+would ask for evidence of the Crucifixion and the reappearance; when
+these two points had been established they would have been satisfied-
+-not unnaturally--that a great miracle had been performed:  but no
+sane man would be contented now with the evidence that was sufficient
+then, any more than he would be content to accept many things which a
+child must take upon authority, and authority only.  WE ought to
+require the most ample evidence that not only the appearance of
+death, but death itself, must have inevitably ensued upon the
+Crucifixion, and if this were not forthcoming we should not for a
+moment hesitate about refusing to believe that the reappearance was
+miraculous.
+
+"And this is what would most assuredly be done now by impartial
+examiners--by men of scientific mind who had no wish either to
+believe or disbelieve except according to the evidence; but even now,
+if their affections and their hopes of a glorious kingdom in a world
+beyond the grave were enlisted on the side of the miracle, it would
+go hard with the judgement of most men.  How much more would this be
+so, if they had believed from earliest childhood that miracles were
+still occasionally worked in England, and that a few generations ago
+they had been much more signal and common?
+
+"Can we wonder then, if we ourselves feel so strongly concerning
+events which are hull down upon the horizon of time, that those who
+lived in the very thick of them should have been possessed with an
+all absorbing ecstasy or even frenzy of excitement?  Assuredly there
+is no blame on the score of credulity to be attached to those who
+propagated the Christian religion, but the beliefs which were natural
+and lawful to them, are, if natural, yet not lawful to ourselves:
+they should be resisted:  they are neither right nor wise, and do not
+form any legitimate ground for faith:  if faith means only the
+believing facts of history upon insufficient evidence, we deny the
+merit of faith; on the contrary, we regard it as one of the most
+deplorable of all errors--as sapping the foundations of all the moral
+and intellectual faculties.  It is grossly immoral to violate one's
+inner sense of truth by assenting to things which, though they may
+appear to be supported by much, are still not supported by enough.
+The man who can knowingly submit to such a derogation from the rights
+of his self-respect, deserves the injury to his mental eye-sight
+which such a course will surely bring with it.  But the mischief will
+unfortunately not be confined to himself; it will devolve upon all
+who are ill-fated enough to be in his power; he will be reckless of
+the harm he works them, provided he can keep its consequences from
+being immediately offensive to himself.  No:  if a good thing can be
+believed legitimately, let us believe it and be thankful, otherwise
+the goodness will have departed out of it; it is no longer ours; we
+have no right to it, and shall suffer for it, we and our children, if
+we try to keep it.  It has been said that the fathers have eaten sour
+grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge, but, more truly, it
+is the eating of sweet and stolen fruit by the fathers that sets the
+teeth of the children jarring.  Let those who love their children
+look to this, for on their own account they may be mainly trusted to
+avoid the sour.  Hitherto the intensity of the belief of the Apostles
+has been the mainstay of our own belief.  But that mainstay is now no
+longer strong enough.  A rehearing of the evidence is imperatively
+demanded, that it may either be confirmed or overthrown."
+
+It cannot be denied that there is much in the above with which all
+true Christians will agree, and little to find fault with except the
+self-complacency which would seem to imply that common sense and
+plain dealing belong exclusively to the unbelieving side.  It is time
+that this spirit should be protested against not in word only but in
+deed.  The fact is, that both we and our opponents are agreed that
+nothing should be believed unless it can be proved to be true.  We
+repudiate the idea that faith means the accepting historical facts
+upon evidence which is insufficient to establish them.  We do not
+call this faith; we call it credulity, and oppose it to the utmost of
+our power.
+
+Our opponents imply that we regard as a virtue well-pleasing in the
+sight of God, and dignify with the name of faith, a state of mind
+which turns out to be nothing but a willingness to stand by all sorts
+of wildly improbable stories which have reached us from a remote age
+and country, and which, if true, must lead us to think otherwise of
+the whole course of nature than we should think if we were left to
+ourselves.  This accusation is utterly false and groundless.  Faith
+is the "evidence of things not seen," but it is not "insufficient
+evidence for things alleged to have been seen."  It is "the substance
+of things hoped for," but "reasonably hoped for" was unquestionably
+intended by the Apostle.  We base our faith in the deeper mysteries
+of our religion, as in the nature of the Trinity and the sacramental
+graces, upon the certainty that other things which are within the
+grasp of our reason can be shewn to be beyond dispute.  We know that
+Christ died and rose again; therefore we believe whatever He sees fit
+to tell us, and follow Him, or endeavour to follow Him, whereinsoever
+He commands us, but we are not required to take both the commands of
+the Mediator AND HIS CREDENTIALS upon faith.  It is because certain
+things within our comprehension are capable of the most irrefragable
+proof, that certain others out of it may justly be required to be
+believed, and indeed cannot be disbelieved without contumacy and
+presumption.  And this applies to a certain extent to the credentials
+also:  for although no man should be captious, nor ask for more
+evidence than would satisfy a well-disciplined mind concerning the
+truth of any ordinary fact (as one who not contented with the
+evidence of a seal, a handwriting and a matter not at variance with
+probability, would nevertheless refuse to act upon instructions
+because he had not with his own eyes actually seen the sender write
+and sign and seal), yet it is both reasonable and indeed necessary
+that a certain amount of care should be taken before the credentials
+are accepted.  If our opponents mean no more than this we are at one
+with them, and may allow them to proceed.
+
+"Turn then," they say, "to the account of the events which are
+alleged to have happened upon the morning of the Resurrection, as
+given in the fourth Gospel:  and assume for the sake of the argument
+that that account, if not from John's own hand, is nevertheless from
+a Johannean source, and virtually the work of the Apostle.  The
+account runs as follows:
+
+"'The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene while it was yet
+dark unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the
+sepulchre.  Then she runneth and cometh to Simon Peter and to the
+other disciple whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, 'They have
+taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they
+have laid Him.'  Peter therefore went forth and that other disciple,
+and came to the sepulchre.  So they both ran together:  and the other
+disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.  And he
+stooping down and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying, yet went
+he not in.  Then cometh Simon Peter following him and went into the
+sepulchre and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin that was
+about His head not lying with the linen clothes but wrapped together
+in a place by itself.  Then went in also that other disciple, which
+came first to the sepulchre, and he saw and believed.  For as yet
+they knew not the Scripture that he must rise from the dead.  Then
+the disciples went away again to their own home.  But Mary stood
+without 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 Jesus
+had lain, and they say unto her, 'Woman, why weepest thou?'  She
+saith unto them, 'Because they have taken away my Lord and I know not
+where 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 two
+parts, let us examine first what we are told as having come actually
+under John's own observation, and, secondly, what happened
+afterwards.
+
+I.  "It is clear that Mary had seen nothing miraculous before she
+came running to the two Apostles, Peter and John.  She had found the
+tomb empty when she reached it.  She did not know where the body of
+her Lord then was, NOR WAS THERE ANYTHING TO SHEW HOW LONG IT HAD
+BEEN REMOVED:  all she knew was that within thirty-six hours from the
+time of its having been laid in the tomb it had disappeared, but how
+much 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, simply
+the grave clothes (WHICH WERE PROBABLY OF WHITE LINEN), lying IN TWO
+SEPARATE PLACES.  Then, AND NOT TILL THEN, do they appear to have
+entertained their first belief or hope that Christ might have risen
+from the dead.
+
+"This is plain and credible; but it amounts to an empty tomb, and to
+an empty tomb only.
+
+"Here, for a moment, we must pause.  Had these men but a few weeks
+previously seen Lazarus raised from the corruption of the grave--to
+say nothing of other resurrections from the dead?  Had they seen
+their master override every known natural law, and prove that, as far
+as he was concerned, all human experience was worthless, by walking
+upon rough water, by actually talking to a storm of wind and making
+it listen to him, by feeding thousands with a few loaves, and causing
+the fragments that remained after all had eaten, to be more than the
+food originally provided?  Had they seen events of this kind
+continually happening for a space of some two years, and finally had
+they seen their master transfigured, conversing with the greatest of
+their prophets (men who had been dead for ages), and recognised by a
+voice from heaven as the Son of the Almighty, and had they also heard
+anything approaching to an announcement that he should himself rise
+from the dead--or had they not?  They might have seen the raising of
+Lazarus and the rest of the miracles, but might not have anticipated
+that Christ himself would rise, for want of any announcement that
+this should be so; or, again, they might have heard a prophecy of his
+Resurrection from the lips of Christ, but disbelieved it for the want
+of any previous miracles which should convince them that the prophecy
+came from no ordinary person; so that their not having expected the
+Resurrection is explicable by giving up either the prophecies, or the
+miracles, but it is impossible to believe that IN SPITE BOTH OF THE
+MIRACLES AND THE PROPHECIES, the Apostles should have been still
+without any expectation of the Resurrection.  If they had both seen
+the miracles and heard the prophecies, they must have been in a state
+of inconceivably agitated excitement in anticipation of their
+master's reappearance.  And this they were not; on the contrary, they
+were expecting nothing of the kind.  The condition of mind ascribed
+to them considering their supposed surroundings, is one which belongs
+to the drama only; it is not of nature:  it is so utterly at variance
+with all human experience that it should be dismissed at once as
+incredible.
+
+"But it is very credible if Christ was seen alive after his
+Crucifixion, and his reappearance, though due to natural causes, was
+once believed to be miraculous, that this one seemingly well
+substantiated miracle should become the parent of all the others, and
+of the prophecies of the Resurrection.  Thirty years in all
+probability elapsed between the reappearances of Christ and the
+earliest of the four Gospels; thirty years of oral communication and
+spiritual enthusiasm, among an oriental people, and in an
+unscientific age; an age by which the idea of an interference with
+the modes of the universe from a point outside of itself, was taken
+as a matter of course; an age which believed in an anthropomorphic
+Deity who had back parts, which Moses had been allowed to see through
+the hand of God; an age which, over and above all this, was at the
+time especially convulsed with expectations of deliverance from the
+Roman yoke.  Have we not here a soil suitable for the growth of
+miracles, if the seed once fell upon it?  Under such conditions they
+would even spring up of themselves, seedless.
+
+"Once let the reappearances of Christ have been believed to be
+miraculous (and under all the circumstances they might easily have
+been believed to be so, though due to natural causes), and it is not
+wonderful that, in such an age and among such a people, the other
+miracles and the prophecies of the Resurrection should have become
+current within thirty years.  Even we ourselves, with all our
+incalculably greater advantages, could not withstand so great a
+temptation to let our wish become father to our thoughts.  If we had
+been the especially favoured friends of one whom we believed to have
+died, but who yet was not to beholden by death, no matter how careful
+and judicially minded we might be by nature, we should be blind to
+everything except the fact that we had once been the chosen
+companions of an immortal.  There lives no one who could withstand
+the intoxication of such an idea.  A single well-substantiated
+miracle 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 sense
+of the continuity of nature, in which our judgements are, consciously
+or unconsciously, anchored; but if we were very closely connected
+with it in our own persons, we should dwell upon the recollection of
+it and on little else.
+
+"Few of us can realise what happened so very long ago.  Men believe
+in the Christian miracles, though they would reject the notion of a
+modern miracle almost with ridicule, and would hardly even examine
+the evidence in its favour.  But the Christian miracles stand in
+their minds as things apart; their PRESTIGE is greater than that
+attaching to any other events in the whole history of mankind.  They
+are hallowed by the unhesitating belief of many, many generations.
+Every circumstance which should induce us to bow to their authority
+surrounds them with a bulwark of defences which may make us well
+believe that they must be impregnable, and sacred from attack.  Small
+wonder then that the many should still believe them.  Nevertheless
+they do not believe them so fully, nor nearly so fully, as they think
+they do.  For even the strongest imagination can travel but a very
+little way beyond a man's own experience; it will not bear the burden
+of carrying him to a remote age and country; it will flag, wander and
+dream; it will not answer truly, but will lay hold of the most
+obvious absurdity, and present it impudently to its tired master, who
+will accept it gladly and have done with it.  Even recollection
+fails, but how much more imagination!  It is a high flight of
+imagination to be able to realise how weak imagination is.
+
+"We cannot therefore judge what would be the effect of immediate
+contact even with the wild hope of a miracle, from our conventional
+acceptance of the Christian miracles.  If we would realise this we
+must look to modern alleged miracles--to the enthusiasm of the Irish
+and American revivals, when mind inflames mind till strong men burst
+into hysterical tears like children; we must look for it in the
+effect produced by the supposed Irvingite miracles on those who
+believed in them, or in the miracles that followed the Port Royal
+miracle of the holy thorn.  There never was a miracle solitary yet:
+one will soon become the parent of many.  The minds of those who have
+believed in a single miracle as having come within their own
+experience become ecstatic; so deeply impressed are they with the
+momentous character of what they have known, that their power of
+enlisting sympathy becomes immeasurably greater than that of men who
+have never believed themselves to have come into contact with the
+miraculous; their deep conviction carries others along with it, and
+so the belief is strengthened till adverse influences check it, or
+till it reaches a pitch of grotesque horror, as in the case of the
+later Jansenist miracles.  There is nothing, therefore, extraordinary
+in the gradual development within thirty years of all the Christian
+miracles, if the Resurrection were once held to be well
+substantiated; and there is nothing wonderful, under the
+circumstances, in the reappearance of Christ alive after his
+Crucifixion having been assigned to miracle.  He had already made
+sufficient impression upon his followers to require but little help
+from circumstances.  He had not so impressed them as to want NO help
+from any supposed miracle, but nevertheless any strange event in
+connection with him would pass muster, with little or no examination,
+as being miraculous.  He had undoubtedly professed himself to be, and
+had been half accepted as, the promised Messiah.  He had no less
+undoubtedly appeared to be dead, and had been believed to be so both
+by friends and foes.  Let us also grant that he reappeared alive.
+Would it, then, be very astonishing that the little missing link in
+the completeness of the chain of evidence--ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY
+CONCERNING THE ACTUALITY OF THE DEATH--should have been allowed to
+drop out of sight?
+
+"Round such a centre, and in such an age, the other miracles would
+spring up spontaneously, and be accepted the moment that they arose;
+there is nothing in this which is foreign to the known tendencies of
+the human mind, but there would be something utterly foreign to all
+we know of human nature, in the fact of men not anticipating that
+Christ would rise, if they had already seen him raise others from the
+dead and work the miracles ascribed to him, and if they had also
+heard him prophesy that he should himself rise from the dead.  In
+fact nothing can explain the universally recorded incredulity of the
+Apostles as to the reappearance of Christ, except the fact that they
+had never seen him work a single miracle, or else that they had never
+heard him say anything which could lead them to suppose that he was
+to rise from the dead.
+
+"We are therefore not unwilling to accept the facts recorded in the
+fourth Gospel, in so far as they inform us of things which came under
+the knowledge of the writer.  Mary found the tomb empty.  Ignorant
+alike of what had taken place and of what was going to happen, she
+came to Peter and John to tell them that the body was gone; this was
+all 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 have
+flashed upon their minds, that the aspirations which they had already
+indulged in were to prove well founded.  Within an hour or two Christ
+was seen alive, nor can we wonder if the years which intervened
+between the morning of the Resurrection and the writing of the fourth
+Gospel, should have sufficed to make the writer believe that John had
+had an actual belief in the Resurrection, while in truth he had only
+wildly hoped it.  This much is at any rate plain, that neither he nor
+Peter had as yet heard any clearly intelligible prophecy that their
+master should rise from the dead.  Whatever subsequent interpretation
+may have been given to some of the sayings of Jesus Christ, no saying
+was yet known which would of itself have suggested any such
+inference.  We may justly doubt the caution and accuracy of the first
+founders of Christianity, without, even in our hearts, for one moment
+impugning the honesty of their intentions.  We are ready to admit
+that had we been in their places we should in all likelihood have
+felt, believed, and, we will hope, acted as they did; but we cannot
+and will not admit, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary,
+that they were superior to the intelligence of their times, or, in
+other words, that they were capable critics of an event, in which
+both their feelings and the prima facie view of the facts would be so
+likely to mislead them.
+
+II.  "Turning now to the narrative of what passed when Peter and John
+were gone, we find that Mary, stooping down, looked through her tears
+into the darkness of the tomb, and saw two angels clothed in white,
+who asked her why she wept.  We must remember the wide difference
+between believing what the writer of the fourth Gospel tells us that
+John saw, and what he tells us that Mary Magdalene saw.  All we know
+on this point is that he believed that Mary had spoken truly.  Peter
+and John were men, they went into the tomb itself, and we may say for
+a certainty that they saw no angel, nor indeed anything at all, but
+the grave clothes (WHICH WERE PROBABLY OF WHITE LINEN), lying IN TWO
+SEPARATE PLACES within it.  Mary was a woman--a woman whose parallel
+we must look for among Spanish or Italian women of the lower orders
+at the present day; she had, we are elsewhere told, been at one time
+possessed with devils; she was in a state of tearful excitement, and
+looking through her tears from light into comparative darkness.  Is
+it possible not to remember what Peter and John DID see when they
+were in the tomb?  Is it possible not to surmise that Mary in good
+truth saw nothing more?  She thought she saw more, but the excitement
+under which she was labouring at the time, an excitement which would
+increase tenfold after she had seen Christ (as she did immediately
+afterwards and before she had had time to tell her story), would
+easily distort either her vision or her memory, or both.
+
+"The evidence of women of her class--especially when they are highly
+excited--is not to be relied upon in a matter of such importance and
+difficulty as a miracle.  Who would dare to insist upon such evidence
+now?  And why should it be considered as any more trustworthy
+eighteen hundred years ago?  We are indeed told that the angels spoke
+to her; but the speech was very short; the angels simply ask her why
+she weeps; she answers them as though it were the common question of
+common people, and then leaves them.  This is in itself incredible;
+but it is not incredible that if Mary looking into the tomb saw two
+white objects within, she should have drawn back affrighted, and that
+her imagination, thrown into a fever by her subsequent interview with
+Christ, should have rendered her utterly incapable of recollecting
+the true facts of the case; or, again, it is not incredible that she
+should have been believed to have seen things which she never did
+see.  All we can say for certain is that before the fourth Gospel was
+written, and probably shortly after the first reappearance of Christ,
+Mary Magdalene believed, or was thought to have believed, that she
+had seen angels in the tomb; and this being so, the development of
+the short and pointless question attributed to them--possibly as much
+due to the eager cross-questioning of others as to Mary herself--is
+not surprising.
+
+"Before the Sunday of the Resurrection was over, the facts as
+derivable from the fourth Gospel would stand thus.  Jesus Christ, who
+was supposed to have been verily and indeed dead, was known to be
+alive again.  He had been seen, and heard to speak.  He had been seen
+by those who were already prepared to accept him as their leader, and
+whose previous education, and tone of mind, would lead them rather to
+an excess of faith in a miracle, than of scepticism concerning its
+miraculous character.  The Apostles would be in no impartial nor
+sceptical mood when they saw that Christ was alive.  The miracle was
+too near themselves--too fascinating in its supposed consequences for
+themselves--to allow of their going into curious questions about the
+completeness of the death.  The Master whom they had loved, and in
+whom they had hoped, had been crucified and was alive again.  Is it a
+harsh or strained supposition, that what would have assuredly been
+enough for ourselves, if we had known and loved Christ and had been
+attuned in mind as the Apostles were, should also have been enough
+for them?  Who can say so?  The nature of our belief in our Master
+would have been changed once and for ever; and so we find it to have
+been with the Christian Apostles.
+
+"Over and above the reappearance of Christ, there would also be a
+report (probably current upon the very Sunday of the Resurrection),
+that Mary Magdalene had seen a vision of angels in the tomb in which
+Christ's body had been laid; and this, though a matter of small
+moment in comparison with the reappearance of Christ himself, will
+nevertheless concern us nearly when we come to consider the
+narratives 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, they
+came unto the sepulchre bringing the spices which they had prepared,
+and certain others with them.  AND THEY FOUND THE STONE ROLLED AWAY
+FROM THE SEPULCHRE.  AND THEY ENTERED IN, AND FOUND NOT THE BODY OF
+THE LORD JESUS.  And it came to pass as they were much perplexed
+thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments, AND AS
+THEY WERE AFRAID, AND BOWED THEIR FACES TO THE EARTH, they said unto
+them, "WHY SEEK YE THE LIVING AMONG THE DEAD?  He is not here, but is
+risen:  REMEMBER HOW HE SPAKE UNTO YOU WHEN HE WAS YET IN GALILEE,
+saying, 'THE SON OF MAN MUST BE DELIVERED INTO THE HANDS OF SINFUL
+MEN AND BE CRUCIFIED, AND THE THIRD DAY RISE AGAIN."  AND THEY
+REMEMBERED HIS WORDS, and returned from the sepulchre, and told all
+these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.  It was Mary
+Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women
+that were with them which told these things unto the Apostles.  AND
+THEIR WORDS SEEMED UNTO THEM AS IDLE TALES, AND THEY BELIEVED THEM
+NOT.  Then arose Peter, and went unto the sepulchre:  and, stooping
+down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed
+wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.'
+
+"When we compare this account with John's we are at once struck with
+the resemblances and the discrepancies.  Luke and John indeed are
+both agreed that Christ was seen alive after the Crucifixion.  Both
+agree that the tomb was found empty very early on the Sunday morning
+(i.e., within thirty-six hours of the deposition from the Cross), and
+neither writer affords us any clue whatever as to the time and manner
+of the removal of the body; but here the resemblances end; the
+angelic vision of Mary, seen AFTER Peter and John had departed from
+the tomb, and seen apparently by Mary alone, in Luke finds its way
+into the van of the narrative, and Peter is represented as having
+gone to the tomb, NOT IN CONSEQUENCE OF HAVING BEEN SIMPLY TOLD THAT
+THE BODY OF CHRIST WAS MISSING, BUT BECAUSE HE REFUSED TO BELIEVE THE
+MIRACULOUS STORY WHICH WAS TOLD HIM BY THE WOMEN.  In the fourth
+Gospel we heard of no miraculous story being carried by Mary to Peter
+and John.  The angels instead of being seen by one person only, as
+would have appeared from the fourth Gospel, are now seen BY MANY; and
+the women instead of being almost stolidly indifferent to the
+presence of supernatural beings, are afraid, and bow down their faces
+to the earth; instead of merely wanting to be informed why Mary was
+weeping, the angels speak with definite point, and as angels might be
+expected to speak; they allude, also, to past prophecy, which the
+women at once remember.
+
+"Strange, that they should want reminding!  And stranger still that a
+few verses lower down we should find the Apostles remembering no
+prophetic saying, but regarding the story of the women as mere idle
+tales.  What shall we say?  Are not these differences precisely
+similar to those which we are continually meeting with, when a case
+of exaggeration comes before us?  Can we accept BOTH the stories?  Is
+this one of those cases in which all would be made clear if we did
+but know ALL the facts, or is it rather one in which we can
+understand how easily the story given by the one writer might become
+distorted into the version of the other?  Does it seem in any way
+improbable that within the forty years or so between the occurrences
+recorded by John and the writing of Luke's Gospel, the apparently
+trifling, yet truly most important, differences between the two
+writers should have been developed?
+
+"No one will venture to say that the facts, upon the face of them, do
+not strongly suggest such an inference, and that, too, with no
+conscious fraud on the part of any of those through whose mouths the
+story must have passed.  If the fourth Gospel be assigned to John
+(and if it is NOT assigned to John the difficulties on the Christian
+side become so great that the cause may be declared lost), his story
+is that of a principal actor and eye-witness; it bears every impress
+of truth and none of exaggeration upon any point which came under his
+own observation.  Even when he tells of what Mary Magdalene said she
+saw, we see the myth in its earliest and crudest form; there is no
+attempt at circumstance in connection with it, and abundant reason
+for suspecting its supernatural character is given along with it;
+reason which to our minds is at any rate sufficient to make us doubt
+it, but which would naturally have no weight whatever with John after
+he had once seen Christ alive, or indeed with us if we had been in
+his place.  It is not to be wondered at that in such times many a
+fresh bud should be grafted on to the original story; indeed it was
+simply inevitable that this should have been the case.  No one would
+mean to deceive, but we know how, among uneducated and enthusiastic
+persons, the marvellous has an irresistible tendency to become more
+marvellous still; and, as far as we can gather, all the causes which
+bring this about were more actively at work shortly after the time of
+Christ's first reappearance than at any other time which can be
+readily called to mind.  The main facts, as we derive them from the
+consent of BOTH writers, were simply these:- That the tomb of Christ
+was found unexpectedly empty on the Sunday morning; that this fact
+was reported to the Apostles; that Peter went into the tomb and saw
+the linen clothes laid by themselves; that Mary Magdalene said that
+she had seen angels; and that eventually Christ shewed himself
+undoubtedly alive.  Both writers agree so far, but it is impossible
+to say that they agree farther.
+
+"Some may say that it is of little moment whether the angels appeared
+first or last; whether they were seen by many or by one; whether, if
+seen only by one, that one had previously been insane; whether they
+spoke as angels might be expected to speak, i.e., to the point, and
+are shewn to have been recognised as angels by the fear which their
+appearance caused; or whether they caused no alarm, and said nothing
+which was in the least equal to the occasion.  But most men will feel
+that the whole complexion of the story changes according to the
+answers which can be made to these very questions.  Surely they will
+also begin to feel a strong suspicion that the story told by Luke is
+one which has not lost in the telling.  How natural was it that the
+angelic vision should find its way into the foreground of the
+picture, and receive those little circumstantial details of which it
+appeared most to stand in need; how desirable also that the testimony
+of Mary should be corroborated by that of others who were with her,
+and out of whom no devils had been cast.  The first Christians would
+not have been men and women at all unless they had felt thus; but
+they WERE men and women, and hence they acted after the fashion of
+their age and unconsciously exaggerated; the only wonder is that they
+did not exaggerate more, for we must remember that even though the
+Apostles themselves be supposed to have been more judicially
+unimpassioned and less liable to inaccuracy than we have reason to
+believe they were, yet that from the very earliest ages of the Church
+there would be some converts of an inferior stamp.  No matter how
+small a society is, there will be bad in it as well as good--there
+was a Judas even in the twelve.
+
+"But to speak less harshly, there must from the first have been some
+converts who would be capable of reporting incautiously; visions and
+dreams were vouchsafed to many, and not a few marvels may be
+referable to this source; there is no trusting an age in which men
+are liable to give a supernatural interpretation to an extraordinary
+dream, nor is there any end to what may come of it, if people begin
+seriously confounding their sleeping and waking impressions.  In such
+times, then, Luke may have said with a clear conscience that he had
+carefully sifted the truth of what he wrote; but the world has not
+passed through the last two thousand years in vain, and we are bound
+to insist upon a higher standard of credibility.  Luke would believe
+at once, and as a matter of course, things which we should as a
+matter of course reject; yet it is probable that he too had heard
+much that he rejected; he seems to have been dissatisfied with all
+the records with the existence of which he was aware; the account
+which he gives is possibly derived from some very early report; even
+if this report arose at Jerusalem, and within a week after the
+Crucifixion, it might well be very inaccurate, though apparently
+supported by excellent authority, so that there is no necessity for
+charging Luke with unusual credulity.  No one can be expected to be
+greatly in advance of his surroundings; it is well for every one
+except himself if he should happen to be so, but no man is to be
+blamed if he is not; it is enough to save him if he is fairly up to
+the standard of his own times.  'Morality' is rather of the custom
+which 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 mother
+of James, and Salome had bought sweet spices that they might come and
+anoint 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 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 it
+was very great.  And entering into the sepulchre they saw A YOUNG MAN
+sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they
+were affrighted.  And he saith unto them, "Be not affrighted; ye seek
+Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified; he is risen; he is not here;
+behold the place where they laid him.  But go your way, tell his
+disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee:  there ye
+shall see him, as he said unto you."  And they went out quickly, and
+fled from the sepulchre; FOR THEY TREMBLED AND WERE AMAZED, NEITHER
+SAID THEY ANY THING TO ANY MAN, FOR THEY WERE AFRAID.  Now when Jesus
+was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary
+Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.  And she went and
+told 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, BELIEVED
+NOT.'
+
+"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 is
+possible that there may have been another who is not mentioned,
+inasmuch as he remained silent; the angelic vision, however, is again
+brought into the foreground of the story and the fear of the women is
+even more strongly insisted on than it was in Luke.  The angel
+reminds the women that Christ had said that he should be seen by his
+Apostles in Galilee, of which saying we again find that the Apostles
+seem to have had no recollection.  The linen clothes have quite
+dropped out of the story, and we can detect no trace of Peter and
+John's visit to the tomb, but it is remarkable that the women are
+represented as not having said anything about the presence of the
+angel immediately on their having seen him; and this fact, which
+might be in itself suspicious, is apologised for on the score of
+fear, notwithstanding that their silence was a direct violation of
+the command of the being whom they so greatly feared.  We should have
+expected that if they had feared him so much they would have done as
+he told them, but here again everybody seems to act as in a dream or
+drama, in defiance of all the ordinary principles of human action.
+
+"Throughout the preceding paragraph we have assumed that Mark
+intended his readers to understand that the young man seen in the
+tomb was an angel; but, after all, this is rather a bold assumption.
+On what grounds is it supported?  Because Luke tells us that when the
+women reached the tomb they found TWO white angels within it, are we
+therefore to conclude that Mark, who wrote many years earlier, and as
+far as we can gather with much greater historical accuracy, must have
+meant an angel when he spoke of a 'young man'?  Yet this can be the
+only reason, unless the young man's having worn a long white robe is
+considered as sufficient cause for believing him to have been an
+angel; and this, again, is rather a bold assumption.  But if St. Mark
+meant 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, what
+becomes of the angelic visions at the tomb of Christ?  For St.
+Matthew's account is wholly untenable; St. Luke is a much later
+writer, who must have got all his materials second or third hand; and
+although we granted, and are inclined to believe, that the accounts
+of the visits of Mary Magdalene, and subsequently of Peter and John
+to the tomb, which are given in the fourth Gospel, are from a
+Johannean source, if we were asked our reasons for this belief, we
+should be very hard put to it to give them.  Nevertheless we think it
+probable.
+
+"But take it either way; if the account in the fourth Gospel is
+supposed to have been derived from the Apostle John, we have already
+seen that there is nothing miraculous about it, so far as it deals
+with what came under John's own observation; if, on the other hand,
+it is NOT authentic we are thrown back upon St. Mark as incomparably
+our best authority for the facts that occurred on the Sunday after
+the 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 long
+white 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 asked
+to believe that the reappearance of Christ alive, after a hurried
+crucifixion, must have been due to supernatural causes, and
+supernatural causes only!  It will be easily seen what a number of
+threads might be taken up at this point, and followed with not
+uninteresting results.  For the sake, however, of brevity, we grant
+it as most probable that St. Mark meant the young man said to have
+been seen in the tomb, to be considered as an angel; but we must also
+express our conviction that this supposed angelic vision is a
+misplaced offshoot of the report that Mary Magdalene had seen angels
+in the tomb after Peter and John had left it.
+
+"It is possible that Mark's account may be the most historic of all
+those that we have; but we incline to think otherwise, inasmuch as
+the angelic vision placed in the foreground by Mark and Luke, would
+not be likely to find its way into the background again, as it does
+in the fourth Gospel, unless in consequence of really authentic
+information; no unnecessary detraction from the miraculous element is
+conceivable as coming from the writer who has handed down to us the
+story of the raising of Lazarus, where we have, indeed, A REAL
+ACCOUNT OF A RESURRECTION, the continuity of the evidence being
+unbroken, and every link in the chain forged fast and strong, even to
+the unwrapping of the grave clothes from the body as it emerged from
+the sepulchre.  Is it possible that the writer may have given the
+story of the raising of Lazarus (of which we find no trace except in
+the fourth Gospel), because he felt that in giving the Apostolic
+version with absolute or substantial accuracy, he was so weakening
+the miraculous element in connection with the Resurrection of Jesus
+Christ himself, that it became necessary to introduce an
+incontrovertible 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 writers
+are agreed:  we have the same substratum of facts, namely, THE TOMB
+FOUND ALREADY EMPTY WHEN THE WOMEN REACHED IT, a confused and
+contradictory report of an angel or angels seen within it, and the
+subsequent reappearance of Christ.  Not one of the three writers
+affords us the slightest clue as to the time and manner of the
+removal of the body from the tomb; there is nothing in any of the
+narratives which is incompatible with its having been taken away on
+the very night of the Crucifixion itself.
+
+"Is this a case in which the defenders of Christianity would clamour
+for ALL the facts, unless they exceedingly well knew that there was
+no chance of their getting them?  ALL the facts, indeed--what tricks
+does our imagination play us!  One would have thought that there were
+quite enough facts given as the matter stands to make the defenders
+of Christianity wish that there were not so many; and then for them
+to say that if we had more, those that we have would become less
+contradictory!  What right have they to assume that if they had all
+the 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 find
+these accounts even more inexplicable than we do at present?  Had WE
+argued thus we should have been accused of shameless impudence; of a
+desire to maintain any position in which we happened to find
+ourselves, and by which we made money, regardless of every common
+principle of truth or honour, or whatever else makes the difference
+between upright men and self-deceivers.
+
+"It may be said by some that the discrepancies between the three
+accounts given above are discrepancies concerning details only, but
+that all three writers agree about the 'main fact.'  We are
+continually hearing about this 'main fact,' but nobody is good enough
+to tell us precisely what fact is meant.  Is the main fact the fact
+that Jesus Christ was crucified?  Then no one denies it.  We all
+admit that Jesus Christ was crucified.  Or, is it that he was seen
+alive several times after the Crucifixion?  This also we are not
+disposed to deny.  We believe that there is a considerable
+preponderance of evidence in its favour.  But if the 'main fact'
+turns out to be that Christ was crucified, DIED, and then came to
+life again, we admit that here too all the writers are agreed, but we
+cannot find with any certainty that one of them was present when
+Christ died or when his body was taken down from the Cross, or that
+there was any such examination of the body as would be absolutely
+necessary in order to prove that a man had been dead who was
+afterwards seen alive.  If Christ reappeared alive, there is not only
+no tittle of evidence in support of his death which would be allowed
+for a moment in an English court of justice, but there is an
+overwhelming amount of evidence which points inexorably in the
+direction of his never having died.  If he reappeared, there is no
+evidence of his having died.  If he did not reappear, there is no
+evidence of his having risen from the dead.
+
+"We are inclined, however, as has been said already, to believe that
+Jesus Christ really did reappear shortly after the Crucifixion, and
+that his reappearance, though due to natural causes, was conceived to
+be miraculous.  We believe also that Mary fancied that she had seen
+angels in the tomb, and openly said that she had done so; who would
+doubt her when so far greater a marvel than this had been made
+palpably manifest to all?  Who would care to inquire very
+particularly whether there were two angels or only one?  Whether
+there were other women with Mary or whether she was quite alone?  Who
+would compare notes about the exact moment of their appearing, and
+what strictly accurate account of their words could be expected in
+the ferment of such excitement and such ignorance?  Any speech which
+sounded tolerably plausible would be accepted under the
+circumstances, and none will complain of Mark as having wilfully
+attempted to deceive, any more than he will of Luke:  the
+amplification of the story was inevitable, and the very candour and
+innocence with which the writers leave loophole after loophole for
+escape from the miraculous, is alone sufficient proof of their
+sincerity; nevertheless, it is also proof that they were all more or
+less inaccurate; we can only say in their defence, that in the
+reappearance of Christ himself we find abundant palliation of their
+inaccuracy.  Given one great miracle, proved with a sufficiency of
+evidence for the capacities and proclivities of the age, and the rest
+is easy.  The groundwork of the after-structure of the other miracles
+is to be found in the fact that Christ was crucified, and was
+afterwards seen alive."
+
+There is no occasion for me to examine St. Matthew's account of the
+Resurrection in company with the unhappy men whose views I have been
+endeavouring to represent above.  For reasons which have already been
+sufficiently dwelt upon I freely own that I agree with them in
+rejecting it.  I shall therefore admit that the story of the sealing
+of the tomb, and setting of the guard, the earthquake, the descent of
+the angel from Heaven, his rolling away the stone, sitting upon it,
+and addressing the women therefrom, is to be treated for all
+controversial purposes as though it had never been written.  By this
+admission, I confess to complete ignorance of the time when the stone
+was removed from the mouth of the tomb, or the hour when the Redeemer
+rose.  I should add that I agree with our opponents in believing that
+our Lord never foretold His Resurrection to the Apostles.  But how
+little does it matter whether He foretold His Resurrection or not,
+and whether He rose at one hour or another.  It is enough for me that
+he rose at all; for the rest I care not.
+
+"Yet, see," our opponents will exclaim in answer, "what a mighty
+river has come from a little spring.  We heard first of two men going
+into an empty tomb, finding two bundles of grave clothes, and
+departing.  Then there comes a certain person, concerning whom we are
+elsewhere told a fact which leaves us with a very uncomfortable
+impression, and SHE sees, not two bundles of grave clothes, but two
+white angels, who ask a dreamy pointless question, and receive an
+appropriate answer.  Then we find the time of this apparition
+shifted; it is placed in the front, not in the background, and is
+seen by many, instead of being vouchsafed to no one but to a weeping
+woman looking into the bottom of a tomb.  The speech of the angels,
+also, becomes effective, and the linen clothes drop out of sight
+entirely, unless some faint trace of them is to be found in the 'long
+white garment' which Mark tells us was worn by the young man who was
+in the tomb when the women reached it.  Finally, we have a guard set
+upon the tomb, and the stone which was rolled in front of it is
+sealed; the angel IS SEEN TO DESCEND FROM HEAVEN, to roll away the
+stone, and sit upon it, and there is a great earthquake.  Oh! how
+things grow, how things grow!  And, oh! how people believe!
+
+"See by what easy stages the story has grown up from the smallest
+seed, as the mustard tree in the parable, and how the account given
+by Matthew changes the whole complexion of the events.  And see how
+this account has been dwelt upon to the exclusion of the others by
+the great painters and sculptors from whom, consciously or
+unconsciously, our ideas of the Christian era are chiefly drawn.
+Yes.  These men have been the most potent of theologians, for their
+theology has reached and touched most widely.  We have mistaken their
+echo of the sound for the sound itself, and what was to them an
+aspiration, has, alas! been to us in the place of science and
+reality.
+
+"Truly the ease with which the plainest inferences from the Gospel
+narratives have been overlooked is the best apology for those who
+have attributed unnatural blindness to the Apostles.  If we are so
+blind, why not they also?  A pertinent question, but one which raises
+more difficulties than it solves.  The seeing of truth is as the
+finding of gold in far countries, where the shepherd has drunk of the
+stream and used it daily to cleanse the sweat of his brow, and recked
+little of the treasure which lay abundantly concealed therein, until
+one luckier than his fellows espies it, and the world comes flocking
+thither.  So with truth; a little care, a little patience, a little
+sympathy, and the wonder is that it should have lain hidden even from
+the merest child, not that it should now be manifest.
+
+"How early must it have been objected that there was no evidence that
+the tomb had not been tampered with (not by the Apostles, for they
+were scattered, and of him who laid the body in the tomb--Joseph of
+Arimathaea--we hear no more) and that the body had been delivered not
+to enemies, but friends; how natural that so desirable an addition to
+the completeness of the evidences in favour of a miraculous
+Resurrection should have been early and eagerly accepted.  Would not
+twenty years of oral communication and Spanish or Italian
+excitability suffice for the rooting of such a story?  Yet, as far as
+we can gather, the Gospel according to St. Matthew was even then
+unwritten.  And who was Matthew?  And what was his original Gospel?
+
+"There is one part of his story, and one only, which will stand the
+test of criticism, and that is this:- That the saying that the
+disciples came by night and stole the body of Jesus away was current
+among the Jews, at the time when the Gospel which we now have
+appeared.  Not that they did so--no one will believe this; but the
+allegation of the rumour (which would hardly have been ventured
+unless it would command assent as true) points in the direction of
+search 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 any
+miracle in connection with the tomb of Christ.  He probably
+reappeared alive, but not with any circumstances which we are
+justified in regarding as supernatural.  We are therefore at length
+led to a consideration of the Crucifixion itself.  Is there evidence
+for more than this--that Christ was crucified, was afterwards seen
+alive, and that this was regarded by his first followers as a
+sufficient proof of his having risen from the dead?  This would
+account for the rise of Christianity, and for all the other miracles.
+Take the following passage from Gibbon:- 'The grave and learned
+Augustine, whose understanding scarcely admits the excuse of
+credulity, has attested the innumerable prodigies which were worked
+in Africa by the relics of St. Stephen, and this marvellous narrative
+is inserted in the elaborate work of "The City of God," which the
+Bishop designed as a solid and immortal proof of the truth of
+Christianity.  Augustine solemnly declares that he had selected those
+miracles only which had been publicly certified by persons who were
+either the objects or the spectators of the powers of the martyr.
+Many prodigies were omitted or forgotten, and Hippo had been less
+favourably treated than the other cities of the province, yet the
+Bishop enumerates above seventy miracles, of which three were
+resurrections from the dead, within the limits of his own diocese.
+If we enlarge our view to all the dioceses and all the saints of the
+Christian world, it will not be easy to calculate the fables and
+errors which issued from this inexhaustible source.  But we may
+surely be allowed to observe that a miracle in that age of
+superstition and credulity lost its name and its merits, since it
+could hardly be considered as a deviation from the established laws
+of Nature.'--(Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chap. xxviii., sec. 2).
+
+"Who believes in the miracles, or who would dare to quote them?  Yet
+on what better foundation do those of the New Testament rest?  For
+the death of Christ there is no evidence at all.  There is evidence
+that he was believed to have been dead (under circumstances where a
+misapprehension was singularly likely to arise), by men whose minds
+were altogether in a different clef to ours as regards the
+miraculous, and whom we cannot therefore fairly judge by any modern
+standard.  We cannot judge THEM, but we are bound to weigh the facts
+which they relate, not in their balance, but in our own.  It is not
+what might have seemed reasonably believable to them, but what is
+reasonably believable in our own more enlightened age which can be
+alone accepted sinlessly by ourselves.  Men's modes of thought
+concerning facts change from age to age; but the facts change not at
+all, and it is of them that we are called to judge.
+
+"We turn to the fourth Gospel, as that from which we shall derive the
+most accurate knowledge of the facts connected with the Crucifixion.
+Here we find that it was about twelve o'clock when Pilate brought out
+Christ for the last time; the dialogue that followed, the
+preparations for the Crucifixion, and the leading Christ outside the
+city to the place where the Crucifixion was to take place, could
+hardly have occupied less than an hour.  By six o'clock (by consent
+of all writers) the body was entombed, so that the actual time during
+which Christ hung upon the cross was little more than four hours.
+Let us be thankful to hope that the time of suffering may have been
+so short--but say five hours, say six, say whatever the reader
+chooses, the Crucifixion was avowedly too hurried for death in an
+ordinary case to have ensued.  The thieves had to be killed, as yet
+alive.  Immediately before being taken down from the cross the body
+was delivered to friends.  Within thirty-six hours afterwards the
+tomb 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 later
+Christ was seen alive.
+
+"Let it be remembered also that the fact of the body having been
+delivered to Joseph BEFORE the taking down from the cross, greatly
+enhanced the chance of an escape from death, inasmuch as the duties
+of the soldiers would have ended with the presentation of the order
+from Pilate.  If any faint symptom of returning animation shewed
+itself in consequence of the mere change of position and the
+inevitable shock attendant upon being moved, the soldiers would not
+know it; their task was ended, and they would not be likely either to
+wish, or to be allowed, to have anything to do with the matter.
+Joseph appears to have been a rich man, and would be followed by
+attendants.  Moreover, although we are told by Mark that Pilate sent
+for the centurion to inquire whether Christ was dead, yet the same
+writer also tells us that this centurion had already come to the
+conclusion that Christ was the Son of God, a statement which is
+supported by the accounts of Matthew and Luke; Mark is the only
+Evangelist who tells us that the centurion WAS sent for, but even
+granting that this was so, would not one who had already recognised
+Christ as the Son of God be inclined to give him every assistance in
+his power?  He would be frightened, and anxious to get the body down
+from the cross as fast as possible.  So long as Christ appeared to be
+dead, there would be no unnecessary obstacle thrown in the way of the
+delivery of the body to Joseph, by a centurion who believed that he
+had 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 of
+the body, except Joseph of Arimathaea, for the presence of Nicodemus,
+and indeed his existence, rests upon the slenderest evidence.  None
+of the Apostles appear to have had anything to do with the
+deposition, nor yet the women who had come from Galilee, who are
+represented as seeing where the body was laid (and by Luke as seeing
+HOW it was laid), but do not seem to have come into close contact
+with the body.
+
+"Would any modern jury of intelligent men believe under similar
+circumstances that the death had been actual and complete?  Would
+they not regard--and ought they not to regard--reappearance as
+constituting ample proof that there had been no death?  Most
+assuredly, unless Christ had had his head cut off, or had been seen
+to be burnt to ashes.  Again, if unexceptionable medical testimony as
+to the completeness of the death had reached us, there would be no
+help for it; we should have to admit that something had happened
+which was at variance with all our experience of the course of
+nature; or again if his legs had been broken, or his feet pierced, we
+could say nothing; but what irreparable mischief is done to any vital
+function of the body by the mere act of crucifixion?  The feet were
+not always, 'nor perhaps generally,' pierced (so Dean Alford tells
+us, quoting from Justin Martyr), nor is there a particle of evidence
+to shew that any exception was made in the present instance.  A man
+who is crucified dies from sheer exhaustion, so that it cannot be
+deemed improbable that he might swoon away, and that every outward
+appearance of death might precede death by several hours.
+
+"Are we to suppose that a handful of ignorant soldiers should be
+above error, when we remember that men have been left for dead, been
+laid out for burial and buried by their best friends--nay, that they
+have over and over again been pronounced dead by skilled physicians,
+when the facilities for knowing the truth were far greater, and when
+a mistake was much less likely to occur, than at the hurried
+Crucifixion of Jesus Christ?  The soldiers would apply no polished
+mirror to the lips, nor make use of any of those tests which, under
+the circumstances, would be absolutely necessary before life could be
+pronounced to be extinct; they would see that the body was lifeless,
+inanimate, to all outward appearance like the few other dead bodies
+which they had probably observed closely; with this they would rest
+contented.
+
+"It is true, they probably believed Christ to be dead at the time
+they handed over the body to his friends, and if we had heard nothing
+more of the matter we might assume that they were right; but the
+reappearance of Christ alive changes the whole complexion of the
+story.  It is not very likely that the Roman soldiers would have been
+mistaken in believing him to be dead, unless the hurry of the whole
+affair, and the order from Pilate, had disposed them to carelessness,
+and to getting the matter done as fast as possible; but it is much
+less likely that a dead man should come to life again than that a
+mistake should have been made about his having being dead.  The
+latter is an event which probably happens every week in one part of
+the world or another; the former has never yet been known.
+
+"It is not probable that a man officially executed should escape
+death; but that a DEAD MAN should escape from it is more improbable
+still; in addition to the enormous preponderance of probability on
+the side of Christ's never having died which arises from this
+consideration alone, we are told many facts which greatly lessen the
+improbability of his having escaped death, inasmuch as the
+Crucifixion was hurried, and the body was immediately delivered to
+friends without the known destruction of any organic function, and
+while still hanging upon the cross.
+
+"Joseph and Nicodemus (supposing that Nicodemus was indeed a party to
+the entombment) may be believed to have thought that Christ was dead
+when they received the body, but they could not refuse him their
+assistance when they found out their mistake, nor, again, could they
+forfeit their high position by allowing it to be known that they had
+restored the life of one who was so obnoxious to the authorities.
+They would be in a very difficult position, and would take the
+prudent course of backing out of the matter at the first moment that
+humanity would allow, of leaving the rest to chance, and of keeping
+their own counsel.  It is noticeable that we never hear of them
+again; for there were no two people in the world better able to know
+whether the Resurrection was miraculous or not, and none who would be
+more deeply interested in favour of the miracle.  They had been
+faithful when the Apostles themselves had failed, and if their faith
+had been so strong while everything pointed in the direction of the
+utter collapse of Christianity, what would it be, according to every
+natural impulse of self-approbation, when so transcendent a miracle
+as a resurrection had been worked almost upon their own premises, and
+upon one whose remains they had generously taken under their
+protection at a time when no others had ventured to shew them
+respect?
+
+"We should have fancied that Mary would have run to Joseph and
+Nicodemus, not to the Apostles; that Joseph and Nicodemus would then
+have sent for the Apostles, or that, to say the least of it, we
+should have heard of these two persons as having been prominent
+members of the Church at Jerusalem; but here again the experience of
+the ordinary course of nature fails us, and we do not find another
+word or hint concerning them.  This may be the result of accident,
+but if so, it is a very unfortunate accident, and we have already had
+a great deal too much of unfortunate accidents, and of truths which
+MAY be truths, but which are uncommonly like exaggeration.  Stories
+are like people, whom we judge of in no small degree by the dress
+they wear, the company they keep, and that subtle indefinable
+something which we call their expression.
+
+"Nevertheless, there arise the questions how far the spear wound
+recorded by the writer of the fourth Gospel must be regarded,
+firstly, as an actual occurrence, and, secondly, as having been
+necessarily fatal, for unless these things are shewn to be
+indisputable we have seen that the balance of probability lies
+greatly 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 wound
+was actually inflicted, and that death must have inevitably followed,
+then the death of Christ is proved.  The Resurrection becomes
+supernatural; the Ascension forthwith ceases to be marvellous; the
+Miraculous Conception, the Temptation in the Wilderness, all the
+other miracles of Christ and his Apostles, become believable at once
+upon so signal a failure of human experience; human experience ceases
+to be a guide at all, inasmuch as it is found to fail on the very
+point where it has been always considered to be most firmly
+established--the remorselessness of the grip of death.  But before we
+can consent to part with the firm ground on which we tread, in the
+confidence of which we live, move, and have our being--the trust in
+the established experience of countless ages--we must prove the
+infliction of the wound and its necessarily fatal character beyond
+all possibility of mistake.  We cannot be expected to reject a
+natural solution of an event however mysterious, and to adopt a
+supernatural in its place, so long as there is any element of doubt
+upon the supernatural side.
+
+"The natural solution of the origin of belief in the Resurrection
+lies very ready to our hands; once admit that Christ was crucified
+hurriedly, that there is no proof of the destruction of any organic
+function of the body, that the body itself was immediately delivered
+to friends, and that thirty-six hours afterwards Christ was seen
+alive, and it is impossible to understand how any human being can
+doubt what he ought to think.  We must own also that once let Joseph
+have kept his own counsel (and he had a great stake to lose if he did
+NOT keep it), once let the Apostles believe that Christ's restoration
+to life was miraculous (and under the circumstances they would be
+sure to think so), and their reason would be so unsettled that in a
+very short time all the recognised and all the apocryphal miracles of
+Christ would pass current with them without a shadow of difficulty."
+
+It will be observed that throughout both this and the preceding
+chapter I have been dealing with those of our opponents who, while
+admitting the reappearances of our Lord, ascribe them to natural
+causes only.  I consider this position to be only second in
+importance to the one taken by Strauss, and as perhaps in some
+respects capable of being supported with an even greater outward
+appearance of probability.  I therefore resolved to combat it, and as
+a preliminary to this, have taken care that it shall be stated in the
+clearest and most definite manner possible.  But it is plain that
+those who accept the fact that our Lord reappeared after the
+Crucifixion differ hardly less widely from Strauss than they do from
+ourselves; it will therefore be expedient to shew how they maintain
+their ground against so formidable an antagonist.  Let it be
+remembered that Strauss and his followers admit that THE DEATH of our
+Lord is proved, while those of our opponents who would deny this,
+nevertheless admit that we can establish THE REAPPEARANCES; it
+follows therefore that each of our most important propositions is
+admitted by one section or other of the enemy, and each section would
+probably be heartily glad to be able to deny what it admits.  Can
+there be any doubt about the significance of this fact?  Would not a
+little reflection be likely to suggest to the distracted host of our
+adversaries that each of its two halves is right, as FAR AS IT GOES,
+but that agreement will only be possible between them when each party
+has learnt that it is in possession of only half the truth, and has
+come to admit both the DEATH OF OUR LORD AND HIS RESURRECTION?
+
+Returning, however, to the manner in which the section of our
+opponents with whom I am now dealing meet Strauss, they may be
+supposed 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 of
+Jesus is clear, unanimous, and connected.'  If this means that the
+Evangelists would certainly know whether Christ died or not, we demur
+to it at once.  Strauss would himself admit that not one of the
+writers who have recorded the facts connected with the Crucifixion
+was an eyewitness of that event, and he must also be aware that the
+very utmost which any of these writers can have KNOWN, was THAT
+CHRIST WAS BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN. DEAD.  It is strange to see Strauss
+so suddenly struck with the clearness, unanimity, and connectedness
+of the Evangelists.  In the very next sentence he goes on to say,
+'Equally fragmentary, full of contradiction and obscurity, is all
+that they tell us of the opportunities of observing him which his
+adherents are supposed to have had after his resurrection.'  Now,
+this seems very unfair, for, after all, the gospel writers are quite
+as unanimous in asserting the main fact that Christ reappeared, as
+they are in asserting that he died; they would seem to be just as
+'clear, unanimous, and connected,' about the former event as the
+latter (for the accounts of the Crucifixion vary not a little), and
+they must have had infinitely better means of knowing whether Christ
+reappeared than whether he had actually died.  There is not the same
+scope for variation in the bare assertion that a man died, as there
+is in the narration of his sayings and doings upon the several
+occasions of his reappearance.  Besides, in support of the
+reappearances, we have the evidence of Paul, who, though not an eye-
+witness, was well acquainted with those who were; whereas no man can
+make more out of the facts recorded concerning the death of Jesus,
+than that he was believed to be dead under circumstances in which
+mistake might easily arise, that there is no reason to think that any
+organic function of the body had been destroyed at the time that it
+was delivered over to friends, and that none of those who testified
+to Christ's death appear to have verified their statement by personal
+inspection of the body.  On these points the Evangelists do indeed
+appear to be 'clear, unanimous, and connected.'
+
+"Later on Strauss is even more unsatisfactory, for on the page which
+follows the one above quoted from, he writes:  'Besides which, it is
+quite evident that this (the natural) view of the resurrection of
+Jesus, apart from the difficulties in which it is involved, does not
+even solve the problem which is here under consideration:  the
+origin, that is, of the Christian Church by faith in the miraculous
+resurrection of the Messiah.  It is impossible that a being who had
+stolen half-dead out of a sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill,
+wanting medical treatment, who required bandaging, strengthening, and
+indulgence, and who still, at last, yielded to his sufferings, could
+have given to the disciples the impression that he was a conqueror
+over death and the grave, the Prince of Life, an impression which lay
+at the bottom of their future ministry.  Such a resuscitation could
+only have weakened the impression which he had made upon them in life
+and in death; at the most could only have given it an elegiac voice,
+but could by no possibility have changed their sorrow into
+enthusiasm, have elevated their reverence into worship.'
+
+"Now, the fallacy in the above is obvious; it assumes that CHRIST was
+in such a state as to be compelled to creep about, weak and ill, &c.,
+and ultimately to die from the effects of his sufferings; whereas
+there is not a word of evidence in support of all this.  He may have
+been weak and ill when he forbade Mary to touch him, on the first
+occasion of his being seen alive; but it would be hard to prove even
+this, and on no subsequent occasion does he shew any sign of
+weakness.  The supposition that he died of the effects of his
+sufferings is quite gratuitous; one would like to know where Strauss
+got it from.  He MAY have done so, or he may have been assassinated
+by some one commissioned by the Jewish Sanhedrim, or he may have felt
+that his work was done, and that any further interference upon his
+part would only mar it, and therefore resolved upon withdrawing
+himself from Palestine for ever, or Joseph of Arimathaea may have
+feared the revolution which he saw approaching--or twenty things
+besides might account for Christ's final disappearance.  The only
+thing, however, which we can say with any certainty is that he
+disappeared, and that there is no reason to believe that he died of
+his wounds.  All over and above this is guesswork.
+
+"Again, if Christ on reappearing had continued in daily intercourse
+with his disciples, it might have been impossible that they should
+not find out that he was in all respects like themselves.  But he
+seems to have been careful to avoid seeing them much.  Paul only
+mentions five reappearances, only one of which was to any
+considerable number of people.  According also to the gospel writers,
+the reappearances were few; they were without preparation, and
+nothing seems to have been known of where he resided between each
+visit; this rarity and mysteriousness of the reappearances of Christ
+(whether dictated by fear of his enemies or by policy) would heighten
+their effect, and prevent the Apostles from knowing much more about
+their master than the simple fact that he was indisputably alive.
+They saw enough to assure them of this, but they did not see enough
+to prevent their being able to regard their master as a conqueror
+over death and the grave, even though it could be shewn (which
+certainly cannot be done) that he continued in infirm health, and
+ultimately died of his wounds.
+
+"If the Apostles had been highly educated English or German
+Professors, it might be hard to believe them capable of making any
+mistake; but they were nothing of the kind; they were ignorant
+Eastern peasants, living in the very thick of every conceivable kind
+of delusive influence.  Strauss himself supposes their minds to have
+been so weak and unhinged that they became easy victims to
+hallucination.  But if this was the case, they would be liable to
+other kinds of credulity, and it seems strange that one who would
+bring them down so low, should be here so suddenly jealous for their
+intelligence.  There is no reason to suppose that Christ WAS weak and
+ill after the first day or two, any more than there is for believing
+that he died of his wounds.  This being so, is it not more simple and
+natural to believe that the Apostles were really misled by a solid
+substratum of strange events--a substratum which seems to be
+supported by all the evidence which we can get--than that the whole
+story of the appearances of Christ after the Crucifixion should be
+due to baseless dreams and fancies?  At any rate, if the Apostles
+could be misled by hallucination, much more might they be misled by a
+natural reappearance, which looked not unlike a supernatural one.
+
+"The belief in the miraculous character of the Resurrection is the
+central point of the whole Christian system.  Let this be once
+believed, and considering the times, which, it must always be
+remembered, were in respect of credulity widely different from our
+own, 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, and
+unfamiliarity with the ideas of accuracy and science, and considering
+also the unquestionable beauty and wisdom of much which is recorded
+as having been taught by Christ, and the really remarkable
+circumstances of the case--we say, once let the Resurrection be
+believed to be miraculous, and the rest is clear; there is no further
+mystery about the origin of the Christian religion.
+
+"So the matter has now come to this pass, that we are to jeopardise
+our faith in all human experience, if we are unable to see our way
+clearly out of a few words about a spear wound, recorded as having
+been inflicted in a distant country nearly two thousand years ago, by
+a writer concerning whom we are entirely ignorant, and whose
+connection with any eye-witness of the events which he records is a
+matter of pure conjecture.  We will see about this hereafter; all
+that 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 of
+the arguments which have led our opponents as well as the Dean of
+Canterbury, and I may add, with due apology, myself, to conclude that
+nothing is known as to the severity or purpose of the spear wound.
+The case, therefore, of our adversaries will rest thus:- that there
+is not only no sufficient reason for believing that Christ died upon
+the cross, but that there are the strongest conceivable reasons for
+believing that He did not die; that the shortness of time during
+which He remained upon the cross, the immediate delivery of the body
+to friends, and, above all, the subsequent reappearance alive, are
+ample grounds for arriving at such a conclusion.  They add further
+that it would seem a monstrous supposition to believe that a good and
+merciful God should have designed to redeem the world by the
+infliction of such awful misery upon His own Son, and yet determined
+to condemn every one who did not believe in this design, in spite of
+such a deficiency of evidence that disbelief would appear to be a
+moral obligation.  No good God, they say, would have left a matter of
+such unutterable importance in a state of such miserable uncertainty,
+when the addition of a very small amount of testimony would have been
+sufficient to establish it.
+
+In the two following chapters I shall show the futility and
+irrelevancy of the above reasoning--if, indeed, that can be called
+reasoning which is from first to last essentially unreasonable.
+Plausible as, in parts, it may have appeared, I have little doubt
+that the reader will have already detected the greater number of the
+fallacies which underlie it.  But before I can allow myself to enter
+upon the welcome task of refutation, a few more words from our
+opponents will yet be necessary.  However strongly I disapprove of
+their views, I trust they will admit that I have throughout expressed
+them as one who thoroughly understands them.  I am convinced that the
+course I have taken is the only one which can lead to their being
+brought into the way of truth, and I mean to persevere in it until I
+have explained the views which they take concerning our Lord's
+Ascension, with no less clearness than I shewed forth their opinions
+concerning the Resurrection.
+
+"In St. Matthew's Gospel," they will say, "we find no trace whatever
+of any story concerning the Ascension.  The writer had either never
+heard anything about the matter at all, or did not consider it of
+sufficient importance to deserve notice.
+
+"Dean Alford, indeed, maintains otherwise.  In his notes on the
+words, 'And lo!  I am with you always unto the end of the world,' he
+says, 'These words imply and set forth the Ascension'; it is true
+that 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 his
+disciples to the end of time; but how do they set forth the fact that
+his body was seen by a number of people to rise into the air and
+actually to mount up far into the region of the clouds?
+
+"The fact is simply this--and nobody can know it better than Dean
+Alford--that Matthew tells us nothing about the Ascension.
+
+"The last verses of Mark's Gospel are admitted by Dean Alford himself
+to be not genuine, but even in these the subject is dismissed in a
+single verse, and although it is stated that Christ was received into
+Heaven, there is not a single word to imply that any one was supposed
+to have seen him actually on his way thither.
+
+"The author of the fourth Gospel is also silent concerning the
+Ascension.  There is not a word, nor hint, nor faintest trace of any
+knowledge of the fact, unless an allusion be detected in the words,
+'What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascending where he was
+before?' (John vi., 62) in reference to which passage Dean Alford, in
+his note on Luke xxiv., 52, writes as follows:- 'And might not we
+have concluded from the wording of John vi., 62, that our Lord must
+have intended an ascension INSIGHT OF SOME OF THOSE TO WHOM HE SPOKE,
+and that the Evangelist GIVES THAT HINT, BY RECORDING THOSE WORDS
+WITHOUT COMMENT, THAT HE HAD SEEN IT?'  That is to say, we are to
+conclude that the writer of the fourth Gospel actually SAW the
+Ascension, because he tells us that Christ uttered the words, 'What
+and 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 is
+there for thinking that that work is genuine?  Let us make another
+extract 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 had
+related regarding the life of Christ; nor Polycarp, who was himself a
+disciple of the Apostle John; nor Barnabas, nor Clement of Rome, in
+their epistles; nor, lastly, Ignatius (in his genuine writings),
+makes any mention of, or allusion to, this gospel.  SO THAT IN THE
+MOST ANCIENT CIRCLE OF ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY, IT APPEARS TO BE
+UNKNOWN. OR NOT RECOGNISED.'  We may add that there is no trace of
+its existence before the latter half of the second century, and that
+the internal evidence against its genuineness appears to be more and
+more conclusive the more it is examined.
+
+"St. Paul, when enumerating the last appearances of his master, in a
+passage where the absence of any allusion to the Ascension is almost
+conclusive as to his never having heard a word about it, is also
+silent.  In no part of his genuine writings does he give any sign of
+his having been aware that any story was in existence as to the
+manner 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 than
+half a century after the supposed event, when few, or more probably
+none, of those who were supposed to have seen it were either living
+or within reach to contradict it.  Luke writes (xxiv., 51), 'And it
+came to pass that while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and
+carried up into Heaven.'  This is the only account of the Ascension
+given in any part of the Gospels which can be considered genuine.  It
+gives Bethany as the place of the miracle, whereas, if Dean Alford is
+right 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 some
+Christian writers will maintain that it happened both at Bethany and
+in Galilee.
+
+"In his subsequent work, written some sixty or seventy years after
+the Ascension, St. Luke gives us that more detailed account which is
+commonly present to the imagination of all men (thanks to the Italian
+painters), when the Ascension is alluded to.  The details, it would
+seem, came to his knowledge after he had written his Gospel, and many
+a long year after Matthew and Mark and Paul had written.  How he came
+by the additional details we do not know.  Nobody seems to care to
+know.  He must have had them revealed to him, or been told them by
+some one, and that some one, whoever he was, doubtless knew what he
+was saying, and all Europe at one time believed the story, and this
+is sufficient proof that mistake was impossible.
+
+"It is indisputable that from the very earliest ages of the Church
+there existed a belief that Christ was at the right hand of God; but
+no one who professes to have seen him on his way thither has left a
+single word of record.  It is easy to believe that the facts may have
+been revealed in a night vision, or communicated in one or other of
+the many ways in which extraordinary circumstances ARE communicated,
+during the years of oral communication and enthusiasm which elapsed
+between the supposed Ascension of Christ and the writing of Luke's
+second work.  It is not surprising that a firm belief in Christ's
+having survived death should have arisen in consequence of the actual
+circumstances connected with the Crucifixion and entombment.  Was it
+then strange that this should develop itself into the belief that he
+was now in Heaven, sitting at the right hand of God the Father?  And
+finally was it strange that a circumstantial account of the manner in
+which he left this earth should be eagerly accepted?"
+
+[In an appendix at the end of the book I have given the extracts from
+the Gospels which are necessary for a full comprehension of the
+preceding chapters.--W. B. O.]
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--THE CHRIST-IDEAL
+
+
+
+I have completed a task painful to myself and the reader.  Painful to
+myself inasmuch as I am humiliated upon remembering the power which
+arguments, so shallow and so easily to be refuted, once had upon me;
+painful to the reader, as everything must be painful which even
+appears to throw doubt upon the most sublime event that has happened
+in human history.  How little does all that has been written above
+touch the real question at issue, yet, what self-discipline and
+mental training is required before we learn to distinguish the
+essential from the unessential.
+
+Before, however, we come to close quarters with our opponents
+concerning the views put forward in the preceding chapters, it will
+be well to consider two questions of the gravest and most interesting
+character, questions which will probably have already occurred to the
+reader with such force as to demand immediate answer.  They are
+these.
+
+Firstly, what will be the consequences of admitting any considerable
+deviation from historical accuracy on the part of the sacred writers?
+
+Secondly, how can it be conceivable that God should have permitted
+inaccuracy or obscurity in the evidence concerning the Divine
+commission of His Son?
+
+If God so loved the World that He sent His only begotten Son into it
+to rescue those who believed in Him from destruction, how is it
+credible that He should not have so arranged matters as that all
+should find it easy to believe?  If He wanted to save mankind and
+knew that the only way in which mankind could be saved was by
+believing certain facts, how can it be that the records of the facts
+should have been allowed to fall into confusion?
+
+To both these questions I trust that the following answers may appear
+conclusive.
+
+I.  As regards the consequences which may be supposed to follow upon
+giving up any part of the sacred writings, no matter how seemingly
+unimportant, it is undoubtedly true that to many minds they have
+appeared too dangerous to be even contemplated.  Thus through fear of
+some supposed unutterable consequences which would happen to the
+cause of truth if truth were spoken, people profess to believe in the
+genuineness of many passages in the Bible which are universally
+acknowledged by competent judges of every shade of theological
+opinion to be interpolations into the original text.  To say nothing
+of the Old Testament, where many whole books are of disputed
+genuineness or authenticity, there are portions of the New which none
+will seriously defend;--for example, the last verses of St. Mark's
+Gospel,--containing, as they do, the sentence of damnation against
+all who do not believe--the second half of the third, and the whole
+of the fourth verse of the fifth chapter of St. John's Gospel, the
+story of the woman taken in adultery, and probably the whole of the
+last chapter of St. John's Gospel, not to mention the Epistle to the
+Hebrews, the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and to the Ephesians, the
+Epistles of Peter and James, the famous verses as to the three
+witnesses in the First Epistle of St. John, and perhaps also the book
+of Revelation.  These are passages and works about which there is
+either no doubt at all as to their not being genuine, or over which
+there hangs so much uncertainty that no dependence can be placed upon
+them.
+
+But over and above these, there are not a few parts of each of the
+Gospels which, though of undisputed genuineness, cannot be accepted
+as historical; thus the account of the Resurrection given by St.
+Matthew, and parts of those by Luke and Mark, the cursing of the
+barren fig-tree, and the prophecies of His Resurrection ascribed to
+our Lord Himself, will not stand the tests of criticism which we are
+bound to apply to them if we are to exercise the right of private
+judgement; instead of handing ourselves over to a priesthood as the
+sole custodians and interpreters of the Bible.  It has been said by
+some that the miracle of the penny found in the fish's mouth should
+be included in the above category, but it should be remembered that
+we have only the injunction of our Lord to St. Peter that he should
+catch the fish and the promise that he should find the penny in its
+mouth, but that we have no account of the sequel, it is therefore
+possible that in the event of St. Peter's faith having failed him he
+may have procured the money from some other source, and that thus the
+miracle, though undoubtedly intended, was never actually performed.
+How unnecessary therefore as well as presumptuous are the
+Rationalistic interpretations which have been put upon the event by
+certain German writers!
+
+Now there are few, if any, who would be so illiberal as to wish for
+the exclusion from the sacred volume of all those books or passages
+which, though neither genuine nor perhaps edifying, have remained in
+the Canon of Scripture for many centuries.  Any serious attempt to
+reconstruct the Canon would raise a theological storm which would not
+subside in this century.  The work could never be done perfectly, and
+even if it could, it would have to be done at the expense of tearing
+all Christendom in pieces.  The passages do little or no harm where
+they are, and have received the sanction of time; let them therefore
+by all means remain in their present position.  But the question is
+still forced upon us whether the consequences of openly admitting the
+certain spuriousness of many passages, and the questionable nature of
+others as regards morality, genuineness and authenticity, should be
+feared as being likely to prejudice the main doctrines of
+Christianity.
+
+The answer is very plain.  He who has vouchsafed to us the Christian
+dispensation may be safely trusted to provide that no harm shall
+happen, either to it or to us, from an honest endeavour to attain the
+truth concerning it.  What have we to do with consequences?  These
+are in the hands of God.  Our duty is to seek out the truth in prayer
+and humility, and when we believe that we have found it, to cleave to
+it 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 is
+wiser to gloss over this or that, and who consider it "injudicious"
+to announce the whole truth in connection with Christianity, should
+have learnt by this time that no admission which can by any
+possibility be required of them can be so perilous to the cause of
+Christ as the appearance of shirking investigation.  It has already
+been insisted upon that cowardice is at the root of the infidelity
+which we see around us; the want of faith in the power of truth which
+exists in certain pious but timid hearts has begotten utter unbelief
+in the minds of all superficial investigators into Christian
+evidences.  Such persons see that the defenders have something in the
+background, something which they would cling to although they are
+secretly aware that they cannot justly claim it.  This is enough for
+many, and hence more harm is done by fear than could ever have been
+done by boldness.  Boldness goes out into the fight, and if in the
+wrong gets slain, childless.  Fear stays at home and is prolific of a
+brood of falsehoods.
+
+It is immoral to regard consequences at all, where truth and justice
+are concerned; the being impregnated with this conviction to the
+inmost core of one's heart is an axiom of common honesty--one of the
+essential features which distinguish a good man from a bad one.
+Nevertheless, to make it plain that the consequences of outspoken
+truthfulness in connection with the scriptural writings would have no
+harmful effect whatever, but would, on the contrary, be of the utmost
+service as removing a stumbling-block from the way of many--let us
+for the moment suppose that very much more would have to be given up
+than can ever be demanded.
+
+Suppose we were driven to admit that nothing in the life of our Lord
+can be certainly depended upon beyond the facts that He was begotten
+by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary; that He worked many miracles
+upon earth, and delivered St. Matthew's version of the sermon on the
+mount and most of the parables as we now have them; finally, that He
+was crucified, dead, and buried, that He rose again from the dead
+upon the third day, and ascended unto Heaven.  Granting for the sake
+of argument that we could rely on no other facts, what would follow?
+Nothing which could in any way impair the living power of
+Christianity.
+
+The essentials of Christianity, i.e., a belief in the Divinity of the
+Saviour and in His Resurrection and Ascension, have stood, and will
+stand, for ever against any attacks that can be made upon them, and
+these are probably the only facts in which belief has ever been
+absolutely necessary for salvation; the answer, therefore, to the
+question what ill consequences would arise from the open avowal of
+things which every student must know to be the fact concerning the
+biblical writings is that there would be none at all.  The Christ-
+ideal which, after all, is the soul and spirit of Christianity would
+remain precisely where it was, while its recognition would be far
+more general, owing to the departure on the part of its apologists
+from certain lines of defence which are irreconcilable with the ideal
+itself.
+
+II.  Returning to the objection how it could be possible that God
+should have left the records of our Lord's history in such a vague
+and fragmentary condition, if it were really of such intense
+importance for the world to understand it and believe in it, we find
+ourselves face to face with a question of far greater importance and
+difficulty.
+
+The old theory that God desired to test our faith, and that there
+would be no merit in believing if the evidence were such as to
+commend itself at once to our understanding, is one which need only
+be stated to be set aside.  It is blasphemy against the goodness of
+God 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 to
+violate one of the very most precious of God's own gifts.  There is
+an ingenious cruelty about such conduct which it is revolting even to
+imagine.  Indeed, the whole theory reduces our Heavenly Father to a
+level of wisdom and goodness far below our own; and this is
+sufficient answer to it.
+
+But when, turning aside from the above, we try to adopt some other
+and more reasonable view, we naturally set ourselves to consider why
+the Almighty should have required belief in the Divinity of His Son
+from man.  What is there in this belief on man's part which can be so
+grateful to God that He should make it a sine qua non for man's
+salvation?  As regards Himself, how can it matter to Him what man
+should think of Him?  Nay, it must be for man's own good that the
+belief is demanded.
+
+And why?  Surely we can see plainly that it is the beauty of the
+Christ-ideal which constitutes the working power of Christianity over
+the hearts and lives of men, leading them to that highest of all
+worships which consists in imitation.  Now the sanction which is
+given to this ideal by belief in the Divinity of our Lord, raises it
+at once above all possibility of criticism.  If it had not been so
+sanctioned it might have been considered open to improvement; one
+critic would have had this, and another that; comparison would have
+been made with ideals of purely human origin such as the Greek ideal,
+exemplified in the work of Phidias, and in later times with the
+mediaeval Italian ideal, as deducible from the best fifteenth and
+early sixteenth Italian painting and sculpture, the Madonnas of
+Bellini and Raphael, or the St. George of Donatello; or again with
+the ideal derivable from the works of our own Shakespeare, and there
+are some even now among those who deny the Divinity of Christ who
+will profess that each one of these ideals is more universal, more
+fitted for the spiritual food of a man, and indeed actually higher,
+than that presented by the life and death of our Saviour.  But once
+let the Divine origin of this last ideal be admitted, and there can
+be no further uncertainty; hence the absolute necessity for belief in
+Christ's Divinity as closing the most important of all questions,
+Whereunto should a man endeavour to liken both himself and his
+children?
+
+Seeing then that we have reasonable ground for thinking that belief
+in the Divinity of our Lord is mainly required of us in order to
+exalt our sense of the paramount importance of following and obeying
+the life and commands of Christ, it is natural also to suppose THAT
+WHATEVER MAY HAVE HAPPENED TO THE RECORDS OF THAT LIFE should have
+been ordained with a view to the enhancing of the preciousness of the
+ideal.
+
+Now, the fragmentary character, and the partial obscurity--I might
+have almost written, the incomparable chiaroscuro--of the
+Evangelistic writings have added to the value of our Lord's character
+as an ideal, not only in the case of Christians, but as bringing the
+Christ-ideal within the reach and comprehension of an infinitely
+greater number of minds than it could ever otherwise have appealed
+to.  It is true that those who are insensible to spiritual
+influences, and whose materialistic instinct leads them to deny
+everything which is not as clearly demonstrable by external evidence
+as a fact in chemistry, geography, or mathematics, will fail to find
+the hardness, definition, tightness, and, let me add, littleness of
+outline, in which their souls delight; they will find rather the
+gloom and gleam of Rembrandt, or the golden twilight of the
+Venetians, the losing and the finding, and the infinite liberty of
+shadow; and this they hate, inasmuch as it taxes their imagination,
+which is no less deficient than their power of sympathy; they would
+have all found, as in one of those laboured pictures wherein each
+form is as an inflated bladder and, has its own uncompromising
+outline remorselessly insisted upon.
+
+Looking to the ideals of purely human creation which have come down
+to us from old times, do we find that the Theseus suffers because we
+are unable to realise to ourselves the precise features of the
+original?  Or again do the works of John Bellini suffer because the
+hand of the painter was less dexterous than his intention pure?  It
+is not what a man has actually put upon his canvas, but what he makes
+us feel that he felt, which makes the difference between good and bad
+in painting.  Bellini's hand was cunning enough to make us feel what
+he intended, and did his utmost to realise; but he has not realised
+it, and the same hallowing effect which has been wrought upon the
+Theseus by decay (to the enlarging of its spiritual influence), has
+been wrought upon the work of Bellini by incapacity--the incapacity
+of the painter to utter perfectly the perfect thought which was
+within.  The early Italian paintings have that stamp of individuality
+upon them which assures us that they are not only portraits, but as
+faithful portraits as the painter could make them, more than this we
+know not, but more is unnecessary.
+
+Do we not detect an analogy to this in the records of the
+Evangelists?  Do we not see the child-like unself-seeking work of
+earnest and loving hearts, whose innocence and simplicity more than
+atone for their many shortcomings, their distorted renderings, and
+their omissions?  We can see THROUGH these things as through a glass
+darkly, or as one looking upon some ineffable masterpiece of Venetian
+portraiture by the fading light of an autumnal evening, when the
+beauty of the picture is enhanced a hundredfold by the gloom and
+mystery of dusk.  We may indeed see less of the actual lineaments
+themselves, but the echo is ever more spiritually tuneful than the
+sound, and the echo we find within us.  Our imagination is in closer
+communion with our longings than the hand of any painter.
+
+Those who relish definition, and definition only, are indeed kept
+away from Christianity by the present condition of the records, but
+even if the life of our Lord had been so definitely rendered as to
+find a place in their system, would it have greatly served their
+souls?  And would it not repel hundreds and thousands of others, who
+find in the suggestiveness of the sketch a completeness of
+satisfaction, which no photographic reproduction could have given?
+The above may be difficult to understand, but let me earnestly
+implore the reader to endeavour to master its import.
+
+People misunderstand the aim and scope of religion.  Religion is only
+intended 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 ever
+kindled by a mechanical drawing?  How cold and dead were science
+unless supplemented by art and by religion!  Not joined with them,
+for the merest touch of these things impairs scientific value--which
+depends essentially upon accuracy, and not upon any feeling for the
+beautiful and lovable.  In like manner the merest touch of science
+chills the warmth of sentiment--the spiritual life.  The mechanical
+drawing is spoiled by being made artistic, and the work of the artist
+by becoming mechanical.  The aim of the one is to teach men how to
+construct, of the other how to feel.
+
+For the due conservation therefore of both the essential requisites
+of human well-being--science, and religion--it is requisite that they
+be kept asunder and reserved for separate use at different times.
+Religion is the mistress of the arts, and every art which does not
+serve religion truly is doomed to perish as a lying and unprofitable
+servant.  Science is external to religion, being a separate
+dispensation, a distinct revelation to mankind, whereby we are put
+into full present possession of more and more of God's modes of
+dealing with material things, according as we become more fitted to
+receive them through the apprehension of those modes which have been
+already laid open to us.
+
+We ought not therefore to have expected scientific accuracy from the
+Gospel records--much less should we be required to believe that such
+accuracy exists.  Does any great artist ever dream of aiming directly
+at imitation?  He aims at representation--not at imitation.  In order
+to attain true mastery here, he must spend years in learning how to
+see; and then no less time in learning how NOT to see.  Finally, he
+learns how to translate.  Take Turner for example.  Who conveys so
+living an impression of the face of nature?  Yet go up to his canvas
+and what does one find thereon?  Imitation?  Nay--blotches and daubs
+of paint; the combination of these daubs, each one in itself when
+taken alone absolutely untrue, forms an impression which is quite
+truthful.  No combination of minute truths in a picture will give so
+faithful a representation of nature as a wisely arranged tissue of
+untruths.
+
+Absolute reproduction is impossible even to the photograph.  The work
+of a great artist is far more truthful than any photograph; but not
+even the greatest artist can convey to our minds the whole truth of
+nature; no human hand nor pigments can expound all that lies hidden
+in "Nature's infinite book of secrecy"; the utmost that can be done
+is to convey an impression, and if the impression is to be conveyed
+truthfully, the means must often be of the most unforeseen character.
+The old Pre-Raphaelites aimed at absolute reproduction.  They were
+succeeded by a race of men who saw all that their predecessors had
+seen, but also something higher.  The Van Eycks and Memling paved the
+way 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, and
+Tintoretto; Perugino was succeeded by Raphael.  It is everywhere the
+same story; a reverend but child-like worship of the letter, followed
+by a manful apprehension of the spirit, and, alas! in due time by an
+almost total disregard of the letter; then rant and cant and bombast,
+till the value of the letter is reasserted.  In theology the early
+men are represented by the Evangelicals, the times of utter decadence
+by infidelity--the middle race of giants is yet to come, and will be
+found in those who, while seeing something far beyond either minute
+accuracy or minute inaccuracy, are yet fully alive both to the letter
+and to the spirit of the Gospels.
+
+Again, do not the seeming wrongs which the greatest ideals of purely
+human origin have suffered at the hands of time, add to their value
+instead of detracting from it?  Is it not probable that if we were to
+see the glorious fragments from the Parthenon, the Theseus and the
+Ilyssus, or even the Venus of Milo, in their original and unmutilated
+condition, we should find that they appealed to us much less forcibly
+than they do at present?  All ideals gain by vagueness and lose by
+definition, inasmuch as more scope is left for the imagination of the
+beholder, who can thus fill in the missing detail according to his
+own spiritual needs.  This is how it comes that nothing which is
+recent, whether animate or inanimate, can serve as an ideal unless it
+is adorned by more than common mystery and uncertainty.  A new
+Cathedral is necessarily very ugly.  There is too much found and too
+little lost.  Much less could an absolutely perfect Being be of the
+highest value as an ideal, as long as He could be clearly seen, for
+it is impossible that He could be known as perfect by imperfect men,
+and His very perfections must perforce appear as blemishes to any but
+perfect critics.  To give therefore an impression of perfection, to
+create an absolutely unsurpassable ideal, it became essential that
+the actual image of the original should become blurred and lost,
+whereon the beholder now supplies from his own imagination that which
+is TO HIM more perfect than the original, though objectively it must
+be infinitely less so.
+
+It is probably to this cause that the incredulity of the Apostles
+during our Lord's life-time must be assigned.  The ideal was too near
+them, and too far above their comprehension; for it must be always
+remembered that the convincing power of miracles in the days of the
+Apostles must have been greatly weakened by the current belief in
+their being events of no very unusual occurrence, and in the
+existence both of good and evil spirits who could take possession of
+men and compel them to do their bidding.  A resurrection from the
+dead or a restoration of sight to the blind, must have seemed even
+less portentous to them, than an unusually skilful treatment of
+disease by a physician is to us.  We can therefore understand how it
+happened that the faith of the Apostles was so little to be depended
+upon even up to the Crucifixion, inasmuch as the convincing power of
+miracles had been already, so to speak, exhausted, a fact which may
+perhaps explain the early withdrawal of the power to work them; we
+cannot indeed believe that it could have been so far weakened as to
+make the Apostles disregard the prophecies of their Master that He
+should rise from the dead, if He had ever uttered them, and we have
+already seen reason to think that these prophecies are the ex post
+facto handiwork of time; but the incredulity of the disciples, when
+seen through the light now thrown upon it, loses that wholly
+inexplicable character which it would otherwise bear.
+
+But to return to the subject of the ideal presented by the life and
+death of our Lord.  In the earliest days of the Church there can have
+been no want of the most complete and irrefragable evidence for the
+objective reality of the miracles, and especially of the Resurrection
+and Ascension.  The character of Christ would also stand out revealed
+to all, with the most copious fulness of detail.  The limits within
+which so sharply defined an ideal could be acceptable were narrow,
+but as the radius of Christian influence increased, so also would the
+vagueness and elasticity of the ideal; and as the elasticity of the
+ideal, so also the range of its influence.
+
+A beneficent and truly marvellous provision for the greater
+complexity of man's spiritual needs was thus provided by a gradual
+loss of detail and gain of breadth.  Enough evidence was given in the
+first instance to secure authoritative sanction for the ideal.
+During the first thirty or forty years after the death of our Lord no
+one could be in want of evidence, and the guilt of unbelief is
+therefore brought prominently forward.  Then came the loss of detail
+which was necessary in order to secure the universal acceptability of
+the ideal; but the same causes which blurred the distinctness of the
+features, involved the inevitable blurring of no small portions of
+the external evidences whereby the Divine origin of the ideal was
+established.  The primary external evidence became less and less
+capable of compelling instantaneous assent, according as it was less
+wanted, owing to the greater mass of secondary evidence, and to the
+growth of appreciation of the internal evidences, a growth which
+would be fostered by the growing adaptability of the ideal.
+
+Some thirty or forty years, then, from the death of our Saviour the
+case would stand thus.  The Christ-ideal would have become infinitely
+more vague, and hence infinitely more universal:  but the causes
+which had thus added to its value would also have destroyed whatever
+primary evidence was superabundant, and the vagueness which had
+overspread the ideal would have extended itself in some measure over
+the 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 the
+ideal, and too little distinctness in the evidences.  It became
+necessary therefore to provide against this danger.
+
+PRECISELY AT THAT EPOCH THE GOSPELS MADE THEIR APPEARANCE.  Not
+simultaneously, not in concert, and not in perfect harmony with each
+other, yet with the error distributed skilfully among them, as in a
+well-tuned instrument wherein each string is purposely something out
+of tune with every other.  Their divergence of aim, and different
+authorship, secured the necessary breadth of effect when the accounts
+were viewed together; their universal recognition afforded the
+necessary permanency, and arrested further decay.  If I may be
+pardoned for using another illustration, I would say that as the
+roundness of the stereoscopic image can only be attained by the
+combination of two distinct pictures, neither of them in perfect
+harmony with the other, so the highest possible conception of Christ,
+cannot otherwise be produced than through the discrepancies of the
+Gospels.
+
+From the moment of the appearing of the Gospels, and, I should add,
+of the Epistles of St. Paul, the external evidences of Christianity
+became secured from further change; as they were then, so are they
+now, they can neither be added to nor subtracted from; they have lain
+as it were sleeping, till the time should come to awaken them.  And
+the time is surely now, for there has arisen a very numerous and
+increasing class of persons, whose habits of mind unfit them for
+appreciating the value of vagueness, but who have each one of them a
+soul which may be lost or saved, and on whose behalf the evidences
+for the authority whereby the Christ-ideal is sanctioned, should be
+restored to something like their former sharpness.  Christianity
+contains provision for all needs upon their arising.  The work of
+restoration is easy.  It demands this much only--the recognition that
+time has made incrustations upon some parts of the evidences, and
+that 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 not
+to the disturbance of their present form and arrangement.
+
+The above explanation of the causes for the obscurity which rests
+upon much of our Lord's life and teaching, may give us ground for
+hoping that some of those who have failed to feel the force of the
+external evidences hitherto, may yet be saved, provided they have
+fully 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 so
+imperatively insisted upon, in order that the ideal might thus be
+exalted above controversy, and made more sacred in the eyes of men
+than it could have been if referable to a purely human source.  May
+not, then, one who recognises the ideal as his summum bonum find
+grace although he knows not, or even cares not, how it should have
+come to be so?  For even a sceptic who regarded the whole New
+Testament as a work of art, a poem, a pure fiction from beginning to
+end, and who revered it for its intrinsic beauty only, as though it
+were a picture or statue, even such a person might well find that it
+engendered in him an ideal of goodness and power and love and human
+sympathy, which could be derived from no other source.  If, then, our
+blessed Lord so causes the sun of His righteousness to shine upon
+these men, shall we presume to say that He will not in another world
+restore them to that full communion with Himself which can only come
+from a belief in His Divinity?
+
+We can understand that it should have been impossible to proclaim
+this in the earliest ages of the Church, inasmuch as no weakening of
+the sanctions of the ideal could be tolerated, but are we bound to
+extend the operation of the many passages condemnatory of unbelief to
+a time so remote as our own, and to circumstances so widely different
+from those under which they were uttered?  Do we so extend the
+command not to eat things strangled or blood, or the assertion of St.
+Paul that the unmarried state is higher than the married?  May we not
+therefore hope that certain kinds of unbelief have become less
+hateful in the sight of God inasmuch as they are less dangerous to
+the universal acceptance of our Lord as the one model for the
+imitation of all men?  For, after all, it is not belief in the facts
+which constitutes the essence of Christianity, but rather the being
+so impregnated with love at the contemplation of Christ that
+imitation becomes almost instinctive; this it is which draws the
+hearts of men to God the Father, far more than any intellectual
+belief that God sent our Lord into the world, ordaining that he
+should be crucified and rise from the dead.  Christianity is
+addressed rather to the infinite spirit of man than to his finite
+intelligence, and the believing in Christ through love is more
+precious in the sight of God than any loving through belief.  May we
+not hope, then, that those whose love is great may in the end find
+acceptance, though their belief is small?  We dare not answer this
+positively; but we know that there are times of transition in the
+clearness of the Christian evidences as in all else, and the
+treatment of those whose lot is cast in such times will surely not
+escape the consideration of our Heavenly Father.
+
+But with reference to the many-sidedness of the Christ-ideal, as
+having been part of the design of God, and not attainable otherwise
+than as the creation of destruction--as coming out of the waste of
+time--it is clear that the perception of such a design could only be
+an offspring of modern thought; the conception of such an apparently
+self-frustrating scheme could only arise in minds which were familiar
+with the manner in which it is necessary "to hound nature in her
+wanderings" before her feints can be eluded, and her prevarications
+brought to book.  A deep distrust of the over-obvious is wanted,
+before men can be brought to turn aside from objections which at the
+first blush appear to be very serious, and to take refuge in
+solutions which seem harder than the problems which they are intended
+to solve.  What a shock must the discovery of the rotation of the
+earth have given to the moral sense of the age in which it was made.
+How it contradicted all human experience.  How it must have outraged
+common sense.  How it must have encouraged scepticism even about the
+most obvious truths of morality.  No question could henceforth be
+considered settled; everything seemed to require reopening; for if
+man had once been deceived by Nature so entirely, if he had been so
+utterly led astray and deluded by the plausibility of her pretence
+that the earth was immovably fixed, what else, that seemed no less
+incontrovertible, might not prove no less false?
+
+It is probable that the opposition to Galileo on the part of the
+Roman church was as much due to some such feelings as these, as to
+theological objections; the discovery was felt to unsettle not only
+the foundations of the earth, but those of every branch of human
+knowledge and polity, and hence to be an outrage upon morality
+itself.  A man has no right to be very much in advance of other
+people; he is as a sheep, which may lead the mob, but must not stray
+forward a quarter of a mile in front of it; if he does this, he must
+be 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 to
+keep him company; the shock to morality and the encouragement to
+lawlessness do more harm than his discovery can atone for.  Let him
+hold 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 the
+Christ ideal in consequence of the inaccuracies and inconsistencies
+of the Gospels--reflections which must now occur to any one--been put
+forward a hundred years ago, they would have met justly with the
+severest condemnation.  But now, even those to whom they may not have
+occurred already will have little difficulty in admitting their
+force.
+
+But be this as it may, it is certain that the inability to understand
+how the sense of Christ in the souls of men could be strengthened by
+the loss of much knowledge of His character, and of the facts
+connected with His history, lies at the root of the error even of the
+Apostle St. Paul, who exclaims with his usual fervour, but with less
+than his usual wisdom, "Has Christ been divided?" (I. Cor. i., 13).
+"Yea," we may make answer, "He is divided and is yet divisible that
+all may share in Him."  St. Paul himself had realised that it was the
+spiritual value of the Christ-ideal which was the purifier and
+refresher of our souls, inasmuch as he elsewhere declares that even
+though he had known Christ Himself after the flesh, he knew Him no
+more; the spiritual Christ, that is to say the spirit of Christ as
+recognisable by the spirits of men, was to him all in all.  But he
+lived too near the days of our Lord for a full comprehension of the
+Christian scheme, and it is possible that had he known Christ after
+the flesh, his soul might have been less capable of recognising the
+spiritual essence, rather than more so.  Have we here a faint
+glimmering of the motive of the Almighty in not having allowed the
+Gentile Apostle to see Christ after the flesh?  We cannot say.  But
+we may say this much with certainty, that had he been living now, St.
+Paul would have rejoiced at the many-sidedness of Christ, which he
+appears to have hardly recognised in his own life-time.
+
+The apparently contradictory portraits of our Lord which we find in
+the Gospels--so long a stumbling-block to unbelievers--are now seen
+to be the very means which enable men of all ranks, and all shades of
+opinion, to accept Christ as their ideal; they are like the sea,
+which from having seemed the most impassable of all objects, turns
+out to be the greatest highway of communication.  To the artisan, for
+instance, who may have long been out of work, or who may have
+suffered from the greed and selfishness of his employers, or again,
+to the farm labourer who has been discharged perhaps at the approach
+of winter, the parable of "the Labourers in the Vineyard" offers
+itself as a divinely sanctioned picture of the dealings of God with
+man; few but those who have mixed much with the less educated
+classes, can have any idea of the priceless comfort which this
+parable affords daily to those whose lot it has been to remain
+unemployed when their more fortunate brethren have been in full work.
+How many of the poor, again, are drawn to Christianity by the parable
+of Dives and Lazarus.  How many a humble-minded Christian while
+reflecting upon the hardness of his lot, and tempted to cast a
+longing eye upon the luxuries which are at the command of his richer
+neighbours, is restrained from seriously coveting them, by
+remembering the awful fate of Dives, and the happy future which was
+in store for Lazarus.  "Dives," they exclaim, "in his life-time
+possessed good things and in like manner Lazarus evil things, but now
+the one is comforted in the bosom of Abraham, and the other tormented
+in a lake of fire."  They remember, also, that it is easier for a
+camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter
+into the kingdom of Heaven.
+
+It has been said by some that the poor are thus encouraged to gloat
+over the future misery of the rich, and that many of the sayings
+ascribed to our Lord have an unhealthy influence over their minds.  I
+remember to have thought so once myself, but I have seen reason to
+change my mind.  Hope is given by these sayings to many whose lives
+would be otherwise very nearly hopeless, and though I fully grant
+that the parable of Dives and Lazarus can only afford comfort to the
+very poor, yet it is most certain that it DOES afford comfort to this
+numerous class, and helps to keep them contented with many things
+which they would not otherwise endure.
+
+On the other hand, though the poor are first provided for, the rich
+are not left without their full share of consolation.  Joseph of
+Arimathaea was rich, and modern criticism forbids us to believe that
+the parable of Dives and Lazarus was ever actually spoken by our
+Lord--at any rate not in its present form.  Neither are the children
+of the rich forgotten; the son who repents at length of a course of
+extravagant or riotous living is encouraged to return to virtue, and
+to seek reconciliation with his father, by reflecting upon the
+parable of the Prodigal Son, wherein he will find an everlasting
+model for the conduct of all earthly fathers.  I will say nothing of
+the parable of the Unjust Steward, for it is one of which the
+interpretation is most uncertain; nevertheless I am sure that it
+affords comfort to a very large number of persons.
+
+Christ came not to the whole, but to those that were sick; he came
+not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.  Even our fallen
+sisters are remembered in the story of the woman taken in adultery,
+which reminds them that they can only be condemned justly by those
+who are without sin.  It is to the poor, the weak, the ignorant and
+the infirm that Christianity appeals most strongly, and to whose
+needs it is most especially adapted--but these form by far the
+greater portion of mankind.  "Blessed are they that mourn!"  Whose
+sorrow is not assuaged by the mere sound of these words?  Who again
+is not reassured by being reminded that our Heavenly Father feeds the
+sparrows and clothes the lilies of the field, and that if we will
+only seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness we need take no
+heed for the morrow what we shall eat, and what we shall drink, nor
+wherewithal we shall be clothed.  God will provide these things for
+us if we are true Christians, whether we take heed concerning them or
+not.  "I have been young and now am old," saith the Psalmist, "yet
+never saw I the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging their bread."
+
+How infinitely nobler and more soul-satisfying is the ideal of the
+Christian saint with wasted limbs, and clothed in the garb of
+poverty--his upturned eyes piercing the very heavens in the ecstasy
+of a divine despair--than any of the fleshly ideals of gross human
+conception such as have already been alluded to.  If a man does not
+feel this instinctively for himself, let him test it thus--whom does
+his heart of hearts tell him that his son will be most like God in
+resembling?  The Theseus?  The Discobolus? or the St. Peters and St.
+Pauls of Guido and Domenichino?  Who can hesitate for a moment as to
+which ideal presents the higher development of human nature?  And
+this I take it should suffice; the natural instinct which draws us to
+the Christ-ideal in preference to all others as soon as it has been
+once presented to us, is a sufficient guarantee of its being the one
+most tending to the general well-being of the world.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+It only remains to return to the seventh and eighth chapters, and to
+pass in review the reasons which will lead us to reject the
+conclusions 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 confine
+themselves to maintaining that exaggeration has to a certain extent
+impaired the historic value of some of the Gospel records of the
+Resurrection.  They have made out this much, but have they made out
+more?  They have mistaken the question--which is this--"Did Jesus
+Christ die and rise from the dead?"  And in the place of it they have
+raised another, namely, "Has there been any inaccuracy in the records
+of the time and manner of His reappearing?"
+
+Our error has been that instead of demurring to the relevancy of the
+issue raised by our opponents, we have accepted it.  We have thus
+placed ourselves in a false position, and have encouraged our
+opponents by doing so.  We have undertaken to fight them upon ground
+of their own choosing.  We have been discomfited; but instead of
+owning to our defeat, and beginning the battle anew from a fresh base
+of operations, we have declared that we have not been defeated; hence
+those lamentable and suicidal attempts at disingenuous reasoning
+which we have seen reason to condemn so strongly in the works of Dean
+Alford and others.  How deplorable, how unchristian they are!
+
+The moment that we take a truer ground, the conditions of the strife
+change.  The same spirit of candid criticism which led us to reject
+the account of Matthew in toto, will make it easy for us to admit
+that those of Mark, Luke, and John, may not be so accurate as we
+could have wished, and yet to feel that our cause has sustained no
+injury.  There are probably very few who would pin their faith to the
+fact that Julius Caesar fell exactly at the feet of Pompey's statue,
+or that he uttered the words "Et tu, Brute."  Yet there are still
+fewer who would dispute the fact that Julius Caesar was assassinated
+by 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 the
+manner in which each event took place.
+
+We had thought that these details were known, and so thinking, we had
+a certain consolation in realising to ourselves the precise manner in
+which every incident occurred; yet on reflection we must feel that
+the desire to realise is of the essence of idolatry, which, not
+content with knowing that there is a God, will be satisfied with
+nothing if it has not an effigy of His face and figure.  If it has
+not this it falls straight-way to the denial of God's existence,
+being unable to conceive how a Being should exist and yet be
+incapable of representation.  We are as those who would fall down and
+worship the idol; our opponents, as those who upon the destruction of
+the idol would say that there was no God.
+
+We have met sceptics hitherto by adhering to the opinions as to the
+necessity of accuracy which prevailed among our forefathers, and
+instead of saying, "You are right--we do NOT know all that we thought
+we did--nevertheless we know enough--we know the fact, though the
+manner of the fact be hidden," we have preferred to say, "You are
+mistaken, our severe outline, our hard-and-fast lines are all
+perfectly accurate, there is not a detail of our theories which we
+are not prepared to stand by."  On this comes recrimination and
+mutual anger, and the strife grows hotter and hotter.
+
+Let us now rather say to the unbeliever, "We do not deny the truth of
+much which you assert.  We give up Matthew's account of the
+Resurrection; we may perhaps accept parts of those of Mark and Luke
+and John, but it is impossible to say which parts, unless those in
+which all three agree with one another; and this being so, it becomes
+wiser to regard all the accounts as early and precious memorials of
+the certainty felt by the Apostles that Christ died and rose again,
+but as having little historic value with regard to the time and
+manner of the Resurrection."
+
+Once take this ground, and instead of demurring to the truth of many
+of the assertions of our opponents, demur to their relevancy, and the
+unbeliever will find the ground cut away from under his feet
+independently of the fact that the reasonableness of the concession,
+and the discovery that we are not fighting merely to maintain a
+position, will incline him to calmness and to the reconsideration of
+his own opinions--which will in itself be a great gain--he will soon
+perceive that we are really standing upon firm ground, from which no
+enemy can dislodge us.  The discovery that we know less of the time
+and manner of our Lord's death and Resurrection than we thought we
+did, does not invalidate a single one of the irresistible arguments
+whereby we can establish the fact of His having died and risen again.
+The reader will now perhaps begin to perceive that the sad division
+between Christians and unbelievers has been one of those common cases
+in which both are right and both wrong; Christians being right in
+their chief assertion, and wrong in standing out for the accuracy of
+their details, while unbelievers are right in denying that our
+details are accurate, but wrong in drawing the inference that because
+certain facts have been inaccurately recorded, therefore certain
+others never happened at all.  Both the errors are natural; it is
+high time, however, that upon both sides they should be recognised
+and avoided.
+
+But as regards the demolition of the structure raised in the seventh
+and eighth chapters of this book, whereinsoever, that is to say, it
+seems to menace the more vital part of our faith, the ease with which
+this will effected may perhaps lead the reader to think that I have
+not fulfilled the promise made in the outset, and have failed to put
+the best possible case for our opponents.  This supposition would be
+unjust; I have done the very best for them that I could.  For it is
+plain that they can only take one of two positions, namely, EITHER
+that Christ really died upon the Cross but was never seen alive again
+afterwards at all, and that the stories of His having been so seen
+are purely mythical, OR, if they admit that He was seen alive after
+His Crucifixion, they must deny the completeness of the death; in
+other words, if they are to escape miracle, they must either deny the
+reappearances or the death.
+
+Now in the commencement of this work I dealt with those who deny that
+our Lord rose from the dead, and as the exponent of those who take
+this view I selected Strauss, who is undoubtedly the ablest writer
+they have.  Whether I shewed sufficient reason for thinking that his
+theory was unsound must remain for the decision of the reader, but I
+certainly believe that I succeeded in doing so.  Perhaps the ablest
+of all the writers who have treated the facts given us in the Gospels
+from the Rationalistic point of view, is the author of an anonymous
+work called The Jesus of History (Williams and Norgate, 1866); but
+this writer (and it is a characteristic feature of the Rationalistic
+school to become vague precisely at this very point) leaves us
+entirely in doubt as to whether he accepts the reappearances of
+Christ or not, and his treatment of the facts connected both with the
+Crucifixion and Resurrection is less definite than that of any other
+part of the life of our Lord.  He does not seem to see his own way
+clearly, and appears to consider that it must for ever remain a
+matter of doubt whether the Death of Christ or His reappearance is to
+be rejected.
+
+It is evident that it was most desirable to examine BOTH sets of
+arguments, i.e., those against the Resurrection, and those against
+the completeness of the Death; I have therefore mainly drawn the
+opinions of those who deny the Death from the same pamphlet as that
+from which I drew the criticisms on Dean Alford's notes.  I know of
+no other English work, indeed, in which whatever can be said against
+us upon this all-important head has been put forward, and was
+therefore compelled to draw from this source, or to invent the
+arguments for our opponents, which would have subjected me to the
+accusation of stating them in such way as should best suit my own
+purpose.  The reader, however, must now feel that since there can be
+no 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 did
+actually shew Himself subsequently alive; and this amounts to a
+demonstration of the miraculous character of the Resurrection.  If,
+then, this one miracle be established, I think it unnecessary to
+defend the others, because I cannot think that any will attack them.
+
+But, as has been seen already, Strauss admits that our Lord died upon
+the Cross, and denies the reality of the reappearances.  It is not
+probable that Strauss would have taken refuge in the hallucination
+theory if he had felt that there was the remotest chance of
+successfully denying our Lord's death; for the difficulties of his
+present position are overwhelming, as was fully pointed out in the
+second, third, and fourth chapters of this work.  I regret, however,
+to say that I can nowhere find any detailed account of the reasons
+which have led him to feel so positively about our Lord's Death.
+Such reasons must undoubtedly be at his command, or he would
+indisputably have referred the Resurrection to natural causes.  Is it
+possible that he has thought it better to keep them to himself, as
+proving the Death of our Lord TOO convincingly?  If so, the course
+which 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 Death
+of our Lord, call upon us to reject.
+
+I regret to pass so quickly over one great field of evidence which in
+justice to myself I must allude to, though I cannot dwell upon it,
+for in the outset I declared that I would confine myself to the
+historical evidence, and to this only.  I refer to spiritual insight;
+to the testimony borne by the souls of living persons, who from
+personal experience KNOW that their Redeemer liveth, and that though
+worms destroy this body, yet in their flesh shall they see God.  How
+many thousands are there in the world at this moment, who have known
+Christ as a personal friend and comforter, and who can testify to the
+work which He has wrought upon them!  I cannot pass over such
+testimony as this in silence.  I must assign it a foremost place in
+reviewing the reasons for holding that our hope is not in vain, but I
+may not dwell upon it, inasmuch as it would carry no weight with
+those for whom this work is designed, I mean with those to whom this
+precious experience of Christ has not yet been vouchsafed.  Such
+persons require the external evidence to be made clear to
+demonstration before they will trust themselves to listen to the
+voices of hope or fear, and it is of no use appealing to the
+knowledge and hopes of others without making it clear upon what that
+knowledge and those hopes are grounded.  Nevertheless, I may be
+allowed to point out that those who deny the Death and Resurrection
+of our Lord, call upon us to believe that an immense multitude of
+most truthful and estimable people are no less deceivers of their own
+selves and others, than Mohammedans, Jews and Buddhists are.  How
+many do we not each of us know to whom Christ is the spiritual meat
+and drink of their whole lives.  Yet our opponents call upon us to
+ignore all this, and to refer the emotions and elation of soul, which
+the love of Christ kindles in his true followers, to an inheritance
+of 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 from
+which he cannot see one or several churches.  There is hardly a
+hamlet which is not also a centre for the celebration of our
+Redemption by the Death and Resurrection of Christ.  Not one of these
+churches, say the Rationalists, not one of the clergymen who minister
+therein, not one single village school in all England, but must be
+regarded as a fountain of error, if not of deliberate falsehood.
+Look where they may, they cannot escape from the signs of a vital
+belief in the Resurrection.  All these signs, they will tell us, are
+signs of superstition only; it is superstition which they celebrate
+and would confirm; they are founded upon fanaticism, or at the best
+upon sheer delusion; they poison the fountain heads of moral and
+intellectual well-being, by teaching men to set human experience on
+the one side, and to refer their conduct to the supposed will of a
+personal anthropomorphic God who was actually once a baby--who was
+born of one of his own creatures--and who is now locally and
+corporeally in Heaven, "of reasonable soul and HUMAN FLESH
+subsisting."
+
+Thus do our opponents taunt us, but when we think not only of the
+present day, but of the nearly two thousand years during which
+Christianity has flourished, not in England only, but over all
+Europe, that is to say, over the quarter of the globe which is most
+civilised, and whose civilisation is in itself proof both of capacity
+to judge and of having judged rightly--what an awful admission do
+unbelievers require us to make, when they bid us think that all these
+ages and countries have gone astray to the imagining of a vain thing.
+All the self-sacrifice of the holiest men for sixty generations, all
+the wars that have been waged for the sake of Christ and His truth,
+all the money spent upon churches, clergy, monasteries and religious
+education, all the blood of martyrs, all the celibacy of priests and
+nuns, all the self-denying lives of those who are now ministers of
+the Gospel--according to the Rationalist, no part of all this
+devotion to the cause of Christ has had any justifiable base on
+actual fact.  The bare contemplation of such a stupendous
+misapplication of self-sacrifice and energy, should be enough to
+prevent any one from ever smiling again to whose mind such a
+deplorable view was present:  we wonder that our opponents do not
+shrink back appalled from the contemplation of a picture which they
+must regard as containing so much of sin, impudence and folly; yet it
+is to the contemplation of such a picture, and to a belief in its
+truthfulness to nature, that they would invite us; they cannot even
+see a clergyman without saying to themselves, "There goes one whose
+trade is the promotion of error; whose whole life is devoted to the
+upholding of the untrue."  To them the sight of people flocking to a
+church must be as painful as it would be to us to see a congregation
+of Jews or Mohammedans:  they ought to have no happiness in life so
+long as they believe that the vast majority of their fellow-
+countrymen are so lamentably deluded; yet they would call on us to
+join 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 and
+I think not unprofitable, had my aim been different, to have drawn an
+ampler picture of the heart-rending amount of falsehood, stupidity,
+cruelty and folly which must be referable to a belief in
+Christianity, if, as our opponents maintain, there is no solid ground
+for believing it; but my present purpose is to prove that there IS
+such ground, and having said enough to shew that I do not ignore the
+fields of evidence which lie beyond the purpose of my work, I will
+return 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 BUT
+THE ONE GIVEN IN SCRIPTURE WHICH WILL SET IT AT REST.  Thus it has
+been said that Christ survived the Cross, lingered for a few weeks,
+and in the end succumbed to the injuries which He had sustained.  On
+this there arises the question, did the Apostles know of His death?
+And if so, were they likely to mistake the reappearance of a dying
+man, so shattered and weak as He must have been, for the glory of an
+immortal being?  We know that people can idealise a great deal, but
+they cannot idealise as much as this.  The Apostles cannot have known
+of any death of Christ except His Death upon the Cross, and it is not
+credible that if He had died from the effects of the Crucifixion the
+Apostles should not have been aware of it.  No one will pretend that
+they were, so it is needless to discuss this theory further.
+
+It has also been said that our Lord, having seen the effect of His
+reappearance on the Apostles, considered that further converse with
+them would only weaken it; and that He may have therefore thought it
+wiser to withdraw Himself finally from them, and to leave His
+teaching in their hands, with the certainty that it would never
+henceforth be lost sight of; but this view is inconsistent with the
+character which even our adversaries themselves assign to our
+Saviour.  The idea is one which might occur to a theorist sitting in
+his study, and enlightened by a knowledge of events, but it would not
+suggest itself to a leader in the heat of action.
+
+Another supposition has been that our Lord on recovering
+consciousness after He had been left alone in the tomb, or perhaps
+even before Joseph had gone, may have been unable to realise to
+Himself the nature of the events that had befallen Him, and may have
+actually believed that He had been dead, and been miraculously
+restored to life; that He may yet have felt a natural fear of again
+falling into the hands of His enemies; and partly from this cause,
+and partly through awe at the miracle that He supposed had been
+worked upon Him, have only shewn Himself to His disciples hurriedly,
+in secret, and on rare occasions, spending the greater part of His
+time in some one or other of the secret places of resort, in which He
+had been wont to live apart from the Apostles before the Crucifixion.
+
+I have known it urged that our Lord never said or even thought that
+He had risen from the dead, but shewed Himself alive secretly and
+fearfully, and bade His disciples follow Him to Galilee, where He
+might, and perhaps did, appear more openly, though still rarely and
+with caution; that the rarity and mystery of the reappearances would
+add to the impression of a miraculous resurrection which had
+instantly presented itself to the minds of the Apostles on seeing
+Christ alive; that this impression alone would prevent them from
+heeding facts which must have been obvious to any whose minds were
+not already unhinged by the knowledge that Christ was alive, and by
+the belief that He had been dead; and that they would be blinded by
+awe, 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 for
+not having been dictated by policy; finally that the report of
+Christ's having been seen alive reached the Chief Priests (or perhaps
+Joseph of Arimathaea), and that they determined at all hazards to nip
+the coming mischief in the bud; that they therefore watched their
+opportunity, and got rid of so probable a cause of disturbance by the
+knife of the assassin, or induced Him to depart by threats, which He
+did not venture to resist.
+
+But if our Lord was secretly assassinated how could it have happened
+that the body should never have been found, and produced, when the
+Apostles began declaring publicly that Christ had risen?  What could
+be easier than to bring it forward and settle the whole matter?  It
+cannot be doubted that the body must have been looked for when the
+Apostles began publishing their story; we saw reason for believing
+this when we considered the account of the Resurrection given by St.
+Matthew.  NOW THOSE THAT HIDE CAN FIND; and if the enemies of Christ
+had got rid of Him by foul play, they would know very well where to
+lay their hands upon that which would be the death blow to
+Christianity.  If then Christ did not go away of His own accord, as
+feeling that His teaching would be better preserved by His absence,
+and if He did not die from wounds received upon the Cross, and if He
+was not assassinated secretly, what remains as the most reasonable
+view to be taken concerning His disappearance?  Surely the one that
+WAS taken; the view which commended itself to those who were best
+able to judge--namely, THAT HE HAD ASCENDED BODILY INTO HEAVEN AND
+WAS SITTING AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD THE FATHER.
+
+Where else could He be?
+
+For that He disappeared, and disappeared finally, within six weeks of
+the Crucifixion must be considered certain; there is no one who will
+be bold enough even to hazard a conjecture that the appearance of
+Christ alluded to by St. Paul, as having been vouchsafed to him some
+years later, was that of the living Christ, who had chosen upon this
+one occasion to depart from the seclusion and secrecy which he had
+maintained hitherto.  But if Christ was still living on earth, how
+was it possible that no human being should have the smallest clue to
+His whereabouts?  If He was dead how is it that no one should have
+produced the body?  Such a mysterious and total disappearance, even
+in the face of great jeopardy, has never yet been known, and can only
+be satisfactorily explained by adopting the belief which has
+prevailed for nearly the last two thousand years, and which will
+prevail more and more triumphantly so long as the world shall last--
+the belief that Christ was restored to the glory which He had shared
+with the Father, as soon as ever He had given sufficient proofs of
+His being alive to ensure the devotion of His followers.
+
+Before we can reject the supernatural solution of a mystery otherwise
+inexplicable, we should have some natural explanation which will meet
+the requirements of the case.  A confession of ignorance is not
+enough here.  WE are NOT ignorant; we KNOW that Christ died, inasmuch
+as we have the testimony of all the four Evangelists to this effect,
+the testimony of the Apostle Paul, and through him that of all the
+other Apostles; we have also the certainty that the centurion in
+charge of the soldiers at the Crucifixion would not have committed so
+grave a breach of discipline as the delivery of the body to Joseph
+and Nicodemus, unless he had felt quite sure that life was extinct;
+and finally we have the testimony of the Church for sixty
+generations, and that of myriads now living, whose experience assures
+them that Christ died and rose from the dead; in addition to this
+tremendous body of evidence we have also the story of the spear wound
+recorded in a Gospel which even our opponents believe to be from a
+Johannean source in its later chapters; and though, as has been
+already stated, this wound cannot be insisted upon as in itself
+sufficient to prove our Lord's death, yet it must assuredly be
+allowed its due weight in reviewing the evidence.  The unbeliever
+cannot surely have considered how shallow are all the arguments which
+he can produce, in comparison with those that make against him.  He
+cannot say that I have not done him justice, and I feel confident
+that when he reconsiders the matter in that spirit of humility
+without which he cannot hope to be guided to a true conclusion, he
+will feel sure that Strauss is right in believing that the death of
+our Lord cannot be seriously called in question.
+
+But this being so, the reappearances, which we have seen to be
+established by the collapse of the hallucination theory, must be
+referred to supernatural or miraculous agency; that is to say, our
+Lord died and rose again on the third day, according to the
+Scriptures.  Whereon His disappearance some six weeks later must be
+looked upon very differently from that of any ordinary person.  If
+our Lord could have been shewn to have been a mere man, who had
+escaped death only by a hair's breadth, but still escaped it, perhaps
+some one of the theories for His disappearance, or some combination
+of 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 and
+rose from the dead, there is no theory which will stand, except the
+one which it has been reserved for our own lawless and self-seeking
+times to question.  Through the light of the Resurrection the
+Ascension is clearly seen.
+
+
+My task is now completed.  In an age when Rationalism has become
+recognised as the only basis upon which faith can rest securely, I
+have established the Christian faith upon a Rationalistic basis.
+
+I have made no concession to Rationalism which did not place all the
+vital parts of Christianity in a far stronger position than they were
+in before, yet I have. conceded everything which a sincere
+Rationalist is likely to desire.  I have cleared the ground for
+reconciliation.  It only remains for the two contending parties to
+come forward and occupy it in peace jointly.  May it be mine to see
+the day when all traces of disagreement have been long obliterated!
+
+To the unbeliever I can say, "Never yet in any work upon the
+Christian side have your difficulties been so fully and fairly
+stated; never yet has orthodox disingenuousness been so unsparingly
+exposed."  To the Christian I can say with no less justice, "Never
+yet have the true reasons for the discrepancies in the Gospels been
+so put forward as to enable us to look these discrepancies boldly in
+the face, and to thank God for having graciously allowed them to
+exist."  I do not say this in any spirit of self-glorification.  We
+are children of the hour, and creatures of our surroundings.  As it
+has been given unto us, so will it be required at our hands, and we
+are at best unprofitable servants.  Nevertheless I cannot refrain
+from expressing my gratitude at having been born in an age when
+Christianity and Rationalism are not only ceasing to appear
+antagonistic to one another, BUT HAVE EACH BECOME ESSENTIAL TO THE
+VERY EXISTENCE OF THE OTHER.  May the reader feel this no less
+strongly than I do, and may he also feel that I have supplied the
+missing element which could alone cause them to combine.  If he asks
+me what element I allude to, I answer Candour.  This is the pilot
+that has taken us safely into the Fair Haven of universal brotherhood
+in Christ.
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+
+I--THE BURIAL
+
+
+(John xix. 38-42)
+
+And after this Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus, but
+secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take
+away the body of Jesus:  and Pilate gave him leave.  He came
+therefore, and took the body of Jesus.  And there came also
+Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a
+mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight.  Then took
+they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the
+spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.  Now in the place where
+he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new
+sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid.  There laid they Jesus
+therefore because of the Jews' preparation day; for the sepulchre was
+nigh at hand.
+
+(Luke xxiii. 50-56)
+
+And, behold, there was a man named Joseph, a counsellor; and he was a
+good man, and a just:  (the same had not consented to the counsel and
+deed of them;) he was of Arimathaea, a city of the Jews:  who also
+himself 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 in
+linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein
+never man before was laid.  And that day was the preparation, and the
+sabbath drew on.  And the women also, which came with him from
+Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body
+was laid.  And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and
+rested the sabbath day according to the commandment.
+
+(Mark xv. 42-47)
+
+And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation, that
+is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathaea, an honourable
+counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went
+in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.  And Pilate
+marvelled if he were already dead:  and calling unto him the
+centurion, he asked him whether he had been any while dead.  And when
+he knew it of the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph.  And he
+bought 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 rolled
+a stone unto the door of the sepulchre.  And Mary Magdalene and Mary
+the mother of Joseph beheld where he was laid.
+
+(Matthew xxvii. 57-61)
+
+When the even was come, there came a rich man of Arimathaea, named
+Joseph, who also himself was Jesus' disciple.  He went to Pilate, and
+begged the body of Jesus.  Then Pilate commanded the body to be
+delivered.  And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a
+clean linen cloth.  And laid it in his own new tomb, which he had
+hewn out in the rock:  and he rolled a great stone to the door of the
+sepulchre, and departed.  And there was Mary Magdalene, and the other
+Mary, 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 chief
+priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate.  Saying, Sir, we
+remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three
+days I will rise again.  Command therefore that the sepulchre be made
+sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal
+him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead:  so the
+last error shall be worse than the first.  Pilate said unto them, Ye
+have 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 was
+yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the
+sepulchre.  Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the
+other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have
+taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they
+have laid him.  Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple,
+and came to the sepulchre.  So they ran both together:  and the other
+disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.  And he
+stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went
+he not in.  Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the
+sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie.  And the napkin, that was
+about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped
+together in a place by itself.  Then went in also that other
+disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and
+believed.  For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise
+again from the dead.  Then the disciples went away again unto their
+own home.  But Mary stood without 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, and the other at the
+feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.  And they say unto her,
+Woman, why weepest thou?  She saith unto them, Because they have
+taken 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, they
+came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared,
+and certain others with them.  And they found the stone rolled away
+from the sepulchre.  And they entered in, and found not the body of
+the Lord Jesus.  And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed
+thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:  and
+as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they
+said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?  He is not
+here, but is risen:  remember how he spake unto you when he was yet
+in Galilee, saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands
+of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.  And
+they remembered his words, and returned from the sepulchre, and told
+all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.  It was Mary
+Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women
+that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.  And
+their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.
+Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he
+beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering
+in himself at that which was come to pass.
+
+(Mark xvi. 1-8)
+
+And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of
+James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and
+anoint 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 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 it was very great.  And entering into the
+sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in
+a long white garment; and they were affrighted.  And he saith unto
+them, Be not affrighted:  Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was
+crucified:  he is risen; he is not here:  behold the place where they
+laid him.  But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he
+goeth before you into Galilee:  there shall ye see him, as he said
+unto you.  And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre;
+for they trembled and were amazed:  neither said they anything to any
+man; for they were afraid.
+
+(Matthew xxviii. 1-8)
+
+In the end of the sabbath, as it began to draw toward the first day
+of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the
+sepulchre.  And, behold, there was a great earthquake:  for the angel
+of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone
+from the door, and sat upon it.  His countenance was like lightning,
+and his raiment white as snow, and for fear of him the keepers did
+shake, and became as dead men.  And the angel answered and said unto
+the women, Fear not ye:  for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was
+crucified.  He is not here:  for he is risen, as he said.  Come, see
+the place where the Lord lay.  And go quickly, 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 sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did
+run 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 Jesus
+standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.  Jesus saith unto her,
+Woman, why weepest thou?  Whom seekest thou?  She, supposing him to
+be 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.  Jesus
+saith unto her, Mary.  She turned herself, and saith unto him,
+Rabboni; which is to say, Master.  Jesus saith unto her, Touch me
+not; 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 to
+my God, and your God.  Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples
+that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto
+her.
+
+(Mark xvi. 9-11)
+
+Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared
+first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.  And
+she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and
+wept.  And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been
+seen 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, and
+worshipped him.  Then said Jesus unto them, Be not afraid:  go tell
+my 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 the
+city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were
+done.  And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken
+counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, Say ye, 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, 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.
+
+
+VI--APPEARANCE TO CLEOPAS (AND JAMES?)
+
+
+(Luke xxiv. 13-35)
+
+And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called
+Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.  And they
+talked together of all these things which had happened.  And it came
+to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus
+himself drew near, and went with them.  But their eyes were holden
+that they should not know him.  And he said unto them, What manner of
+communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and
+are sad?  And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said
+unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known
+the things which are come to pass there in these days?  And he said
+unto them, What things?  And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of
+Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and
+all the people:  And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered
+him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him.  But we trusted
+that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel:  and beside
+all this, to-day is the third day since these things were done.  Yea,
+and certain women also of our company made us astonished, which were
+early at the sepulchre; and when they found not his body, they came,
+saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said that
+he was alive, and certain of them which were with us went to the
+sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had said:  but him they
+saw not.  Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to
+believe all that the prophets have spoken:  Ought not Christ to have
+suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?  And beginning at
+Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the
+scriptures the things concerning himself.  And they drew nigh unto
+the village, whither they went:  and he made as though he would have
+gone further.  But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us:  for
+it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.  And he went in to
+tarry 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.  And
+their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of
+their sight.  And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn
+within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to
+us the scriptures?  And they rose up the same hour, and returned to
+Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were
+with them, saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to
+Simon.  And they told what things were done in the way, and how he
+was known of them in breaking of bread.
+
+(Mark xvi. 12-13)
+
+After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they
+walked, and went into the country.  And they went and told it unto
+the 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, when
+the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of
+the 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 hands
+and 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 hath
+sent me, even, so send I you.  And when he had said this, he breathed
+on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.  Whose
+soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever
+sins ye retain, they are retained.  But Thomas, one of the twelve,
+called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.  The other
+disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord.  But he
+said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the
+nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my
+hand into his side, I will not believe.  And after eight days again
+his disciples were within, and Thomas with them:  then came Jesus,
+the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto
+you.  Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my
+hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side:  and be
+not faithless, but believing.  And Thomas answered and said unto him,
+My Lord and my God.  Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast
+seen 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 on
+account 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, and
+saith unto them, Peace be unto you.  But they were terrified and
+affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.  And he said
+unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your
+hearts?  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 unto
+them, Have ye here any meat?  And they gave him a piece of a broiled
+fish, 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, which
+were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the
+psalms concerning me.  Then opened he their understanding, that they
+might understand the scriptures.  And said unto them, Thus it is
+written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the
+dead the third day:  And that repentance and remission of sins should
+be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
+And ye are witnesses of these things.  And, behold, I send the
+promise of my Father upon you:  but tarry ye in the city of
+Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high.
+
+(Mark xvi. 14-18)
+
+Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and
+upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because
+they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen.  And he
+saith unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to
+every creature.  He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;
+but he that believeth not shall be damned.  And these signs shall
+follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they
+shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if
+they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay
+hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
+
+(Matthew xviii. 16-20)
+
+Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain
+where Jesus had appointed them.  And when they saw him, they
+worshipped him:  but some doubted.  And Jesus came and spake unto
+them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth, go
+ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of
+the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:  teaching them to
+observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you:  and, lo, I am
+with 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 was
+parted from them, and carried up into heaven.  And they worshipped
+him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.  And were continually
+in the temple, praising and blessing God.  Amen.
+
+(Mark xvi. 19-20)
+
+So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into
+heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.  And they went forth, and
+preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the
+word with signs following.  Amen.
+
+(Acts i. 1-12)
+
+The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus
+began 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 the
+apostles whom he had chosen.  To whom also he shewed himself alive
+after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty
+days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God:
+and, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they
+should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the
+Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me.  For John truly
+baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not
+many days hence.  When they therefore were come together, they asked
+of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the
+kingdom to Israel?  And he said unto them, It is not for you to know
+the 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 upon
+you:  and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all
+Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
+And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken
+up; and a cloud received him out of their sight, And while they
+looked stedfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood
+by them in white apparel; Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why
+stand ye gazing up into heaven?  This same Jesus, which is taken up
+from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen
+him go into heaven.  Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mount
+called 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, how
+that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that
+he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the
+scriptures:  and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve;
+after that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of
+whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen
+asleep.  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 due
+time.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  It should be borne in mind that this passage was written five or
+six years ago, before the commencement of the Franco-Prussian war,
+What would my brother have said had he been able to comprehend the
+events 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.
+
+
+
+
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+<a href="#startoftext">The Fair Haven, by Samuel Butler</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fair Haven, by Samuel Butler
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+Title: The Fair Haven
+
+Author: Samuel Butler
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6092]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on November 4, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+</pre>
+<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1913 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines4"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h1>THE FAIR HAVEN<br />A Work in Defence of the Miraculous Element
+in our Lord&rsquo;s Ministry upon Earth, both as against Rationalistic
+Impugners and certain Orthodox Defenders, by the late John Pickard Owen,
+with a Memoir of the Author by William Bickersteth Owen.</h1>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>INTRODUCTION BY R. A. STREATFEILD</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The demand for a new edition of <i>The Fair Haven</i> gives me an
+opportunity of saying a few words about the genesis of what, though
+not one of the most popular of Samuel Butler&rsquo;s books, is certainly
+one of the most characteristic.&nbsp; Few of his works, indeed, show
+more strikingly his brilliant powers as a controversialist and his implacable
+determination to get at the truth of whatever engaged his attention.</p>
+<p>To find the germ of <i>The Fair Haven</i> we should probably have
+to go back to the year 1858, when Butler, after taking his degree at
+Cambridge, was preparing himself for holy orders by acting as a kind
+of lay curate in a London parish.&nbsp; Butler never took things for
+granted, and he felt it to be his duty to examine independently a good
+many points of Christian dogma which most candidates for ordination
+accept as matters of course.&nbsp; The result of his investigations
+was that he eventually declined to take orders at all.&nbsp; One of
+the stones upon which he then stumbled was the efficacy of infant baptism,
+and I have no doubt that another was the miraculous element of Christianity,
+which, it will be remembered, was the cause of grievous searchings of
+heart to Ernest Pontifex in Butler&rsquo;s semi-autobiographical novel,
+<i>The Way of All Flesh</i>.&nbsp; While Butler was in New Zealand (1859-64)
+he had leisure for prosecuting his Biblical studies, the result of which
+he published in 1865, after his return to England, in an anonymous pamphlet
+entitled &ldquo;The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as
+given by the Four Evangelists critically examined.&rdquo;&nbsp; This
+pamphlet passed unnoticed; probably only a few copies were printed and
+it is now extremely rare.&nbsp; After the publication of <i>Erewhon</i>
+in 1872, Butler returned once more to theology, and made his anonymous
+pamphlet the basis of the far more elaborate <i>Fair Haven</i>, which
+was originally published 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.&nbsp; It is possible that the memoir was the
+fruit of a suggestion made by Miss Savage, an able and witty woman with
+whom Butler corresponded at the time.&nbsp; Miss Savage was so much
+impressed by the narrative power displayed in <i>Erewhon</i> that she
+urged Butler to write a novel, and we shall probably not be far wrong
+in regarding the biography of John Pickard Owen as Butler&rsquo;s trial
+trip in the art of fiction - a prelude to <i>The Way of All Flesh</i>,
+which he began in 1873.</p>
+<p>It has often been supposed that the elaborate paraphernalia of mystification
+which Butler used in <i>The Fair Haven</i> was deliberately designed
+in order to hoax the public.&nbsp; I do not believe that this was the
+case.&nbsp; Butler, I feel convinced, provided an ironical framework
+for his arguments merely that he might render them more effective than
+they had been when plainly stated in the pamphlet of 1865.&nbsp; He
+fully expected his readers to comprehend his irony, and he anticipated
+that some at any rate of them would keenly resent it.&nbsp; Writing
+to Miss Savage in March, 1873 (shortly before the publication of the
+book), he said: &ldquo;I should hope that attacks on <i>The Fair Haven</i>
+will give me an opportunity of excusing myself, and if so I shall endeavour
+that the excuse may be worse than the fault it is intended to excuse.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+A few days later he referred to the difficulties that he had encountered
+in getting the book accepted by a publisher: &ldquo; --- were frightened
+and even considered the scheme of the book unjustifiable.&nbsp; ---
+urged me, as politely as he could, not to do it, and evidently thinks
+I shall get myself into disgrace even among freethinkers.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+all nonsense.&nbsp; I dare say I shall get into a row - at least I hope
+I shall.&rdquo;&nbsp; Evidently there is here no anticipation of <i>The
+Fair Haven</i> being misunderstood.&nbsp; Misunderstood, however, it
+was, not only by reviewers, some of whom greeted it solemnly as a defence
+of orthodoxy, but by divines of high standing, such as the late Canon
+Ainger, who sent it to a friend whom he wished to convert.&nbsp; This
+was more than Butler could resist, and he hastened to issue a second
+edition bearing his name and accompanied by a preface in which the deceived
+elect were held up to ridicule.</p>
+<p>Butler used to maintain that <i>The Fair Haven</i> did his reputation
+no harm.&nbsp; Writing in 1901, he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>The Fair Haven</i> got me into no social disgrace that
+I have ever been able to discover.&nbsp; I might attack Christianity
+as much as I chose and nobody cared one straw; but when I attacked Darwin
+it was a different matter.&nbsp; For many years <i>Evolution, Old and
+New</i>, and <i>Unconscious Memory</i> made a shipwreck of my literary
+prospects.&nbsp; I am only now beginning to emerge from the literary
+and social injury which those two perfectly righteous books inflicted
+on me.&nbsp; I dare say they abound with small faults of taste, but
+I rejoice in having written both of them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Very likely Butler was right as to the social side of the question,
+but I am convinced that <i>The Fair Haven</i> did him grave harm in
+the literary world.&nbsp; Reviewers fought shy of him for the rest of
+his life.&nbsp; They had been taken in once, and they took very good
+care that they should not be taken in again.&nbsp; The word went forth
+that Butler was not to be taken seriously, whatever he wrote, and the
+results of the decree were apparent in the conspiracy of silence that
+greeted not only his books on evolution, but his Homeric works, his
+writings on art, and his edition of Shakespeare&rsquo;s sonnets.&nbsp;
+Now that he has passed beyond controversies and mystifications, and
+now that his other works are appreciated at their true value, it is
+not too much to hope that tardy justice will be accorded also to <i>The
+Fair Haven</i>.&nbsp; It is true that the subject is no longer the burning
+question that it was forty years ago.&nbsp; In the early seventies theological
+polemics were fashionable.&nbsp; Books like Seeley&rsquo;s <i>Ecce Homo</i>
+and Matthew Arnold&rsquo;s <i>Literature and Dogma</i> were eagerly
+devoured by readers of all classes.&nbsp; Nowadays we take but a languid
+interest in the problems that disturbed our grandfathers, and most of
+us have settled down into what Disraeli described as the religion of
+all sensible men, which no sensible man ever talks about.&nbsp; There
+is, however, in <i>The Fair Haven</i> a good deal more than theological
+controversy, and our Laodicean age will appreciate Butler&rsquo;s humour
+and irony if it cares little for his polemics.&nbsp; <i>The Fair Haven</i>
+scandalised a good many people when it first appeared, but I am not
+afraid of its scandalising anybody now.&nbsp; I should be sorry, nevertheless,
+if it gave any reader a false impression of Butler&rsquo;s Christianity,
+and I think I cannot do better than conclude with a passage from one
+of his essays which represents his attitude to religion perhaps more
+faithfully than anything in <i>The Fair Haven</i>: &ldquo;What, after
+all, is the essence of Christianity?&nbsp; What is the kernel of the
+nut?&nbsp; Surely common sense and cheerfulness, with unflinching opposition
+to the charlatanisms and Pharisaisms of a man&rsquo;s own times.&nbsp;
+The essence of Christianity lies neither in dogma, nor yet in abnormally
+holy life, but in faith in an unseen world, in doing one&rsquo;s duty,
+in speaking the truth, in finding the true life rather in others than
+in oneself, and in the certain hope that he who loses his life on these
+behalfs finds more than he has lost.&nbsp; What can Agnosticism do against
+such Christianity as this?&nbsp; I should be shocked if anything I had
+ever written or shall ever write should seem to make light of these
+things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>R. A. STREATFEILD.<br /><i>August</i>, 1913.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>BUTLER&rsquo;S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The occasion of a Second Edition of <i>The Fair Haven</i> enables
+me to thank the public and my critics for the favourable reception which
+has been accorded to the First Edition.&nbsp; I had feared that the
+freedom with which I had exposed certain untenable positions taken by
+Defenders of Christianity might have given offence to some reviewers,
+but no complaint has reached me from any quarter on the score of my
+not having put the best possible case for the evidence in favour of
+the miraculous element in Christ&rsquo;s teaching - nor can I believe
+that I should have failed to hear of it, if my book had been open to
+exception on this ground.</p>
+<p>An apology is perhaps due for the adoption of a pseudonym, and even
+more so for the creation of two such characters as JOHN PICKARD OWEN
+and his brother.&nbsp; Why could I not, it may be asked, have said all
+that I had to say in my own proper person?</p>
+<p>Are there not real ills of life enough already?&nbsp; Is there not
+a &ldquo;lo here!&rdquo; from this school with its gushing &ldquo;earnestness,&rdquo;
+it distinctions without differences, its gnat strainings and camel swallowings,
+its pretence of grappling with a question while resolutely bent upon
+shirking it, its dust throwing and mystification, its concealment of
+its own ineffable insincerity under an air of ineffable candour?&nbsp;
+Is there not a &ldquo;lo there!&rdquo; from that other school with its
+bituminous atmosphere of exclusiveness and self-laudatory dilettanteism?&nbsp;
+Is there not enough actual exposition of boredom come over us from many
+quarters without drawing for new bores upon the imagination?&nbsp; It
+is true I gave a single drop of comfort.&nbsp; JOHN PICKARD OWEN was
+dead.&nbsp; But his having ceased to exist (to use the impious phraseology
+of the present day) did not cancel the fact of his having once existed.&nbsp;
+That he should have ever been born gave proof of potentialities in Nature
+which could not be regarded lightly.&nbsp; What hybrids might not be
+in store for us next?&nbsp; Moreover, though JOHN PICKARD was dead,
+WILLIAM BICKERSTETH was still living, and might at any moment rekindle
+his burning and shining lamp of persistent self-satisfaction.&nbsp;
+Even though the OWENS had actually existed, should not their existence
+have been ignored as a disgrace to Nature?&nbsp; Who then could be justified
+in creating them when they did not exist?</p>
+<p>I am afraid I must offer an apology rather than an excuse.&nbsp;
+The fact is that I was in a very awkward position.&nbsp; My previous
+work, <i>Erewhon</i>, had failed to give satisfaction to certain ultra-orthodox
+Christians, who imagined that they could detect an analogy between the
+English Church and the Erewhonian Musical Banks.&nbsp; It is inconceivable
+how they can have got hold of this idea; but I was given to understand
+that I should find it far from easy to dispossess them of the notion
+that something in the way of satire had been intended.&nbsp; There were
+other parts of the book which had also been excepted to, and altogether
+I had reason to believe that if I defended Christianity in my own name
+I should not find <i>Erewhon</i> any addition to the weight which my
+remarks might otherwise carry.&nbsp; If I had been suspected of satire
+once, I might be suspected again with no greater reason.&nbsp; Instead
+of calmly reviewing the arguments which I adduced, <i>The Rock</i> might
+have raised a cry of <i>non tali auxilio</i>.&nbsp; It must always be
+remembered that besides the legitimate investors in Christian stocks,
+if so homely a metaphor may be pardoned, there are unscrupulous persons
+whose profession it is to be bulls, bears, stags, and I know not what
+other creatures of the various Christian markets.&nbsp; It is all nonsense
+about hawks not picking out each other&rsquo;s eyes - there is nothing
+they like better.&nbsp; I feared <i>The Guardian, The Record, The John
+Bull</i>, etc., lest they should suggest that from a bear I now turned
+bull with a view to an eventual bishopric.&nbsp; Such insinuations would
+have impaired the value of <i>The Fair Haven</i> as an anchorage for
+well-meaning people.&nbsp; I therefore resolved to obey the injunction
+of the Gentile Apostle and avoid all appearance of evil, by dissociating
+myself from the author of <i>Erewhon</i> as completely as possible.&nbsp;
+At the moment of my resolution JOHN PICKARD OWEN came to my assistance;
+I felt that he was the sort of man I wanted, but that he was hardly
+sufficient in himself.&nbsp; I therefore summoned his brother.&nbsp;
+The pair have served their purpose; a year nowadays produces great changes
+in men&rsquo;s thoughts concerning Christianity, and the little matter
+of <i>Erewhon</i> having quite blown over I feel that I may safely appear
+in my true colours as the champion of orthodoxy, discard the OWENS as
+other than mouthpieces, and relieve the public from uneasiness as to
+any further writings from the pen of the surviving brother.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless I am bound to own that, in spite of a generally favourable
+opinion, my critics have not been unanimous in their interpretation
+of <i>The Fair Haven</i>.&nbsp; Thus, <i>The Rock</i> (April 25, 1873,
+and May 9, 1873), says that the work is &ldquo;an extraordinary one,
+whether regarded as a biographical record or a theological treatise.&nbsp;
+Indeed the importance of the volume compels us to depart from our custom
+of reviewing with brevity works entrusted to us, and we shall in two
+consecutive numbers of <i>The Rock</i> lay before its readers what appear
+to us to be the merits and demerits of this posthumous production.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;His exhibition of the certain proofs furnished of the Resurrection
+of our Lord is certainly masterly and convincing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To the sincerely inquiring doubter, the striking way in which
+the truth of the Resurrection is exhibited must be most beneficial,
+but such a character we are compelled to believe is rare among those
+of the schools of neology.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. OWEN&rsquo;S exposition and refutation of the hallucination
+and mythical theories of Strauss and his followers is most admirable,
+and all should read it who desire to know exactly what excuses men make
+for their incredulity.&nbsp; The work also contains many beautiful passages
+on the discomfort of unbelief, and the holy pleasure of a settled faith,
+which cannot fail to benefit the reader.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>On the other hand, in spite of all my precautions, the same misfortune
+which overtook <i>Erewhon</i> has also come upon <i>The Fair Haven</i>.&nbsp;
+It has been suspected of a satirical purpose.&nbsp; The author of a
+pamphlet entitled <i>Jesus versus Christianity</i> says:-</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>The Fair Haven</i> is an ironical defence of orthodoxy
+at the expense of the whole mass of Church tenet and dogma, the character
+of Christ only excepted.&nbsp; Such at least is our reading of it, though
+critics of the <i>Rock</i> and <i>Record</i> order have accepted the
+book as a serious defence of Christianity, and proclaimed it as a most
+valuable contribution in aid of the faith.&nbsp; Affecting an orthodox
+standpoint it most bitterly reproaches all previous apologists for the
+lack of candour with which they have ignored or explained away insuperable
+difficulties and attached undue value to coincidences real or imagined.&nbsp;
+One and all they have, the author declares, been at best, but zealous
+&lsquo;liars for God,&rsquo; or what to them was more than God, their
+own religious system.&nbsp; This must go on no longer.&nbsp; We, as
+Christians having a sound cause, need not fear to let the truth be known.&nbsp;
+He proceeds accordingly to set forth the truth as he finds it in the
+New Testament; and in a masterly analysis of the account of the Resurrection,
+which he selects as the principal crucial miracle, involving all other
+miracles, he shows how slender is the foundation on which the whole
+fabric of supernatural theology has been reared.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As told by our author the whole affords an exquisite example
+of the natural growth of a legend.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If the reader can once fully grasp the intention of the style,
+and its affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy, and perceive
+also how utterly destructive are its &lsquo;candid admissions&rsquo;
+to the whole fabric of supernaturalism, he will enjoy a rare treat.&nbsp;
+It is not however for the purpose of recommending what we at least regard
+as a piece of exquisite humour, that we call attention to <i>The Fair
+Haven</i>, but &amp;c. &amp;c.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>This is very dreadful; but what can one do?</p>
+<p>Again, <i>The Scotsman</i> speaks of the writer as being &ldquo;throughout
+in downright almost pathetic earnestness.&rdquo;&nbsp; While <i>The
+National Reformer</i> seems to be in doubt whether the book is a covert
+attack upon Christianity or a serious defence of it, but declares that
+both orthodox and unorthodox will find matter requiring thought and
+answer.</p>
+<p>I am not responsible for the interpretations of my readers.&nbsp;
+It is only natural that the same work should present a very different
+aspect according as it is approached from one side or the other.&nbsp;
+There is only one way out of it - that the reader should kindly interpret
+according to his own fancies.&nbsp; If he will do this the book is sure
+to please him.&nbsp; I have done the best I can for all parties, and
+feel justified in appealing to the existence of the widely conflicting
+opinions which I have quoted, as a proof that the balance has been evenly
+held, and that I was justified in calling the book a defence - both
+as against impugners and defenders.</p>
+<p>S. BUTLER.<br /><i>Oct</i>. 8, 1873.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>MEMOIR OF THE LATE JOHN PICKARD OWEN</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The subject of this Memoir, and Author of the work which follows
+it, was born in Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road, London, on the
+5th of February, 1832.&nbsp; He was my elder brother by about eighteen
+months.&nbsp; Our father and mother had once been rich, but through
+a succession of unavoidable misfortunes they were left with but a very
+moderate income when my brother and myself were about three and four
+years old.&nbsp; My father died some five or six years afterwards, and
+we only recollected him as a singularly gentle and humorous playmate
+who doted upon us both and never spoke unkindly.&nbsp; The charm of
+such a recollection can never be dispelled; both my brother and myself
+returned his love with interest, and cherished his memory with the most
+affectionate regret, from the day on which he left us till the time
+came that the one of us was again to see him face to face.&nbsp; So
+sweet and winning was his nature that his slightest wish was our law
+- and whenever we pleased him, no matter how little, he never failed
+to thank us as though we had done him a service which we should have
+had a perfect right to withhold.&nbsp; How proud were we upon any of
+these occasions, and how we courted the opportunity of being thanked!&nbsp;
+He did indeed well know the art of becoming idolised by his children,
+and dearly did he prize the results of his own proficiency; yet truly
+there was no art about it; all arose spontaneously from the wellspring
+of a sympathetic nature which knew how to feel as others felt, whether
+old or young, rich or poor, wise or foolish.&nbsp; On one point alone
+did he neglect us - I refer to our religious education.&nbsp; On all
+other matters he was the kindest and most careful teacher in the world.&nbsp;
+Love and gratitude be to his memory!</p>
+<p>My mother loved us no less ardently than my father, but she was of
+a quicker temper, and less adept at conciliating affection.&nbsp; She
+must have been exceedingly handsome when she was young, and was still
+comely when we first remembered her; she was also highly accomplished,
+but she felt my father&rsquo;s loss of fortune more keenly than my father
+himself, and it preyed upon her mind, though rather for our sake than
+for her own.&nbsp; Had we not known my father we should have loved her
+better than any one in the world, but affection goes by comparison,
+and my father spoiled us for any one but himself; indeed, in after life,
+I remember my mother&rsquo;s telling me, with many tears, how jealous
+she had often been of the love we bore him, and how mean she had thought
+it of him to entrust all scolding or repression to her, so that he might
+have more than his due share of our affection.&nbsp; Not that I believe
+my father did this consciously; still, he so greatly hated scolding
+that I dare say we might often have got off scot free when we really
+deserved reproof had not my mother undertaken the <i>onus</i> of scolding
+us herself.&nbsp; We therefore naturally feared her more than my father,
+and fearing more we loved less.&nbsp; For as love casteth out fear,
+so fear love.</p>
+<p>This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew the
+way to bear it.&nbsp; She tried to upbraid us, in little ways, into
+loving her as much as my father; the more she tried this, the less we
+could succeed in doing it; and so on and so on in a fashion which need
+not be detailed.&nbsp; Not but what we really loved her deeply, while
+her affection for us was unsurpassable still, we loved her less than
+we loved my father, and this was the grievance.</p>
+<p>My father entrusted our religious education entirely to my mother.&nbsp;
+He was himself, I am assured, of a deeply religious turn of mind, and
+a thoroughly consistent member of the Church of England; but he conceived,
+and perhaps rightly, that it is the mother who should first teach her
+children to lift their hands in prayer, and impart to them a knowledge
+of the One in whom we live and move and have our being.&nbsp; My mother
+accepted the task gladly, for in spite of a certain narrowness of view
+- the natural but deplorable result of her earlier surroundings - she
+was one of the most truly pious women whom I have ever known; unfortunately
+for herself and us she had been trained in the lowest school of Evangelical
+literalism - a school which in after life both my brother and myself
+came to regard as the main obstacle to the complete overthrow of unbelief;
+we therefore looked upon it with something stronger than aversion, and
+for my own part I still deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which
+the cause of Christ has ever encountered.&nbsp; But of this more hereafter.</p>
+<p>My mother, as I said, threw her whole soul into the work of our religious
+education.&nbsp; Whatever she believed she believed literally, and,
+if I may say so, with a harshness of realisation which left very little
+scope for imagination or mystery.&nbsp; Her plans of Heaven and solutions
+of life&rsquo;s enigmas were direct and forcible, but they could only
+be reconciled with certain obvious facts - such as the omnipotence and
+all-goodness of God - by leaving many things absolutely out of sight.&nbsp;
+And this my mother succeeded effectually in doing.&nbsp; She never doubted
+that her opinions comprised the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
+but the truth; she therefore made haste to sow the good seed in our
+tender minds, and so far succeeded that when my brother was four years
+old he could repeat the Apostles&rsquo; Creed, the General Confession,
+and the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer without a blunder.&nbsp; My mother made
+herself believe that he delighted in them; but, alas! it was far otherwise;
+for, strange as it may appear concerning one whose later life was a
+continual prayer, in childhood he detested nothing so much as being
+made to pray and to learn his Catechism.&nbsp; In this I am sorry to
+say we were both heartily of a mind.&nbsp; As for Sunday, the less said
+the better.</p>
+<p>I have already hinted (but as a warning to other parents I had better,
+perhaps, express myself more plainly), that this aversion was probably
+the result of my mother&rsquo;s undue eagerness to reap an artificial
+fruit of lip service, which could have little meaning to the heart of
+one so young.&nbsp; I believe that the severe check which the natural
+growth of faith experienced in my brother&rsquo;s case was due almost
+entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism in which he
+had been trained; but, however this may be, we both of us hated being
+made to say our prayers - morning and evening it was our one bugbear,
+and we would avoid it, as indeed children generally will, by every artifice
+which we could employ.&nbsp; Thus we were in the habit of feigning to
+be asleep shortly before prayer time, and would gratefully hear my father
+tell my mother that it was a shame to wake us; whereon he would carry
+us up to bed in a state apparently of the profoundest slumber when we
+were really wide awake and in great fear of detection.&nbsp; For we
+knew how to pretend to be asleep, but we did not know how we ought to
+wake again; there was nothing for it therefore when we were once committed,
+but to go on sleeping till we were fairly undressed and put to bed,
+and could wake up safely in the dark.&nbsp; But deceit is never long
+successful, and we were at last ignominiously exposed.</p>
+<p>It happened one evening that my mother suspected my brother John,
+and tried to open his little hands which were lying clasped in front
+of him.&nbsp; Now my brother was as yet very crude and inconsistent
+in his theories concerning sleep, and had no conception of what a real
+sleeper would do under these circumstances.&nbsp; Fear deprived him
+of his powers of reflection, and he thus unfortunately concluded that
+because sleepers, so far as he had observed them, were always motionless,
+therefore, they must be quite rigid and incapable of motion, and indeed
+that any movement, under any circumstances (for from his earliest childhood
+he liked to carry his theories to their legitimate conclusion), would
+be physically impossible for one who was really sleeping; forgetful,
+oh! unhappy one, of the flexibility of his own body on being carried
+upstairs, and, more unhappy still, ignorant of the art of waking.&nbsp;
+He, therefore, clenched his fingers harder and harder as he felt my
+mother trying to unfold them while his head hung listless, and his eyes
+were closed I as though he were sleeping sweetly.&nbsp; It is needless
+to detail the agony of shame that followed.&nbsp; My mother begged my
+father to box his ears, which my father flatly refused to do.&nbsp;
+Then she boxed them herself, and there followed a scene and a day or
+two of disgrace for both of us.</p>
+<p>Shortly after this there happened another misadventure.&nbsp; A lady
+came to stay with my mother, and was to sleep in a bed that had been
+brought into our nursery, for my father&rsquo;s fortunes had already
+failed, and we were living in a humble way.&nbsp; We were still but
+four and five years old, so the arrangement was not unnatural, and it
+was assumed that we should be asleep before the lady went to bed, and
+be downstairs before she would get up in the morning.&nbsp; But the
+arrival of this lady and her being put to sleep in the nursery were
+great events to us in those days, and being particularly wanted to go
+to sleep, we of course sat up in bed talking and keeping ourselves awake
+till she should come upstairs.&nbsp; Perhaps we had fancied that she
+would give us something, but if so we were disappointed.&nbsp; However,
+whether this was the case or not, we were wide awake when our visitor
+came to bed, and having no particular object to gain, we made no pretence
+of sleeping.&nbsp; The lady kissed us both, told us to lie still and
+go to sleep like good children, and then began doing her hair.</p>
+<p>I remember that this was the occasion on which my brother discovered
+a good many things in connection with the fair sex which had hitherto
+been beyond his ken; more especially that the mass of petticoats and
+clothes which envelop the female form were not, as he expressed it to
+me, &ldquo;all solid woman,&rdquo; but that women were not in reality
+more substantially built than men, and had legs as much as he had, a
+fact which he had never yet realised.&nbsp; On this he for a long time
+considered them as impostors, who had wronged him by leading him to
+suppose that they had far more &ldquo;body in them&rdquo; (so he said),
+than he now found they had.&nbsp; This was a sort of thing which he
+regarded with stern moral reprobation.&nbsp; If he had been old enough
+to have a solicitor I believe he would have put the matter into his
+hands, as well as certain other things which had lately troubled him.&nbsp;
+For but recently my mother had bought a fowl, and he had seen it plucked,
+and the inside taken out; his irritation had been extreme on discovering
+that fowls were not all solid flesh, but that their insides - and these
+formed, as it appeared to him, an enormous percentage of the bird -
+were perfectly useless.&nbsp; He was now beginning to understand that
+sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good meat was concerned; the
+flesh they had was only a mouthful in comparison with what they ought
+to have considering their apparent bulk - insignificant, mere skin and
+bone covering a cavern.&nbsp; What right had they, or anything else,
+to assert themselves as so big, and prove so empty?&nbsp; And now this
+discovery of woman&rsquo;s falsehood was quite too much for him.&nbsp;
+The world itself was hollow, made up of shams and delusions, full of
+sound and fury signifying nothing.</p>
+<p>Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough.&nbsp; Everything with him
+was to be exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it,
+and everything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doing hitherto.&nbsp;
+If a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid; if hollow, very hollow;
+nothing was to be half and half, and nothing was to change unless he
+had himself already become accustomed to its times and manners of changing;
+there were to be no exceptions and no contradictions; all things were
+to be perfectly consistent, and all premises to be carried with extremest
+rigour to their legitimate conclusions.&nbsp; Heaven was to be very
+neat (for he was always tidy himself), and free from sudden shocks to
+the nervous system, such as those caused by dogs barking at him, or
+cows driven in the streets.&nbsp; God was to resemble my father, and
+the Holy Spirit to bear some sort of indistinct analogy to my mother.</p>
+<p>Such were the ideal theories of his childhood - unconsciously formed,
+but very firmly believed in.&nbsp; As he grew up he made such modifications
+as were forced upon him by enlarged perceptions, but every modification
+was an effort to him, in spite of a continual and successful resistance
+to what he recognised as his initial mental defect.</p>
+<p>I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark in
+the preceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used to notice
+it as an almost invariable rule that children&rsquo;s earliest ideas
+of God are modelled upon the character of their father - if they have
+one.&nbsp; Should the father be kind, considerate, full of the warmest
+love, fond of showing it, and reserved only about his displeasure, the
+child having learned to look upon God as His Heavenly Father through
+the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer and our Church Services, will feel towards God
+as he does towards his own father; this conception will stick to a man
+for years and years after he has attained manhood - probably it will
+never leave him.&nbsp; For all children love their fathers and mothers,
+if these last will only let them; it is not a little unkindness that
+will kill so hardy a plant as the love of a child for its parents.&nbsp;
+Nature has allowed ample margin for many blunders, provided there be
+a genuine desire on the parent&rsquo;s part to make the child feel that
+he is loved, and that his natural feelings are respected.&nbsp; This
+is all the religious education which a child should have.&nbsp; As he
+grows older he will then turn naturally to the waters of life, and thirst
+after them of his own accord by reason of the spiritual refreshment
+which they, and they only, can afford.&nbsp; Otherwise he will shrink
+from them, on account of his recollection of the way in which he was
+led down to drink against his will, and perhaps with harshness, when
+all the analogies with which he was acquainted pointed in the direction
+of their being unpleasant and unwholesome.&nbsp; So soul-satisfying
+is family affection to a child, that he who has once enjoyed it cannot
+bear to be deprived of the hope that he is possessed in Heaven of a
+parent who is like his earthly father - of a friend and counsellor who
+will never, never fail him.&nbsp; There is no such religious nor moral
+education as kindly genial treatment and a good example; all else may
+then be let alone till the child is old enough to feel the want of it.&nbsp;
+It is true that the seed will thus be sown late, but in what a soil!&nbsp;
+On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh and uncongenial,
+his conception of his Heavenly Parent will be painful.&nbsp; He will
+begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of his father.&nbsp;
+He will therefore shrink from Him.&nbsp; The rottenness of stillborn
+love in the heart of a child poisons the blood of the soul, and hence,
+later, crime.</p>
+<p>To return, however, to the lady.&nbsp; When she had put on her night-gown,
+she knelt down by her bedside and, to our consternation, began to say
+her prayers.&nbsp; This was a cruel blow to both of us; we had always
+been under the impression that grownup people were not made to say their
+prayers, and the idea of any one saying them of his or her own accord
+had never occurred to us as possible.&nbsp; Of course the lady would
+not say her prayers if she were not obliged; and yet she did say them;
+therefore she must be obliged to say them; therefore we should be obliged
+to say them, and this was a very great disappointment.&nbsp; Awe-struck
+and open-mouthed we listened while the lady prayed in sonorous accents,
+for many things which I do not now remember, and finally for my father
+and mother and for both of us - shortly afterwards she rose, blew out
+the light and got into bed.&nbsp; Every word that she said had confirmed
+our worst apprehensions; it was just what we had been taught to say
+ourselves.</p>
+<p>Next morning we compared notes and drew the most painful inferences;
+but in the course of the day our spirits rallied.&nbsp; We agreed that
+there were many mysteries in connection with life and things which it
+was high time to unravel, and that an opportunity was now afforded us
+which might not readily occur again.&nbsp; All we had to do was to be
+true to ourselves and equal to the occasion.&nbsp; We laid our plans
+with great astuteness.&nbsp; We would be fast asleep when the lady came
+up to bed, but our heads should be turned in the direction of her bed,
+and covered with clothes, all but a single peep-hole.&nbsp; My brother,
+as the eldest, had clearly a right to be nearest the lady, but I could
+see very well, and could depend on his reporting faithfully whatever
+should escape me.</p>
+<p>There was no chance of her giving us anything - if she had meant
+to do so she would have done it sooner; she might, indeed, consider
+the moment of her departure as the most auspicious for this purpose,
+but then she was not going yet, and the interval was at our own disposal.&nbsp;
+We spent the afternoon in trying to learn to snore, but we were not
+certain about it, and in the end regretfully concluded that as snoring
+was not <i>de rigueur</i> we had better dispense with it.</p>
+<p>We were put to bed; the light was taken away; we were told to go
+to sleep, and promised faithfully that we would do so; the tongue indeed
+swore, but the mind was unsworn.&nbsp; It was agreed that we should
+keep pinching one another to prevent our going to sleep.&nbsp; We did
+so at frequent intervals; at last our patience was rewarded with the
+heavy creak, as of a stout elderly lady labouring up the stairs, and
+presently our victim entered.</p>
+<p>To cut a long story short, the lady on satisfying herself that we
+were asleep, never said her prayers at all; during the remainder of
+her visit whenever she found us awake she always said them, but when
+she thought we were asleep, she never prayed.&nbsp; It is needless to
+add that we had the matter out with her before she left, and that the
+consequences were unpleasant for all parties; they added to the troubles
+in which we were already involved as to our prayers, and were indirectly
+among the earliest causes which led my brother to look with scepticism
+upon religion.</p>
+<p>For a while, however, all went on as though nothing had happened.&nbsp;
+An effect of distrust, indeed, remained after the cause had been forgotten,
+but my brother was still too young to oppose anything that my mother
+told him, and to all outward appearance he grew in grace no less rapidly
+than in stature.</p>
+<p>For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by the one
+great sorrow of our father&rsquo;s death.&nbsp; Shortly after this we
+were sent to a day school in Bloomsbury.&nbsp; We were neither of us
+very happy there, but my brother, who always took kindly to his books,
+picked up a fair knowledge of Latin and Greek; he also learned to draw,
+and to exercise himself a little in English composition.&nbsp; When
+I was about fourteen my mother capitalised a part of her income and
+started me off to America, where she had friends who could give me a
+helping hand; by their kindness I was enabled, after an absence of twenty
+years, to return with a handsome income, but not, alas, before the death
+of my mother.</p>
+<p>Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Bible
+with us and explain it.&nbsp; She had become deeply impressed with the
+millenarian fervour which laid hold of so many some twenty-five or thirty
+years ago.&nbsp; The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in the
+Bible, and she was imbued with the fullest conviction that all the threatened
+horrors with which it teems were upon the eve of their accomplishment.&nbsp;
+The year eighteen hundred and forty-eight was to be (as indeed it was)
+a time of general bloodshed and confusion, while in 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 Man with 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 them that were alive, would be
+caught up with other saints into the air, and would possibly receive
+while rising some distinguishing token of confidence and approbation
+which should fall with due impressiveness upon the surrounding multitude;
+then would come the consummation of all things, and she would be ever
+with the Lord.&nbsp; She died peaceably in her bed before she could
+know that a commercial panic was the nearest approach to the fulfilment
+of prophecy which the year eighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth.</p>
+<p>These opinions of my mother&rsquo;s were positively disastrous -
+injuring her naturally healthy and vigorous mind by leading her to indulge
+in all manner of dreamy and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, which
+any but the most narrow literalist would feel at once to be untenable.&nbsp;
+Thus several times she expressed to us her conviction that my brother
+and myself were to be the two witnesses mentioned in the eleventh chapter
+of the Book of Revelation, and dilated upon the gratification she should
+experience upon finding that we had indeed been reserved for a position
+of such distinction.&nbsp; We were as yet mere children, and naturally
+took all for granted that our mother told us; we therefore made a careful
+examination of the passage which threw light upon our future; but on
+finding that the prospect was gloomy and full of bloodshed we protested
+against the honours which were intended for us, more especially when
+we reflected that the mother of the two witnesses was not menaced in
+Scripture with any particular discomfort.&nbsp; If we were to be martyrs,
+my mother ought to wish to be a martyr too, whereas nothing was farther
+from her intention.&nbsp; Her notion clearly was that we were to be
+massacred somewhere in the streets of London, in consequence of the
+anti-Christian machinations of the Pope; that after lying about unburied
+for 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.</p>
+<p>She was not herself indeed to share either our martyrdom or our glorification,
+but was to survive us many years on earth, living in an odour of great
+sanctity and reflected splendour, as the central and most august figure
+in a select society.&nbsp; She would perhaps be able indirectly, through
+her sons&rsquo; influence with the Almighty, to have a voice in most
+of the arrangements both of this world and of the next.&nbsp; If all
+this were to come true (and things seemed very like it), those friends
+who had neglected us in our adversity would not find it too easy to
+be restored to favour, however greatly they might desire it - that is
+to say, they would not have found it too easy in the case of one less
+magnanimous and spiritually-minded than herself.&nbsp; My mother said
+but little of the above directly, but the fragments which occasionally
+escaped her were pregnant, and on looking back it is easy to perceive
+that she must have been building one of the most stupendous aerial fabrics
+that have ever been reared.</p>
+<p>I have given the above in its more amusing aspect, and am half afraid
+that I may appear to be making a jest of weakness on the part of one
+of the most devotedly unselfish mothers who have ever existed.&nbsp;
+But one can love while smiling, and the very wildness of my mother&rsquo;s
+dream serves to show how entirely her whole soul was occupied with the
+things which are above.&nbsp; To her, religion was all in all; the earth
+was but a place of pilgrimage - only so far important as it was a possible
+road to heaven.&nbsp; She impressed this upon both of us by every word
+and action - instant in season and out of season, so that she might
+fill us more deeply with a sense of God.&nbsp; But the inevitable consequences
+happened; my mother had aimed too high and had overshot her mark.&nbsp;
+The influence indeed of her guileless and unworldly nature remained
+impressed upon my brother even during the time of his extremest unbelief
+(perhaps his ultimate safety is in the main referable to this cause,
+and to the happy memories of my father, which had predisposed him to
+love God), but my mother had insisted on the most minute verbal accuracy
+of every part of the Bible; she had also dwelt upon the duty of independent
+research, and on the necessity of giving up everything rather than assent
+to things which our conscience did not assent to.&nbsp; No one could
+have more effectually taught us to try <i>to think</i> the truth, and
+we had taken her at her word because our hearts told us that she was
+right.&nbsp; But she required three incompatible things.&nbsp; When
+my brother grew older he came to feel that independent and unflinching
+examination, with a determination to abide by the results, would lead
+him to reject the point which to my mother was more important than any
+other - I mean the absolute accuracy of the Gospel records.&nbsp; My
+mother was inexpressibly shocked at hearing my brother doubt the authenticity
+of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and then, as it appeared to him, she
+tried to make him violate the duties of examination and candour which
+he had learnt too thoroughly to unlearn.&nbsp; Thereon came pain and
+an estrangement which was none the less profound for being mutually
+concealed.</p>
+<p>This estrangement was the gradual work of some five or six years,
+during which my brother was between eleven and seventeen years old.&nbsp;
+At seventeen, I am told that he was remarkably well informed and clever.&nbsp;
+His manners were, like my father&rsquo;s, singularly genial, and his
+appearance very prepossessing.&nbsp; He had as yet no doubt concerning
+the soundness of any fundamental Christian doctrine, but his mind was
+too active to allow of his being contented with my mother&rsquo;s child-like
+faith.&nbsp; There were points on which he did not indeed doubt, but
+which it would none the less be interesting to consider; such for example
+as the perfectibility of the regenerate Christian, and the meaning of
+the mysterious central chapters of the Epistle to the Romans.&nbsp;
+He was engaged in these researches though still only a boy, when an
+event occurred which gave the first real shock to his faith.</p>
+<p>He was accustomed to teach in a school for the poorest children every
+Sunday afternoon, a task for which his patience and good temper well
+fitted him.&nbsp; On one occasion, however, while he was explaining
+the effect of baptism to one of his favourite pupils, he discovered
+to his great surprise that the boy had never been baptised.&nbsp; He
+pushed his inquiries further, and found that out of the fifteen boys
+in his class only five had been baptised, and, not only so, but that
+no difference in disposition or conduct could be discovered between
+the regenerate boys and the unregenerate.&nbsp; The good and bad boys
+were distributed in proportions equal to the respective numbers of the
+baptised and unbaptised.&nbsp; In spite of a certain impetuosity of
+natural character, he was also of a matter-of-fact and experimental
+turn of mind; he therefore went through the whole school, which numbered
+about a hundred boys, and found out who had been baptised and who had
+not.&nbsp; The same results appeared.&nbsp; The majority had not been
+baptised; yet the good and bad dispositions were so distributed as to
+preclude all possibility of maintaining that the baptised boys were
+better than the unbaptised.</p>
+<p>The reader may smile at the idea of any one&rsquo;s faith being troubled
+by a fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but in truth my brother
+was seriously and painfully shocked.&nbsp; The teacher to whom he applied
+for a solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real power, and
+reported my brother to the rector for having disturbed the school by
+his inquiries.&nbsp; The rector was old and self-opinionated; the difficulty,
+indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to my brother, but
+instead of saying so at once, and referring to any recognised theological
+authority, he tried to put him off with words which seemed intended
+to silence him rather than to satisfy him; finally he lost his temper,
+and my brother fell under suspicion of unorthodoxy.</p>
+<p>This kind of treatment might answer with some people, but not with
+my brother.&nbsp; He alludes to it resentfully in the introductory chapter
+of his book.&nbsp; He became suspicious that a preconceived opinion
+was being defended at the expense of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven
+upon his own unaided investigation.&nbsp; The result may be guessed:
+he began to go astray, and strayed further and further.&nbsp; The children
+of God, he reasoned, the members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom
+of Heaven, were no more spiritually minded than the children of the
+world and the devil.&nbsp; Was then the grace of God a gift which left
+no trace whatever upon those who were possessed of it - a thing the
+presence or absence of which might be ascertained by consulting the
+parish registry, but was not discernible in conduct?&nbsp; The grace
+of man was more clearly perceptible than this.&nbsp; Assuredly there
+must be a screw loose somewhere, which, for aught he knew, might be
+jeopardising the salvation of all Christendom.&nbsp; Where then was
+this loose screw to be found?</p>
+<p>He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief was
+caused by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism.&nbsp; He therefore,
+to my mother&rsquo;s inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists and was
+immersed in a pond near Dorking.&nbsp; With the Baptists he remained
+quiet about three months, and then began to quarrel with his instructors
+as to their doctrine of predestination.&nbsp; Shortly afterwards he
+came accidentally upon a fascinating stranger who was no less struck
+with my brother than my brother with him, and this gentleman, who turned
+out to be a Roman Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church of Rome,
+where he felt sure that he had now found rest for his soul.&nbsp; But
+here, too, he was mistaken; after about two years he rebelled against
+the stifling of all free inquiry; on this rebellion the flood-gates
+of scepticism were opened, and he was soon battling with unbelief.&nbsp;
+He then fell in with one who was a pure Deist, and was shorn of every
+shred of dogma which he had ever held, except a belief in the personality
+and providence of the Creator.</p>
+<p>On reviewing his letters written to me about this time, I am painfully
+struck with the manner in which they show that all these pitiable vagaries
+were to be traced to a single cause - a cause which still exists to
+the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, I fear, 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 regard Christianity as a
+thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirely in the strictest
+reading of the letter, or to be rejected as absolutely untrue.&nbsp;
+The fact is, that all permanent truth is as one of those coal measures,
+a seam of which lies near the surface, and even crops up above the ground,
+but which is generally of an inferior quality and soon worked out; beneath
+it there comes a layer of sand and clay, and then at last the true seam
+of precious quality and in virtually inexhaustible supply.&nbsp; The
+truth which is on the surface is rarely the whole truth.&nbsp; It is
+seldom until this has been worked out and done with - as in the case
+of the apparent flatness of the earth - that unchangeable truth is discovered.&nbsp;
+It is the glory of the Lord to conceal a matter: it is the glory of
+the king to find it out.&nbsp; If my brother, from whom I have taken
+the above illustration, had had some judicious and wide-minded friend
+to correct and supplement the mainly admirable principles which had
+been instilled into him by my mother, 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 as literal and unspiritual as the other - each impressed
+with one aspect of religious truth, and with one only.&nbsp; In the
+end he became perhaps the widest-minded and most original thinker whom
+I have ever met; but no one from his early manhood could have augured
+this result; on the contrary, he shewed every sign of being likely to
+develop into one of those 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 mental vision.&nbsp; In after life, he often met with mere
+lads who seemed to him to be years and years in advance of what he had
+been at their age, and would say, smiling, &ldquo;With a great sum obtained
+I this freedom; but thou wast free-born.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Yet when one comes to think of it, a late development and laborious
+growth are generally more fruitful than those which are over-early luxuriant.&nbsp;
+Drawing an illustration from the art of painting, with which he was
+well acquainted, my brother used to say that all the greatest painters
+had begun with a hard and precise manner from which they had only broken
+after several years of effort; and that in like manner all the early
+schools were founded upon definiteness of outline to the exclusion of
+truth of effect.&nbsp; This may be true; but in my brother&rsquo;s case
+there was something even more unpromising than this; there was a commonness,
+so to speak, of mental execution, from which no one could have foreseen
+his after-emancipation.&nbsp; Yet in the course of time he was indeed
+emancipated to the very uttermost, while his bonds will, I firmly trust,
+be found to have been of inestimable service to the whole human race.</p>
+<p>For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see the
+Christian scheme <i>as a whole</i>, or even to conceive the idea that
+there was any whole at all, other than each one of the stages of opinion
+through which he was at the time passing; yet when the idea was at length
+presented to him by one whom I must not name, the discarded fragments
+of his faith assumed shape, and formed themselves into a consistently
+organised scheme.&nbsp; Then became apparent the value of his knowledge
+of the details of so many different sides of Christian verity.&nbsp;
+Buried in the details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that they were
+only the unessential developments of certain component parts.&nbsp;
+Awakening to the perception of the whole after an intimate acquaintance
+with the details, he was able to realise the position and meaning of
+all that he had hitherto experienced in a way which has been vouchsafed
+to few, if any others.</p>
+<p>Thus he became truly a broad Churchman.&nbsp; Not broad in the ordinary
+and ill-considered use of the term (for the broad Churchman is as little
+able to sympathise with Romanists, extreme High Churchmen and Dissenters,
+as these are with himself - he is only one of a sect which is called
+by the name broad, though it is no broader than its own base), but in
+the true sense of being able to believe in the naturalness, legitimacy,
+and truth <i>qu&acirc;</i> Christianity even of those doctrines which
+seem to stand most widely and irreconcilably asunder.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>But it was impossible that a mind of such activity should have gone
+over so much ground, and yet in the end returned to the same position
+as that from which it started.</p>
+<p>So far was this from being the case that the Christianity of his
+maturer life would be considered dangerously heterodox by those who
+belong to any of the more definite or precise schools of theological
+thought.&nbsp; He was as one who has made the circuit of a mountain,
+and yet been ascending during the whole time of his doing so: such a
+person finds himself upon the same side as at first, but upon a greatly
+higher level.&nbsp; The peaks which had seemed the most important when
+he was in the valley were now dwarfed to their true proportions by colossal
+cloud-capped masses whose very existence could not have been suspected
+from beneath: and again, other points which had seemed among the lowest
+turned out to be the very highest of all - as the Finster-Aarhorn, which
+hides itself away in the centre of the Bernese Alps, is never seen to
+be the greatest till one is high and far off.</p>
+<p>Thus he felt no sort of fear or repugnance in admitting that the
+New Testament writings, as we now have them, are not by any means accurate
+records of the events which they profess to chronicle.&nbsp; This, which
+few English Churchmen would be prepared to admit, was to him so much
+of an axiom that he despaired of seeing any sound theological structure
+raised until it was universally recognised.</p>
+<p>And here he would probably meet with sympathy from the more advanced
+thinkers within the body of the Church, but so far as I know, he stood
+alone as recognising the wisdom of the Divine counsels in having ordained
+the wide and apparently irreconcilable divergencies of doctrine and
+character which we find assigned to Christ in the Gospels, and as finding
+his faith confirmed, not by the supposition that both the portraits
+drawn of Christ are objectively true, but <i>that both are objectively
+inaccurate, and that the Almighty intended they should be inaccurate</i>,
+inasmuch as the true spiritual conception in the mind of man could be
+indirectly more certainly engendered by a strife, a warring, a clashing,
+so to speak, of versions, all of them distorting slightly some one or
+other of the features of the original, than directly by the most absolutely
+correct impression which human language could convey.&nbsp; Even the
+most perfect human speech, as has been often pointed out, is a very
+gross and imperfect vehicle of thought.&nbsp; I remember once hearing
+him say that it was not till he was nearly thirty that he discovered
+&ldquo;what thick and sticky fluids were air and water,&rdquo; how crass
+and dull in comparison with other more subtle fluids; he added that
+speech had no less deceived him, seeming, as it did, to be such a perfect
+messenger of thought, and being after all nothing but a shuffler and
+a loiterer.</p>
+<p>With most men the Gospels are true in spite of their discrepancies
+and inconsistencies; with him Christianity, as distinguished from a
+bare belief in the objectively historical character of each part of
+the Gospels, was true because of these very discrepancies; as his conceptions
+of the Divine manner of working became wider, the very forces which
+had at one time shaken his faith to its foundations established it anew
+upon a firmer and broader base.&nbsp; He was gradually led to feel that
+the ideal presented by the life and death of our Saviour could never
+have been accepted by Jews at all, if its whole purport had been made
+intelligible during the Redeemer&rsquo;s life-time; that in order to
+insure its acceptance by a nucleus of followers it must have been endowed
+with a more local aspect than it was intended afterwards to wear; yet
+that, for the sake of its subsequent universal value, the destruction
+of that local complexion was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable
+from <i>viv&acirc; voce</i> communication and imperfect education were
+the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and
+give it that breadth which could not be otherwise obtainable - and that
+thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and <i>designedly
+enhanced</i>, alike by the waste of time and by its incrustations; that
+all ideals gain by a certain amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder
+to fill in the details according to his own spiritual needs, and that
+no ideal can be truly universal and permanents unless it have an elasticity
+which will allow of this process in the minds of those who contemplate
+it; that it cannot become thus elastic unless by the loss of no inconsiderable
+amount of detail, and that thus the half, as Dr. Arnold used to say,
+&ldquo;becomes greater than the whole,&rdquo; the sketch more preciously
+suggestive than the photograph.&nbsp; Hence far from deploring the fragmentary,
+confused, and contradictory condition of the Gospel records, he saw
+in this condition the means whereby alone the human mind could have
+been enabled to conceive - not the precise nature of Christ - but <i>the
+highest ideal of which each individual Christian soul was capable</i>.&nbsp;
+As soon as he had grasped these conceptions, which will be found more
+fully developed in one of the later chapters of his book, the spell
+of unbelief was broken.</p>
+<p>But, once broken, it was dissolved utterly and entirely; he could
+allow himself to contemplate fearlessly all sorts of issues from which
+one whose experiences had been less varied would have shrunk.&nbsp;
+He was free of the enemy&rsquo;s camp, and could go hither and thither
+whithersoever he would.&nbsp; The very points which to others were insuperable
+difficulties were to him foundation-stones of faith.&nbsp; For example,
+to the objection that if in the present state of the records no clear
+conception of the nature of Christ&rsquo;s life and teaching could be
+formed, we should be compelled to take one for our model of whom we
+knew little or nothing certain, I have heard him answer, &ldquo;And
+so much the better for us all.&nbsp; The truth, if read by the light
+of man&rsquo;s imperfect understanding, would have been falser to him
+than any falsehood.&nbsp; It would have been truth no longer.&nbsp;
+<i>Better be led aright by an error which is so</i> <i>adjusted as to
+compensate for the errors in man&rsquo;s powers of understanding, than
+be misled by a truth which can never be translated from objectivity
+to subjectivity</i>.&nbsp; In such a case, it is the error which is
+the truth and the truth the error.</p>
+<p>Fearless himself, he could not understand the fears felt by others;
+and this was perhaps his greatest sympathetic weakness.&nbsp; He was
+impatient of the subterfuges with which untenable interpretations of
+Scripture were defended, and of the disingenuousness of certain harmonists;
+indeed, the mention of the word harmony was enough to kindle an outbreak
+of righteous anger, which would sometimes go to the utmost limit of
+righteousness.&nbsp; &ldquo;Harmonies!&rdquo; he would exclaim, &ldquo;the
+sweetest harmonies are those which are most full of discords, and the
+discords of one generation of musicians become heavenly music in the
+hands of their successors.&nbsp; Which of the great musicians has not
+enriched his art not only by the discovery of new harmonies, but by
+proving that sounds which are actually inharmonious are nevertheless
+essentially and eternally delightful?&nbsp; What an outcry has there
+not always been against the &lsquo;unwarrantable licence&rsquo; with
+the rules of harmony whenever a Beethoven or a Mozart has broken through
+any of the trammels which have been regarded as the safeguards of the
+art, instead of in their true light of fetters, and how gratefully have
+succeeding musicians acquiesced in and adopted the innovation.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Then would follow a tirade with illustration upon illustration, comparison
+of this passage with that, and an exhaustive demonstration that one
+or other, or both, could have had no sort of possible foundation in
+fact; he could only see that the persons from whom he differed were
+defending something which was untrue and which they ought to have known
+to be untrue, but he could not see that people ought to know many things
+which they do not know.</p>
+<p>Had he himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see from
+his own standpoints?&nbsp; Can any of us do so?&nbsp; The force of early
+bias and education, the force of intellectual surroundings, the force
+of natural timidity, the force of dulness, were things which he could
+appreciate and make allowance for in any other age, and among any other
+people than his own; but as belonging to England and the Nineteenth
+Century they had no place in his theory of Nature; they were inconceivable,
+unnatural, unpardonable, whenever they came into contact with the subject
+of Christian evidences.&nbsp; Deplorable, indeed, they are, but this
+was just the sort of word to which he could not confine himself.&nbsp;
+The criticisms upon the late Dean Alford&rsquo;s notes, which will be
+given in the sequel, display this sort of temper; they are not entirely
+his own, but he adopted them and endorsed them with a warmth which we
+cannot but feel to be unnecessary, not to say more.&nbsp; Yet I am free
+to confess that whatever editorial licence I could venture to take has
+been taken in the direction of lenity.</p>
+<p>On the whole, however, he valued Dean Alford&rsquo;s work very highly,
+giving him great praise for the candour with which he not unfrequently
+set the harmonists aside.&nbsp; For example, in his notes upon the discrepancies
+between St. Luke&rsquo;s and St. Matthew&rsquo;s accounts of the early
+life of our Lord, the Dean openly avows that it is quite beyond his
+purpose to attempt to reconcile the two.&nbsp; &ldquo;This part of the
+Gospel history,&rdquo; he writes, &ldquo;is one where the harmonists,
+by their arbitrary reconcilement of the two accounts, have given great
+advantage to the enemies of the faith.&nbsp; <i>As the two accounts
+now stand</i>, it is wholly impossible to suggest any satisfactory method
+of <i>uniting them</i>, every one who has attempted it has in some part
+or other of his hypothesis violated probability and common sense,&rdquo;
+but in spite of this, the Dean had no hesitation in accepting both the
+accounts.&nbsp; With reference to this the author of <i>The Jesus of
+History</i> (Williams and Norgate, 1866) - a work to which my brother
+admitted himself to be under very great obligations, and which he greatly
+admired, in spite of his utter dissent from the main conclusion arrived
+at, has the following note:-</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dean Alford, N.T. for English readers, admits that the narratives
+as they stand are contradictory, but he believes both.&nbsp; He is even
+severe upon the harmonists who attempt to frame schemes of reconciliation
+between the two, on account of the triumph they thus furnish to the
+&lsquo;enemies of the faith,&rsquo; a phrase which seems to imply all
+who believe less than he does.&nbsp; The Dean, however, forgets that
+the faith which can believe two (apparently) contradictory propositions
+in matters of fact is a very rare gift, and that for one who is so endowed
+there are thousands who can be satisfied with a plausible though demonstrably
+false explanation.&nbsp; To the latter class the despised harmonists
+render a real service.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Upon this note my brother was very severe.&nbsp; In a letter, dated
+Dec. 18, 1866, addressed to a friend who had alluded to it, and expressed
+his concurrence with it as in the main just, my brother wrote: &ldquo;You
+are wrong about the note in <i>The Jesus of History</i>, there is more
+of the Christianity of the future in Dean Alford&rsquo;s indifference
+to the harmony between the discordant accounts of Luke and Matthew than
+there would have been <i>even in the most convincing and satisfactory</i>
+explanation of the way in which they came to differ.&nbsp; No such explanation
+is possible; both the Dean and the author of <i>The Jesus of History</i>
+were very well aware of this, but the latter is unjust in assuming that
+his opponent was not alive to the absurdity of appearing to believe
+two contradictory propositions at one and the same time.&nbsp; The Dean
+takes very good care that he shall not appear to do this, for it is
+perfectly plain to any careful reader that he must really believe that
+one or both narratives are inaccurate, inasmuch as the differences between
+them are too great to allow of reconciliation by a supposed suppression
+of detail.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This, though not said so clearly as it should have been, is
+yet virtually implied in the admission that no sort of fact which could
+by any possibility be admitted as reconciling them had ever occurred
+to human ingenuity; what, then, Dean Alford must have really felt was
+that the spiritual value of each account was no less precious for not
+being in strict accordance with the other; that the objective truth
+lies somewhere between them, and is of very little importance, being
+long dead and buried, and living in its results only, in comparison
+with the subjective truth conveyed by both the narratives, which lives
+in our hearts independently of precise knowledge concerning the actual
+facts.&nbsp; Moreover, that though both accounts may perhaps be inaccurate,
+yet that <i>a very little</i> natural inaccuracy on the part of each
+writer would throw them apparently very wide asunder, that such inaccuracies
+are easily to be accounted for, and would, in fact, be inevitable in
+the sixty years of oral communication which elapsed between 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 that the details of the facts
+connected with the conception, birth, genealogy, and earliest history
+of our Saviour are irrecoverable - a general impression being alone
+possible, or indeed desirable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It might perhaps have been more satisfactory if Dean Alford
+had expressed the above more plainly; but if he had done this, who would
+have read his book?&nbsp; Where would have been that influence in the
+direction of truly liberal Christianity which has been so potent during
+the last twenty years?&nbsp; As it was, the freedom with which the Dean
+wrote was the cause of no inconsiderable scandal.&nbsp; Or, again, he
+may not have been fully conscious of his own position: few men are;
+he had taken the right one, but more perhaps by spiritual instinct than
+by conscious and deliberate exercise of his intellectual faculties.&nbsp;
+Finally, compromise is not a matter of good policy only, it is a solemn
+duty in the interests of Christian peace, and this not in minor matters
+only - we can all do this much - but in those concerning which we feel
+most strongly, for here the sacrifice is greatest and most acceptable
+to God.&nbsp; There are, of course, limits to this, and Dean Alford
+may have carried compromise too far in the present instance, but it
+is very transparent.&nbsp; The narrowness which leads the author of
+<i>The Jesus of History</i> to strain at such a gnat is the secret of
+his inability to accept the divinity and miracles of our Lord, and has
+marred the most exhaustively critical exegesis of the life and death
+of our Saviour with an impotent conclusion.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It is strange that one who could write thus should occasionally have
+shown himself so little able to apply his own principles.&nbsp; He seems
+to have been alternately under the influence of two conflicting spirits
+- at one time writing as though there were nothing precious under the
+sun except logic, consistency, and precision, and breathing fire and
+smoke against even very trifling deviations from the path of exact criticism
+- at another, leading the reader almost to believe that he disregarded
+the value of any objective truth, and speaking of endeavour after accuracy
+in terms that are positively contemptuous.&nbsp; Whenever he was in
+the one mood he seemed to forget the possibility of any other; so much
+so that I have sometimes thought that he did this deliberately and for
+the same reasons as those which led Adam Smith to exclude one set of
+premises in his <i>Theory of Moral Sentiments</i> and another in his
+<i>Wealth of Nations</i>.&nbsp; I believe, however, that the explanation
+lies in the fact that my brother was inclined to underrate the importance
+of belief in the objective truth of any other individual features in
+the life of our Lord than his Resurrection and Ascension.&nbsp; All
+else seemed dwarfed by the side of these events.&nbsp; His whole soul
+was so concentrated upon the centre of the circle that he forgot the
+circumference, or left it out of sight.&nbsp; Nothing less than the
+strictest objective truth as to the main facts of the Resurrection and
+Ascension would content him; the other miracles and the life and teaching
+of our Lord might then be left open; whatever view was taken of them
+by each individual Christian was probably the one most desirable for
+the spiritual wellbeing of each.</p>
+<p>Even as regards the Resurrection and Ascension, he did not greatly
+value the detail.&nbsp; Provided these facts were so established that
+they could never henceforth be controverted, he thought that the less
+detail the broader and more universally acceptable would be the effect.&nbsp;
+Hence, when Dean Alford&rsquo;s notes seemed to jeopardise the evidences
+for these things, he could brook no trifling; for unless Christ actually
+died and actually came to life again, he saw no escape from an utter
+denial of any but natural religion.&nbsp; Christ would have been no
+more to him than Socrates or Shakespeare, except in so far as his teaching
+was more spiritual.&nbsp; The triune nature of the Deity - the Resurrection
+from the dead - the hope of Heaven and salutary fear of Hell - all would
+go but for the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ; nothing would
+remain except a sense of the Divine as a substitute for God, and the
+current feeling of one&rsquo;s peers as the chief moral check upon misconduct.&nbsp;
+Indeed, we have seen this view openly advocated by a recent writer,
+and set forth in the very plainest terms.&nbsp; My brother did not live
+to see it, but if he had, he would have recognised the fulfilment of
+his own prophecies as to what must be the inevitable sequel of a denial
+of our Lord&rsquo;s Resurrection.</p>
+<p>It will be seen therefore that he was in no danger of being carried
+away by a &ldquo;pet theory.&rdquo;&nbsp; Where light and definition
+were essential, he would sacrifice nothing of either; but he was jealous
+for his highest light, and felt &ldquo;that the whole effect of the
+Christian scheme was indefinitely heightened by keeping all other lights
+subordinate&rdquo; - this at least was the illustration which he often
+used concerning it.&nbsp; But as there were limits to the value of light
+and &ldquo;finding&rdquo; - limits which had been far exceeded, with
+the result of an unnatural forcing of the lights, and an effect of garishness
+and unreality - so there were limits to the as yet unrecognised preciousness
+of &ldquo;losing&rdquo; and obscurity; these limits he placed at the
+objectivity of our Lord&rsquo;s Resurrection and Ascension.&nbsp; Let
+there be light enough to show these things, and the rest would gain
+by being in half-tone and shadow.</p>
+<p>His facility of illustration was simply marvellous.&nbsp; From his
+conversation any one would have thought that he was acquainted with
+all manner of arts and sciences of which he knew little or nothing.&nbsp;
+It is true, as has been said already, that he had had some practice
+in the art of painting, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the masterpieces
+of Raphael, Titian, Guido, Domenichino, and others; but he could never
+have been called a painter; for music he had considerable feeling; I
+think he must have known thorough-bass, but it was hard to say what
+he did or did not know.&nbsp; Of science he was almost entirely ignorant,
+yet he had assimilated a quantity of stray facts, and whatever he assimilated
+seemed to agree with him and nourish his mental being.&nbsp; But though
+his acquaintance with any one art or science must be allowed to have
+been superficial only, he had an astonishing perception of the relative
+bearings of facts which seemed at first sight to be quite beyond the
+range of one another, and of the relations between the sciences generally;
+it was this which gave him his felicity and fecundity of illustration
+- a gift which he never abused.&nbsp; He delighted in its use for the
+purpose of carrying a clear impression of his meaning to the mind of
+another, but I never remember to have heard him mistake illustration
+for argument, nor endeavour to mislead an adversary by a fascinating
+but irrelevant simile.&nbsp; The subtlety of his mind was a more serious
+source of danger to him, though I do not know that he greatly lost by
+it in comparison with what he gained; his sense, however, of distinctions
+was so fine that it would sometimes distract his attention from points
+of infinitely greater importance in connection with his subject than
+the particular distinction which he was trying to establish at the moment.</p>
+<p>The reader may be glad to know what my brother felt about retaining
+the unhistoric passages of Scripture.&nbsp; Would he wish to see them
+sought for and sifted out?&nbsp; Or, again, what would he propose concerning
+such of the parables as are acknowledged by every liberal Churchman
+to be immoral, as, for instance, the story of Dives and Lazarus and
+the Unjust Steward - parables which can never have been spoken by our
+Lord, at any rate not in their present shape?&nbsp; And here we have
+a remarkable instance of his moderation and truly English good sense.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Do not touch one word of them,&rdquo; was his often-repeated
+exclamation.&nbsp; &ldquo;If not directly inspired by the mouth of God
+they have been indirectly inspired by the force of events, and the force
+of events is the power and manifestation of God; they could not have
+been allowed to come into their present position if they had not been
+recognised in the counsels of the Almighty as being of indirect service
+to mankind; there is a subjective truth conveyed even by these parables
+to the minds of many, that enables them to lay hold of other and objective
+truths which they could not else have grasped.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There can be no question that the communistic utterances of
+the third gospel, as distinguished from St. Matthew&rsquo;s more spiritual
+and doubtless more historic rendering of the same teaching, have been
+of inestimable service to Christianity.&nbsp; Christ is not for the
+whole only, but also for them that are sick, for the ill-instructed
+and what we are pleased to call &lsquo;dangerous&rsquo; classes, as
+well as for the more sober thinkers.&nbsp; To how many do the words,
+&lsquo;Blessed be ye poor: for your&rsquo;s is the kingdom of Heaven&rsquo;
+(Luke vi., 20), carry a comfort which could never be given by the &lsquo;Blessed
+are the poor in spirit&rsquo; of Matthew v., 3.&nbsp; In Matthew we
+find, &lsquo;Blessed are the poor in spirit: for their&rsquo;s is the
+kingdom of Heaven.&nbsp; Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall
+be comforted.&nbsp; Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the
+earth.&nbsp; Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness:
+for they shall be filled.&nbsp; Blessed are the merciful: for they shall
+obtain mercy.&nbsp; Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see
+God.&nbsp; Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the
+children of God.&nbsp; Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness&rsquo;
+sake: for their&rsquo;s is the kingdom of heaven.&nbsp; Blessed are
+ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all
+manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.&nbsp; Rejoice, and
+be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted
+they the prophets which were before you.&rsquo;&nbsp; In Luke we read,
+&lsquo;Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.&nbsp;
+Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. . . .&nbsp; But woe
+unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.&nbsp;
+Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger.&nbsp; Woe unto you
+that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.&nbsp; Woe unto you, when
+all men shall speak well of you! for so did <i>their</i> fathers to
+the false prophets,&rsquo; where even the grammar of the last sentence,
+independently of the substance, is such as it is impossible to ascribe
+to our Lord himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The &lsquo;upper&rsquo; classes naturally turn to the version
+of Matthew, but the &lsquo;lower,&rsquo; no less naturally to that of
+Luke, nor is it likely that the ideal of Christ would be one-tenth part
+so dear to them had not this provision for them been made, not by the
+direct teaching of the Saviour, but by the indirect inspiration of such
+events as were seen by the Almighty to be necessary for the full development
+of the highest ideal of which mankind was capable.&nbsp; All that we
+have in the New Testament is the inspired word, directly or indirectly,
+of God, the unhistoric no less than the historic; it is for us to take
+spiritual sustenance from whatever meats we find prepared for us, not
+to order the removal of this or that dish; the coarser meats are for
+the coarser natures; as they grow in grace they will turn from these
+to the finer: let us ourselves partake of that which we find best suited
+to us, but do not let us grudge to others the provision that God has
+set before them.&nbsp; There are many things which though not objectively
+true are nevertheless subjectively true to those who can receive them;
+and subjective truth is universally felt to be even higher than objective,
+as may be shown by the acknowledged duty of obeying our consciences
+(which is the right <i>to us</i>) rather than any dictate of man however
+much more objectively true.&nbsp; It is that which is true <i>to us</i>
+that we are bound each one of us to seek and follow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Having heard him thus far, and being unable to understand, much less
+to sympathise with teaching so utterly foreign to anything which I had
+heard elsewhere, I said to him, &ldquo;Either our Lord did say the words
+assigned to him by St. Luke or he did not.&nbsp; If he did, as they
+stand they are bad, and any one who heard them for the first time would
+say that they were bad; if he did not, then we ought not to allow them
+to remain in our Bibles to the misleading of people who will thus believe
+that God is telling them what he never did tell them - to the misleading
+of the poor, whom even in low self-interest we are bound to instruct
+as fully and truthfully as we can.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled and answered, &ldquo;That is the Peter Bell view of the
+matter.&nbsp; I thought so once, as, indeed, no one can know better
+than yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The expression upon his face as he said this was sufficient to show
+the clearness of his present perception, nevertheless I was anxious
+to get to the root of the matter, and said that if our Lord never uttered
+these words their being attributed to him must be due to fraud; to pious
+fraud, but still to fraud.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not so,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;it is due to the weakness
+of man&rsquo;s powers of memory and communication, and perhaps in some
+measure to unconscious inspiration.&nbsp; Moreover, even though wrong
+of some sort may have had its share in the origin of certain of the
+sayings ascribed to our Saviour, yet their removal now that they have
+been consecrated by time would be a still greater wrong.&nbsp; Would
+you defend the spoliation of the monasteries, or the confiscation of
+the abbey lands?&nbsp; I take it no - still less would you restore the
+monasteries or take back the lands; a consecrated change becomes a new
+departure; accept it and turn it to the best advantage.&nbsp; These
+are things to which the theory of the Church concerning lay baptism
+is strictly applicable.&nbsp; <i>Fieri non debet, factum valet</i>.&nbsp;
+If in our narrow and unsympathetic strivings after precision we should
+remove the hallowed imperfections whereby time has set the glory of
+his seal upon the gospels as well as upon all other aged things, not
+for twenty generations will they resume that ineffable and inviolable
+aspect which our fussy meddlesomeness will have disturbed.&nbsp; Let
+them alone.&nbsp; It is as they stand that they have saved the world.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No change is good unless it is imperatively called for.&nbsp;
+Not even the Reformation was good; it is good now; I acquiesce in it,
+as I do in anything which in itself not vital has received the sanction
+of many generations of my countrymen.&nbsp; It is sanction which sanctifieth
+in matters of this kind.&nbsp; I would no more undo the Reformation
+now than I would have helped it forward in the sixteenth century.&nbsp;
+Leave the historic, the unhistoric, and the doubtful to grow together
+until the harvest: that which is not vital will perish and rot unnoticed
+when it has ceased to have vitality; it is living till it has done this.&nbsp;
+Note how the very passages which you would condemn have died out of
+the regard of any but the poor.&nbsp; Who quotes them?&nbsp; Who appeals
+to them?&nbsp; Who believes in them?&nbsp; Who indeed except the poorest
+of the poor attaches the smallest weight to them whatever?&nbsp; To
+us they are dead, and other passages will die to us in like manner,
+noiselessly and almost imperceptibly, as the services for the fifth
+of November died out of the Prayer Book.&nbsp; One day the fruit will
+be hanging upon the tree, as it has hung for months, the next it will
+be lying upon the ground.&nbsp; It is not ripe until it has fallen of
+itself, or with the gentlest shaking; use no violence towards it, confident
+that you cannot hurry the ripening, and that if shaken down unripe the
+fruit will be worthless.&nbsp; Christianity must have contained the
+seeds of growth within itself, even to the shedding of many of its present
+dogmas.&nbsp; If the dogmas fall quietly in their maturity, the precious
+seed of truth (which will be found in the heart of every dogma that
+has been able to take living hold upon the world&rsquo;s imagination)
+will quicken and spring up in its own time: strike at the fruit too
+soon and the seed will die.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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 I
+have here recorded.&nbsp; I have given it in my capacity of editor and
+in some sort biographer, but am far from being prepared to maintain
+that it is likely, or indeed ought, to meet with the approval of any
+considerable number of Christians.&nbsp; But, surely, in these days
+of self-mystification it is refreshing to see the boldness with which
+my brother thought, and the freedom with which he contemplated all sorts
+of issues which are too generally avoided.&nbsp; What temptation would
+have been felt by many to soften down the inconsistencies and contradictions
+of the Gospels.&nbsp; How few are those who will venture to follow the
+lead of scientific criticism, and admit what every scholar must well
+know to be indisputable.&nbsp; Yet if a man will not do this, he shows
+that he has greater faith in falsehood than in truth.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>On my brother&rsquo;s death I came into possession of several of
+his early commonplace books filled with sketches for articles; some
+of these are more developed than others, but they are all of them fragmentary.&nbsp;
+I do not think that the reader will fail to be interested with the insight
+into my brother&rsquo;s spiritual and intellectual progress which a
+few 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.&nbsp; They are too exaggerated
+to be dangerous, being so obviously unfair as to carry their own antidote.&nbsp;
+The reader will not fail to notice the growth not only in thought but
+also in literary style which is displayed by my brother&rsquo;s later
+writings.</p>
+<p>In reference to the very subject of the parables above alluded to,
+he had written during his time of unbelief:- &ldquo;Why are we to interpret
+so literally all passages about the guilt of unbelief, and insist upon
+the historical character of every miraculous account, while we are indignant
+if any one demands an equally literal rendering of the precepts concerning
+human conduct?&nbsp; He that hath two coats is not to give to him that
+hath none: this would be &lsquo;visionary,&rsquo; &lsquo;utopian,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;wholly unpractical,&rsquo; and so forth.&nbsp; Or, again, he
+that is smitten on the one cheek is not to turn the other to the smiter,
+but to hand the offender over to the law; nor are the commands relative
+to indifference as to the morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence
+to be taken as they stand; nor yet the warnings against praying in public;
+nor can the parables, any one of them, be interpreted strictly with
+advantage to human welfare, except perhaps that of the Good Samaritan;
+nor the Sermon on the Mount, save in such passages as were already the
+common property of mankind before the coming of Christ.&nbsp; The parables
+which every one praises are in reality very bad: the Unjust Steward,
+the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Prodigal Son, Dives and Lazarus,
+the Sower and the Seed, the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the Marriage Garment,
+the Man who planted a Vineyard, are all either grossly immoral, or tend
+to engender a very low estimate of the character of God - an estimate
+far below the standard of the best earthly kings; where they are not
+immoral, or do not tend to degrade the character of God, they are the
+merest commonplaces imaginable, such as one is astonished to see people
+accept as having been first taught by Christ.&nbsp; Such maxims as those
+which inculcate conciliation and a forgiveness of injuries (wherever
+practicable) are certainly good, but the world does not owe their discovery
+to Christ, and they have had little place in the practice of his followers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is impossible to say that as a matter of fact the English
+people forgive their enemies more freely now than the Romans did, we
+will say in the time of Augustus.&nbsp; The value of generosity and
+magnanimity was perfectly well known among the ancients, nor do these
+qualities assume any nobler guise in the teaching of Christ than they
+did in that of the ancient heathen philosophers.&nbsp; On the contrary,
+they have no direct equivalent in Christian thought or phraseology.&nbsp;
+They are heathen words drawn from a heathen language, and instinct with
+the same heathen ideas of high spirit and good birth as belonged to
+them in the Latin language; they are no part or parcel of Christianity,
+and are not only independent of it, but savour distinctly of the flesh
+as opposed to the spirit, and are hence more or less antagonistic to
+it, until they have undergone a certain modification and transformation
+- until, that is to say, they have been mulcted of their more frank
+and genial elements.&nbsp; The nearest approach to them in Christian
+phrase is &lsquo;self-denial,&rsquo; but the sound of this word kindles
+no smile of pleasure like that kindled by the ideas of generosity and
+nobility of conduct.&nbsp; At the thought of self-denial we feel good,
+but uncomfortable, and as though on the point of performing some disagreeable
+duty which we think we ought to pretend to like, but which we do not
+like.&nbsp; At the thought of generosity, we feel as one who is going
+to share in a delightfully exhilarating but arduous pastime - full of
+the most pleasurable excitement.&nbsp; On the mention of the word generosity
+we feel as if we were going out hunting; at the word &lsquo;self-denial,&rsquo;
+as if we were getting ready to go to church.&nbsp; Generosity turns
+well-doing into a pleasure, self-denial into a duty, as of a servant
+under compulsion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are people who will deny this, but there are people
+who will deny anything.&nbsp; There are some who will say that St. Paul
+would not have condemned the Falstaff plays, <i>Twelfth Night, The Tempest,
+A Midsummer Night&rsquo;s Dream</i>, and almost everything that Shakspeare
+ever wrote; but there is no arguing against this.&nbsp; &lsquo;Every
+man,&rsquo; said Dr. Johnson, &lsquo;has a right to his own opinion,
+and every one else has a right to knock him down for it.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+But even granting that generosity and high spirit have made some progress
+since the days of Christ, allowance must be made for the lapse of two
+thousand years, during which time it is only reasonable to suppose that
+an advance would have been made in civilisation - and hence in the direction
+of clemency and forbearance - whether Christianity had been preached
+or not, but no one can show that the modern English, if superior to
+the ancients in these respects, show any greater superiority than may
+be ascribed justly to centuries of established order and good government.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Again, as to the ideal presented by the character of Christ,
+about which so much has been written; is it one which would meet with
+all this admiration if it were presented to us now for the first time?&nbsp;
+Surely it offers but a peevish view of life and things in comparison
+with that offered by other highest ideals - the old Roman and Greek
+ideals, the Italian ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As with the parables so with the Sermon on the Mount - where
+it is not commonplace it is immoral, and <i>vice vers&acirc;</i>; the
+admiration which is so freely lavished upon the teachings of Jesus Christ
+turns out to be but of the same kind as that bestowed upon certain modern
+writers, who have made great reputations by telling people what they
+perfectly well knew; and were in no particular danger of forgetting.&nbsp;
+There is, however, this excuse for those who have been carried away
+with such musical but untruthful sentences as &lsquo;Blessed are they
+that mourn: for they shall be comforted,&rsquo; namely, that they have
+not come to the subject with unbiassed minds.&nbsp; It is one thing
+to see no merit in a picture, and another to see no merit in a picture
+when one is told that it is by Raphael; we are few of us able to stand
+against the <i>prestige</i> of a great name; our self-love is alarmed
+lest we should be deficient in taste, or, worse still, lest we should
+be considered to be so; as if it could matter to any right-minded person
+whether the world considered him to be of good taste or not, in comparison
+with the keeping of his own soul truthful to itself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But if this holds good about things which are purely matters
+of taste, how much more does it do so concerning those who make a distinct
+claim upon us for moral approbation or the reverse?&nbsp; Such a claim
+is most imperatively made by the teaching of Jesus Christ: are we then
+content to answer in the words of others - words to which we have no
+title of our own - or shall we strip ourselves of preconceived opinion,
+and come to the question with minds that are truly candid?&nbsp; Whoever
+shrinks from this is a liar to his own self, and as such, the worst
+and most dangerous of liars.&nbsp; He is as one who sits in an impregnable
+citadel and trembles in a time of peace - so great a coward as not even
+to feel safe when he is in his own keeping.&nbsp; How loose of soul
+if he knows that his own keeping is worthless, how aspen-hearted if
+he fears lest others should find him out and hurt him for communing
+truthfully with himself!</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That a man should lie to others if he hopes to gain something
+considerable - this is reckoned cheating, robbing, fraudulent dealing,
+or whatever it may be; but it is an intelligible offence in comparison
+with the allowing oneself to be deceived.&nbsp; So in like manner with
+being bored.&nbsp; The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible
+than the bore.&nbsp; He who puts up with shoddy pictures, shoddy music,
+shoddy morality, shoddy society, is more despicable than he who is the
+prime agent in any of these things.&nbsp; He has less to gain, and probably
+deceives himself more; so that he commits the greater crime for the
+less reward.&nbsp; And I say emphatically that the morality which most
+men profess to hold as a Divine revelation was a shoddy morality, which
+would neither wash nor wear, but was woven together from a tissue of
+dreams and blunders, and steeped in blood more virulent than the blood
+of Nessus.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh! if men would but leave off lying to themselves!&nbsp;
+If they would but learn the sacredness of their own likes and dislikes,
+and exercise their moral discrimination, making it clear to themselves
+what it is that they really love and venerate.&nbsp; There is no such
+enemy to mankind as moral cowardice.&nbsp; A downright vulgar self-interested
+and unblushing liar is a higher being than the moral cur whose likes
+and dislikes are at the beck and call of bullies that stand between
+him and his own soul; such a creature gives up the most sacred of all
+his rights for something more unsubstantial than a mess of pottage -
+a mental serf too abject even to know that he is being wronged.&nbsp;
+Wretched emasculator of his own reason, whose jejune timidity and want
+of vitality are thus omnipresent in the most secret chambers of his
+heart!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided we
+feel that he was under strong temptation and well knew that he was deceiving.&nbsp;
+He has done wrong - still we can understand it, and he may yet have
+some useful stuff about him - but what can we feel towards one who for
+a small motive tells lies even to himself, and does not know that he
+is lying?&nbsp; What useless rotten fig-wood lumber must not such a
+thing be made of, and what lies will there not come out of it, falling
+in every direction upon all who come within its reach.&nbsp; The common
+self-deceiver of modern society is a more dangerous and contemptible
+object than almost any ordinary felon, a matter upon which those who
+do not deceive themselves need no enlightenment.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But why insist so strongly on the literal interpretation of
+one part of the sayings of Christ, and be so elastic about that of the
+passages which inculcate more than those ordinary precepts which all
+had agreed upon as early as the days of Solomon and probably earlier?&nbsp;
+We have cut down Christianity so as to make it appear to sanction our
+own conventions; but we have not altered our conventions so as to bring
+them into harmony with Christianity.&nbsp; We do not give to him that
+asketh; we take good care to avoid him; yet if the precept meant only
+that we should be liberal in assisting others - it wanted no enforcing:
+the probability is that it had been enforced too much rather than too
+little already; the more literally it has been followed the more terrible
+has the mischief been; the saying only becomes harmless when regarded
+as a mere convention.&nbsp; So with most parts of Christ&rsquo;s teaching.&nbsp;
+It is only conventional Christianity which will stand a man in good
+stead to live by; true Christianity will never do so.&nbsp; Men have
+tried it and found it fail; or, rather, its inevitable failure was so
+obvious that no age or country has ever been mad enough to carry it
+out in such a manner as would have satisfied its founders.&nbsp; So
+said Dean Swift in his <i>Argument against abolishing Christianity</i>.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I hope,&rsquo; he writes, &lsquo;no reader imagines me so weak
+as to stand up in defence of real Christianity, such as used in primitive
+times&rsquo; (if we may believe the authors of those ages) &lsquo;to
+have an influence upon men&rsquo;s beliefs and actions.&nbsp; To offer
+at the restoring of that would be, indeed, a wild project; it would
+be to dig up foundations, to destroy at one blow all the wit and half
+the learning of the kingdom, to break the entire frame and constitution
+of things, to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the professors
+of them; in short, to turn our courts of exchange and shops into deserts;
+and would be full as absurd as the proposal of Horace 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 of cure for the corruption of
+their manners.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Therefore, I think this caution was in itself altogether
+unnecessary (which I have inserted only to prevent all possibility of
+cavilling), since every candid reader will easily understand my discourse
+to be intended only in defence of nominal Christianity, the other having
+been for some time wholly laid aside by general consent as utterly inconsistent
+with our present schemes of wealth and power.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yet but for these schemes of wealth and power the world would
+relapse into barbarianism; it is they and not Christianity which have
+created and preserved civilisation.&nbsp; And what if some unhappy wretch,
+with a serious turn of mind and no sense of the ridiculous, takes all
+this talk about Christianity in sober earnest, and tries to act upon
+it?&nbsp; Into what misery may he not easily fall, and with what life-long
+errors may he not embitter the lives of his children!</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Again, we do not cut off our right hand nor pluck out our
+eyes if they offend us; we conventionalise our interpretations of these
+sayings at our will and pleasure; we do take heed for the morrow, and
+should be inconceivably wicked and foolish were we not to do so; we
+do gather up riches, and indeed we do most things which the experience
+of mankind has taught us to be to our advantage, quite irrespectively
+of any precept of Christianity for or against.&nbsp; But why say that
+it is Christianity which is our chief guide, when the words of Christ
+point in such a very different direction from that which we have seen
+fit to take?&nbsp; Perhaps it is in order to compensate for our laxity
+of interpretation upon these points that we are so rigid in stickling
+for accuracy upon those which make no demand upon our comfort or convenience?&nbsp;
+Thus, though we conventionalise practice, we never conventionalise dogma.&nbsp;
+Here, indeed, we stickle for the letter most inflexibly; yet one would
+have thought that we might have had greater licence to modify the latter
+than the former.&nbsp; If we say that the teaching of Christ is not
+to be taken according to its import - why give it so much importance?&nbsp;
+Teaching by exaggeration is not a satisfactory method, nor one worthy
+of a being higher than man; it might have been well once, and in the
+East, but it is not well now.&nbsp; It induces more and more of that
+jarring and straining of our moral faculties, of which much is unavoidable
+in the existing complex condition of affairs, but of which the less
+the better.&nbsp; At present the tug of professed principles in one
+direction, and of necessary practice in the other, causes the same sort
+of wear and tear in our moral gear as is caused to a steam-engine by
+continually reversing it when it is going it at full speed.&nbsp; No
+mechanism can stand it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The above extracts (written when he was about twenty-three years
+old) may serve to show how utter was the subversion of his faith.&nbsp;
+His mind was indeed in darkness!&nbsp; Who could have hoped that so
+brilliant a day should have succeeded to the gloom of such mistrust?&nbsp;
+Yet as upon a winter&rsquo;s morning in November when the sun rises
+red through the smoke, and presently the fog spreads its curtain of
+thick darkness over the city, and then there comes a single breath of
+wind from some more generous quarter, whereupon the blessed sun shines
+again, and the gloom is gone; or, again, as when the warm south-west
+wind comes up breathing kindness from the sea, unheralded, suspected,
+when the earth is in her saddest frost, and on the instant all the lands
+are thawed and opened to the genial influences of a sweet springful
+whisper - so thawed his heart, and the seed which had lain dormant in
+its fertile soil sprang up, grew, ripened, and brought forth an abundant
+harvest.</p>
+<p>Indeed now that the result has been made plain we can perhaps feel
+that his scepticism was precisely of that nature which should have given
+the greatest ground for hope.&nbsp; He was a genuine lover of truth
+in so far as he could see it.</p>
+<p>His lights were dim, but such as they were he walked according to
+them, and hence they burnt ever more and more clearly, till in later
+life they served to show him what is vouchsafed to such men and to such
+only - the enormity of his own mistakes.&nbsp; Better that a man should
+feel the divergence between Christian theory and Christian practice,
+that he should be shocked at it - even to the breaking away utterly
+from the theory until he has arrived at a wider comprehension of its
+scope - than that he should be indifferent to the divergence and make
+no effort to bring his principles and practice into harmony with one
+another.&nbsp; A true lover of consistency, it was intolerable to him
+to say one thing with his lips and another with his actions.&nbsp; As
+long as this is true concerning any man, his friends may feel sure that
+the hand of the Lord is with him, though the signs thereof be hidden
+from mortal eyesight.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>During the dark and unhappy time when he had, as it seems to me,
+bullied himself, or been bullied into infidelity, he had been utterly
+unable to realise the importance even of such a self-evident fact as
+that our Lord addressing an Eastern people would speak in such a way
+as Eastern people would best understand; it took him years to appreciate
+this.&nbsp; He could not see that modes of thought are as much part
+of a language as the grammar and words which compose it, and that before
+a passage can be said to be translated from one language into another
+it is often not the words only which must be rendered, but the thought
+itself which must be transformed; to a people habituated to exaggeration
+a saying which was not exaggerated would have been pointless - so weak
+as to arrest the attention of no one; in order to translate it into
+such words as should carry precisely the same meaning to colder and
+more temperate minds, the words would often have to be left out of sight
+altogether, and a new sentence or perhaps even simile or metaphor substituted;
+this is plainly out of the question, and therefore the best course is
+that which has been taken, <i>i.e</i>., to render the words as accurately
+as possible, and leave the reader to modify the meaning.&nbsp; But it
+was years before my brother could be got to feel this, nor did he ever
+do so fully, simple and obvious though it must appear to most people,
+until he had learned to recognise the value of a certain amount of inaccuracy
+and inconsistency in everything which is not comprehended in mechanics
+or the exact sciences.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is this,&rdquo; he used to say,
+&ldquo;which gives artistic or spiritual value as contrasted with mechanical
+precision.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In inaccuracy and inconsistency, therefore (within certain limits),
+my brother saw the means whereby our minds are kept from regarding things
+as rigidly and immutably fixed which are not yet fully understood, and
+perhaps may never be so while we are in our present state of probation.&nbsp;
+Life is not one of the exact sciences, living is essentially an art
+and not a science.&nbsp; Every thing addressed to human minds at all
+must be more or less of a compromise; thus, to take a very old illustration,
+even the definitions of a point and a line - the fundamental things
+in the most exact of the sciences - are mere compromises.&nbsp; A point
+is supposed to have neither length, breadth, nor thickness - this in
+theory, but in practice unless a point have a little of all these things
+there is nothing there.&nbsp; So with a line; a line is supposed to
+have length, but no breadth, yet in practice we never saw a line which
+had not breadth.&nbsp; What inconsistency is there here, in requiring
+us to conceive something which we cannot conceive, and which can have
+no existence, before we go on to the investigation of the laws whereby
+the earth can alone be measured and the orbits of the planets determined.&nbsp;
+I do not think that this illustration was presented to my brother&rsquo;s
+mind while he was young, but I am sure that if it had been it would
+have made him miserable.&nbsp; He would have had no confidence in mathematics,
+and would very likely have made a furious attack upon Newton and Galileo,
+and been firmly convinced that he was discomfiting them.&nbsp; Indeed
+I cannot forget a certain look of bewilderment which came over his face
+when the idea was put before him, I imagine, for the first time.&nbsp;
+Fortunately he had so grown that the right inference was now in no danger
+of being missed.&nbsp; He did not conclude that because the evidences
+for mathematics were founded upon compromises and definitions which
+are inaccurate - therefore that mathematics were false, or that there
+were no mathematics, but he learnt to feel that there might be other
+things which were no less indisputable than mathematics, and which might
+also be founded on facts for which the evidences were not wholly free
+from inconsistencies and inaccuracies.</p>
+<p>To some he might appear to be approaching too nearly to the &ldquo;Sed
+tu vera puta&rdquo; argument of Juvenal.&nbsp; I greatly fear that an
+attempt may be made to misrepresent him as taking this line; that is
+to say, as accepting Christianity on the ground of the excellence of
+its moral teaching, and looking upon it as, indeed, a superstition,
+but salutary for women and young people.&nbsp; Hardly anything would
+have shocked him more profoundly.&nbsp; This doctrine with its plausible
+show of morality appeared to him to be, perhaps, the most gross of all
+immoralities, inasmuch as it cuts the ground from under the feet of
+truth, luring the world farther and farther from the only true salvation
+- the careful study of facts and of the safest inferences that may be
+drawn from them.&nbsp; Every fact was to him a part of nature, a thing
+sacred, pregnant with Divine teaching of some sort, as being the expression
+of Divine will.&nbsp; It was through facts that he saw God; to tamper
+with facts was, in his view, to deface the countenance of the Almighty.&nbsp;
+To say that such and such was so and so, when the speaker did not believe
+it, was to lead people to worship a false God instead of a true one;
+an &epsilon;&iota;&delta;&omega;&lambda;&omicron;&nu;; setting them,
+to quote the words of the Psalmist, &ldquo;a-whoring after their own
+imaginations.&rdquo;&nbsp; He saw the Divine presence in everything
+- the evil as well as the good; the evil being the expression of the
+Divine will that such and such courses should not go unpunished, but
+bring pain and misery which should deter others from following them,
+and the good being his sign of approbation.&nbsp; There was nothing
+good for man to know which could not be deduced from facts.&nbsp; This
+was the only sound basis of knowledge, and to found things upon fiction
+which could be made to stand upon facts was to try and build upon a
+quicksand.</p>
+<p>He, therefore, loathed the reasoning of Juvenal with all the intensity
+of his nature.&nbsp; It was because he believed that the Resurrection
+and Ascension of our Lord were just as much matters of actual history
+as the assassination of Julius C&aelig;sar, and that they happened precisely
+in the same way as every daily event happens at present - that he accepted
+the Christian scheme in its essentials.&nbsp; Then came the details.&nbsp;
+Were these also objectively true?&nbsp; He answered, &ldquo;Certainly
+not in every case.&rdquo;&nbsp; He would not for the world have had
+any one believe that he so considered them; but having made it perfectly
+clear that he was not going to deceive himself, he set himself to derive
+whatever spiritual comfort he could from them, just as he would from
+any noble fiction or work of art, which, while not professing to be
+historical, was instinct with the soul of genius.&nbsp; That there were
+unhistorical passages in the New Testament was to him a fact; therefore
+it was to be studied as an expression of the Divine will.&nbsp; What
+could be the meaning of it?&nbsp; That we should consider them as true?&nbsp;
+Assuredly not this.&nbsp; Then what else?&nbsp; This - that we should
+accept as subjectively true whatever we found spiritually precious,
+and be at liberty to leave all the rest alone - the unhistoric element
+having been introduced purposely for the sake of giving greater scope
+and latitude to the value of the ideal.</p>
+<p>Of course one who was so firmly persuaded of the objective truth
+of the Resurrection and Ascension could be in no sort of danger of relapsing
+into infidelity as long as his reason remained.&nbsp; During the years
+of his illness his mind was clearly impaired, and no longer under his
+own control; but while his senses were his own it was absolutely impossible
+that he could be shaken by discrepancies and inconsistencies in the
+gospels.&nbsp; What small and trifling things are such discrepancies
+by the side of the great central miracle of the Resurrection!&nbsp;
+Nevertheless their existence was indisputable, and was no less indisputably
+a cause of stumbling to many, as it had been to himself.&nbsp; His experience
+of his own sufferings as an unbeliever gave him a keener sympathy with
+those who were in that distressing condition than could be felt by any
+one who had not so suffered, and fitted him, perhaps, more than any
+one who has yet lived to be the interpreter of Christianity to the Rationalist,
+and of Rationalism to the Christian.&nbsp; This, accordingly, was the
+task to which he set himself, having been singularly adapted for it
+by Nature, and as singularly disciplined by events.</p>
+<p>It seemed to him that the first thing was to make the two parties
+understand one another - a thing which had never yet been done, but
+which was not at all impossible.&nbsp; For Protestantism is raised essentially
+upon a Rationalistic base.&nbsp; When we come to a definition of Rationalism
+nothing can be plainer than that it demands no scepticism from any one
+which an English Protestant would not approve of.&nbsp; It is another
+matter with the Church of Rome.&nbsp; That Church openly declares it
+as an axiom that religion and reason have nothing to do with one another,
+and that religion, though in flat contradiction to reason, should yet
+be accepted from the hands of a certain order as an act of unquestioning
+faith.&nbsp; The line of separation therefore between the Romanist and
+the Rationalist is clear, and definitely bars any possibility of arrangement
+between the two.&nbsp; Not so with the Protestant, who as heartily as
+the Rationalist admits that nothing is required to be believed by man
+except such things as can be reasonably proved - i.e., proved to the
+satisfaction of the reason.&nbsp; No Protestant would say that the Christian
+scheme ought to be accepted in spite of its being contrary to reason;
+we say that Christianity is to be believed because it can be shewn to
+follow as the necessary consequence of using our reason rightly.&nbsp;
+We should be shocked at being supposed to maintain otherwise.&nbsp;
+Yet this is pure Rationalism.&nbsp; The Rationalist would require nothing
+more; he demurs to Christianity because he maintains that if we bring
+our reason to bear upon the evidences which are brought forward in support
+of it, we are compelled to reject it; but he would accept it without
+hesitation if he believed that it could be sustained by arguments which
+ought to carry conviction to the reason.&nbsp; Thus both are agreed
+in principle that if the evidences of Christianity satisfy human reason,
+then Christianity should be received, but that on any other supposition
+it should be rejected.</p>
+<p>Here then, he said, we have a common starting-point and the main
+principle of Rationalism turns out to be nothing but what we all readily
+admit, and with which we and our fathers have been as familiar for centuries
+as with the air we breathe.&nbsp; Every Protestant is a Rationalist,
+or else he ought to be ashamed of himself.&nbsp; Does he want to be
+called an &ldquo;Irrationalist&rdquo;?&nbsp; Hardly - yet if he is not
+a Rationalist what else can he be?&nbsp; No: the difference between
+us is one of detail, not of principle.&nbsp; This is a great step gained.</p>
+<p>The next thing therefore was to make each party understand the view
+which the other took concerning the position which they had agreed to
+hold in common.&nbsp; There was no work, so far as he knew, which would
+be accepted both by Christians and unbelievers as containing a fair
+statement of the arguments of the two contending parties: every book
+which he had yet seen upon either side seemed written with the view
+of maintaining that its own side could hold no wrong, and the other
+no right: neither party seemed to think that they had anything to learn
+from the other, and neither that any considerable addition to their
+knowledge of the truth was either possible or desirable.&nbsp; Each
+was in possession of truth already, and all who did not see and feel
+this must be either wilfully blinded, or intensely stupid, or hypocrites.</p>
+<p>So long as people carried on a discussion thus, what agreement was
+possible between them?&nbsp; Yet where, upon the Christian side, was
+the attempt to grapple with the real difficulties now felt by unbelievers?&nbsp;
+Simply nowhere.&nbsp; All that had been done hitherto was antiquated.&nbsp;
+Modern Christianity seemed to shrink from grappling with modern Rationalism,
+and displayed a timidity which could not be accounted for except by
+the supposition of secret misgiving that certain things were being defended
+which could not be defended fairly.&nbsp; This was quite intolerable;
+a misgiving was a warning voice from God, which should be attended to
+as a man valued his soul.&nbsp; On the other hand, the conviction reasonably
+entertained by unbelievers that they were right on many not inconsiderable
+details of the dispute, and that so-called orthodox Christians in their
+hearts knew it but would not own it - or that if they did not know it,
+they were only in ignorance because it suited their purpose to be so
+- this conviction gave an overweening self-confidence to infidels, as
+though they must be right in the whole because they were so in part;
+they therefore blinded themselves to all the more fundamental arguments
+in support of Christianity, because certain shallow ones had been put
+forward in the front rank, and been far too obstinately defended.&nbsp;
+They thus regarded the question too superficially, and had erred even
+more through pride of intellect and conceit than their opponents through
+timidity.</p>
+<p>What then was to be done?&nbsp; Surely this; to explain the two contending
+parties to one another; to show to Rationalists that Christians are
+right upon Rationalistic principles in all the more important of their
+allegations; that is to say, to establish the Resurrection and Ascension
+of the Redeemer upon a basis which should satisfy the most imperious
+demands of modern criticism.&nbsp; This would form the first and most
+important part of the task.&nbsp; Then should follow a no less convincing
+proof that Rationalists are right in demurring to the historical accuracy
+of much which has been too obstinately defended by so-called orthodox
+writers.&nbsp; This would be the second part.&nbsp; Was there not reason
+to hope that when this was done the two parties might understand one
+another, and meet in a common Christianity?&nbsp; He believed that there
+was, and that the ground had been already cleared for such mutual compromise
+as might be accepted by both sides, not from policy but conviction.&nbsp;
+Therefore he began writing the book which it has devolved upon myself
+to edit, and which must now speak for itself.&nbsp; For him it was to
+suffer and to labour; almost on the very instant of his having done
+enough to express his meaning he was removed from all further power
+of usefulness.</p>
+<p>The happy change from unbelief to faith had already taken place some
+three or four years before my return from America.&nbsp; With it had
+also come that sudden development of intellectual and spiritual power
+which so greatly astonished even those who had known him best.&nbsp;
+The whole man seemed changed - to have become possessed of an unusually
+capacious mind, instead of one which was acute, but acute only.&nbsp;
+On looking over the earlier letters which I received from him when I
+was in America, I can hardly believe that they should have been written
+by the same person as the one to whom, in spite of not a few great mental
+defects, I afterwards owed more spiritual enrichment than I have owed
+to any other person.&nbsp; Yet so it was.&nbsp; It came upon me imperceptibly
+that I had been very stupid in not discovering that my brother was a
+genius; but hardly had I made the discovery, and hardly had the fragment
+which follows this memoir received its present shape, when his overworked
+brain gave way and he fell into a state little better than idiocy.&nbsp;
+His originally cheerful spirits left him, and were succeeded by a religious
+melancholy which nothing could disturb.&nbsp; He became incapable either
+of mental or physical exertion, and was pronounced by the best physicians
+to be suffering from some obscure disease of the brain brought on by
+excitement and undue mental tension: in this state he continued for
+about four years, and died peacefully, but still as one in the profoundest
+melancholy, on the 15th of March, 1872, aged 40.</p>
+<p>Always hopeful that his health would one day be restored, I never
+ventured to propose that I should edit his book during his own life-time.&nbsp;
+On his death I found his papers in the most deplorable confusion.&nbsp;
+The following chapters had alone received anything like a presentable
+shape - and these providentially are the most essential.</p>
+<p>A dream is a dream only, yet sometimes there follows a fulfilment
+which bears a strange resemblance to the thing dreamt of.&nbsp; No one
+now believes that the Book of Revelation is to be taken as foretelling
+events which will happen in the same way as the massacre, for instance,
+of St. Bartholomew, indeed it is doubtful how far the whole is not to
+be interpreted as an allegory, descriptive of spiritual revolutions;
+yet surely my mother&rsquo;s dream as to the future of one, at least,
+of her sons has been strangely verified, and it is believed that the
+reader when he lays down this volume will feel that there have been
+few more potent witnesses to the truth of Christ than John Pickard Owen.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>THE FAIR HAVEN</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTION</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It is to be feared that there is no work upon the evidences of our
+faith, which is as satisfactory in its completeness and convincing power
+as we have a right to expect when we consider the paramount importance
+of the subject and the activity of our enemies.&nbsp; Otherwise why
+should there be no sign of yielding on the part of so many sincere and
+eminent men who have heard all that has been said upon the Christian
+side and are yet not convinced by it?&nbsp; We cannot think that the
+many philosophers who make no secret of their opposition to the Christian
+religion are unacquainted with the works of Butler and Paley - of Mansel
+and Liddon.&nbsp; This cannot be: they must be acquainted with them,
+and find them fail.</p>
+<p>Now, granting readily that in some minds there is a certain wilful
+and prejudiced self-blindness which no reasoning can overcome, and granting
+also that men very much preoccupied with any one pursuit (more especially
+a scientific one) will be apt to give but scant and divided attention
+to arguments upon other subjects such as religion or politics, nevertheless
+we have so many opponents who profess to have made a serious study of
+Christian evidences, and against whose opinion no exception can be fairly
+taken, that it seems as though we were bound either to admit that our
+demonstrations require rearrangement and reconsideration, or to take
+the Roman position, and maintain that revelation is no fit subject for
+evidence but is to be accepted upon authority.&nbsp; This last position
+will be rejected at once by nine-tenths of Englishmen.&nbsp; But upon
+rejecting it we look in vain for a work which shall appear to have any
+such success in arresting infidelity as attended the works of Butler
+and Paley in the last century.&nbsp; In their own day these two great
+men stemmed the current of infidelity: but no modern writers have succeeded
+in doing so, and it will scarcely be said that either Butler or Paley
+set at rest the many serious and inevitable questions in connection
+with Christianity which have arisen during the last fifty years.&nbsp;
+We could hardly expect one of the more intelligent students at Oxford
+or Cambridge to find his mind set once and for ever free from all rising
+doubt either by the <i>Analogy</i> or the <i>Evidences</i>.&nbsp; Suppose,
+for example, that he has been misled by the German writers of the T&uuml;bingen
+school, how will either of the above-named writers help him?&nbsp; On
+the contrary, they will do him harm, for they will not meet the requirements
+of the case, and the inference is too readily drawn that nothing else
+can do so.&nbsp; It need hardly be insisted upon that this inference
+is a most unfair one, but surely the blame of its being drawn rests
+in some measure at the door of those whose want of thoroughness has
+left people under the impression that no more can be said than what
+has been said already.</p>
+<p>It is the object, therefore, of this book to contribute towards establishing
+Christian evidences upon a more secure and self-evident base 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 of Christian evidence
+can tend towards so great a consummation.&nbsp; In spite of the narrow
+limits within which I have resolved to keep my treatment of the subject,
+I trust that I may be able to produce such an effect upon the minds
+of those who are in doubt concerning the evidences for the hope that
+is in them, that henceforward they shall never doubt again.&nbsp; I
+am not sanguine enough to suppose that I shall be able to induce certain
+eminent naturalists and philosophers to reopen a question which they
+have probably long laid aside as settled; unfortunately it is not in
+any but the very noblest Christian natures to do this, nevertheless,
+could they be persuaded to read these pages I believe that they would
+find so much which would be new to them, that their prejudices would
+be greatly shaken.&nbsp; To the younger band of scientific investigators
+I appeal more hopefully.</p>
+<p>It may be asked why not have undertaken the whole subject and devoted
+a life-time to writing an exhaustive work?&nbsp; The answer suggests
+itself that the believer is in no want of such a book, while the unbeliever
+would be repelled by its size.&nbsp; Assuredly there can be no doubt
+as to the value of a great work which should meet objections derived
+from certain recent scientific theories, and confute opponents who have
+arisen since the death of our two great apologists, but as a preliminary
+to this a smaller and more elementary book seems called for, which shall
+give the main outlines of our position with such boldness and effectiveness
+as to arrest the attention of any unbeliever into whose hands it may
+fall, and induce him to look further into what else may be urged upon
+the Christian side.&nbsp; We are bound to adapt our means to our ends,
+and shall have a better chance of gaining the ear of our adversaries
+if we can offer them a short and pregnant book than if we come to them
+with a long one from which whole chapters might be pruned.&nbsp; We
+have to bring the Christian religion to men who will look at no book
+which cannot be read in a railway train or in an arm-chair; it is most
+deplorable that 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
+in bringing about a better state of things.&nbsp; And let me add that
+never yet was there a time when it so much behoved all who are impressed
+with the vital power of religion to bestir themselves; for the symptoms
+of a general indifference, not to say hostility, must be admitted to
+be widely diffused, in spite of an imposing array of facts which can
+be brought forward to the contrary; and not only this, but the stream
+of infidelity seems making more havoc yearly, as it might naturally
+be expected to do, when met by no new works of any real strength or
+permanence.</p>
+<p>Bearing in mind, therefore, the necessity for prompt action, it seemed
+best to take the most overwhelming of all miracles - the Resurrection
+of our Lord Jesus Christ, and show that it can be so substantiated that
+no reasonable man should doubt it.&nbsp; This I have therefore attempted,
+and I humbly trust that the reader will feel that I have not only attempted
+it, but done it, once and for all so clearly and satisfactorily and
+with such an unflinching examination of the most advanced arguments
+of unbelievers, that the question can never be raised hereafter by any
+candid mind, or at any rate not until science has been made to rest
+on different grounds from those on which she rests at present.</p>
+<p>But the truth of our Lord&rsquo;s resurrection having been once established,
+what need to encumber this book with further evidences of the miraculous
+element in his ministry?&nbsp; The other miracles can be no insuperable
+difficulty to one who accepts the Resurrection.&nbsp; It is true that
+as Christians we cannot dwell too minutely upon every act and incident
+in the life of the Redeemer, but unhappily we have to deal with those
+who are not Christians, and must consider rather what we can get them
+to take than what we should like to give them: &ldquo;Be ye wise as
+serpents and harmless as doves,&rdquo; saith the Saviour.&nbsp; A single
+miracle is as good as twenty, provided that it be well established,
+and can be shewn to be so: it is here that even the ablest of our apologists
+have too often failed; they have professed to substantiate the historical
+accuracy of all the recorded miracles and sayings of our Lord, with
+a result which is in some instances feeble and conventional, and occasionally
+even unfair (oh! what suicidal folly is there in even the remotest semblance
+of unfairness), instead of devoting themselves to throwing a flood of
+brilliancy upon the most important features and leaving the others to
+shine out in the light reflected from these.&nbsp; Even granting that
+some of the miracles recorded of our Lord are apocryphal, what of that?&nbsp;
+We do not rest upon them: we have enough and more than enough without
+them, and can afford to take the line of saying to the unbeliever, &ldquo;Disbelieve
+this miracle or that if you find that you cannot accept it, but believe
+in the Resurrection, of which we will put forward such ample proofs
+that no healthy reason can withstand them, and, having accepted the
+Resurrection, admit it as the manifestation of supernatural power, the
+existence of which can thus no longer be denied.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Does not the reader feel that there is a ring of truth and candour
+about this which must carry more weight with an opponent than any strained
+defence of such a doubtful miracle as the healing of the impotent man
+at the pool of Bethesda?&nbsp; We weight ourselves as against our opponents
+by trying to defend too much; no matter how sound and able the defence
+of one part of the Christian scheme may have been, its effect is often
+marred by contiguity with argument which the writer himself must have
+suspected, or even known, to be ingenious rather than sound: the moment
+that this is felt in any book its value with an opponent is at an end,
+for he must be continually in doubt whether the spirit which he has
+detected here or there may not be existing and at work in a hundred
+other places where he has not detected it.&nbsp; What carries weight
+with an antagonist is the feeling that his position has been mastered
+and his difficulties grasped with thoroughness and candour.</p>
+<p>On this point I am qualified to speak from long and bitter experience.&nbsp;
+I say that want of candour and the failure to grasp the position occupied,
+however untenably, by unbelievers is the chief cause of the continuance
+of unbelief.&nbsp; When this cause has been removed unbelief will die
+a natural death.&nbsp; For years I was myself a believer in nothing
+beyond the personality and providence of God: yet I feel (not without
+a certain sense of bitterness, which I know that I should not feel but
+cannot utterly subdue) that if my first doubts had been met with patient
+endeavour to understand their nature and if I had felt that the one
+in whom I confided had been ready to go to the root of the matter, and
+even to yield up the convictions of a life-time could it be shewn that
+they were unsafely founded, my doubts would have been resolved in an
+hour or two&rsquo;s quiet conversation, and would at once have had the
+effect, which they have only had after long suffering and unrest, of
+confirming me in my allegiance to Christ.&nbsp; But I was met with anger
+and impatience.&nbsp; There was an instinct which told me that my opponent
+had never heard a syllable against his own convictions, and was determined
+not to hear one: on this I assumed rashly that he must have good reason
+for his resolution; and doubt ripened into unbelief.&nbsp; Oh! what
+years of heart-burning and utter drifting followed.&nbsp; Yet when I
+was at last brought within the influence of one who not only believed
+all that my first opponent did, but who also knew that the more light
+was thrown upon it the more clearly would its truth be made apparent
+- a man who talked with me as though he was anxious that I should convince
+him if he were in error, not as though bent on making me believe whatever
+habit and circumstances had imposed as a formula upon himself - my heart
+softened at once, and the dry places of my soul were watered.</p>
+<p>The above may seem too purely personal to warrant its introduction
+here, yet the experience is one which should not be without its value
+to others.&nbsp; Its effect upon myself has been to give me an unutterable
+longing to save others from sufferings like my own; I know so well where
+it is that, to use a homely metaphor, the shoe pinches.&nbsp; And it
+is chiefly here - in the fact that the unbeliever does not feel as though
+we really wanted to understand him.&nbsp; This feeling is in many cases
+lamentably well founded.&nbsp; No one likes hearing doubt thrown upon
+anything which he regards as settled beyond dispute, and this, happily,
+is what most men feel concerning Christianity.&nbsp; Again, indolence
+or impotence of mind indisposes many to intellectual effort; others
+are pained by coming into contact with anything which derogates from
+the glory due to the great sacrifice of Christ, or to his Divine nature,
+and lastly not a few are withheld by moral cowardice from daring to
+bestow the pains upon the unbeliever which his condition requires.&nbsp;
+But from whichever of these sources the disinclination to understand
+him comes, its effect is equally disastrous to the unbeliever.&nbsp;
+People do not mind a difference of opinion, if they feel that the one
+who differs from them has got a firm grasp of their position; or again,
+if they feel that he is trying to understand them but fails from some
+defect either of intellect or education, even in this case they are
+not pained by opposition.&nbsp; What injures their moral nature and
+hardens their hearts is the conviction that another could understand
+them if he chose, but does not choose, and yet none the less condemns
+them.&nbsp; On this they become imbued with that bitterness against
+Christianity which is noticeable in so many free-thinkers.</p>
+<p>Can we greatly wonder?&nbsp; For, sad though the admission be, it
+is only justice to admit that we Christians have been too often contented
+to accept our faith without knowing its grounds, in which case it is
+more by luck than by cunning that we are Christians at all, and our
+faith will be in continual danger.&nbsp; The greater number even of
+those who have undertaken to defend the Christian faith have been sadly
+inclined to avoid a difficulty rather than to face it, unless it is
+so easy as to be no real difficulty at all.&nbsp; I do not say that
+this is unnatural, for the Christian writer must be deeply impressed
+with the sinfulness of unbelief, and will therefore be anxious to avoid
+raising doubts which will probably never yet have occurred to his reader,
+and might possibly never do so; nor does there at first sight appear
+to be much advantage in raising difficulties for the sole purpose of
+removing them; nevertheless I cannot think that if either Butler or
+Paley could have foreseen the continuance of unbelief, and the ruin
+of so many souls whom Christ died to save, they would have been contented
+to act so almost entirely upon the defensive.</p>
+<p>Yet it is impossible not to feel that we in their place should have
+done as they did.&nbsp; Infidelity was still in its infancy: the nature
+of the disease was hardly yet understood; and there seemed reason to
+fear lest it might be aggravated by the very means taken to cure it;
+it seemed safer therefore in the first instance to confine attention
+to the matter actually in debate, and leave it to time to suggest a
+more active treatment should the course first tried prove unsatisfactory.&nbsp;
+Who can be surprised that the earlier apologists should have felt thus
+in the presence of an enemy whose novelty made him appear more portentous
+than he can ever seem to ourselves?&nbsp; They were bound to venture
+nothing rashly; what they did they did, for their own age, thoroughly;
+we owe it to their cautious pioneering that we so know the weakness
+of our opponents and our own strength as to be able to do fearlessly
+what may well have seemed perilous to our forefathers: nevertheless
+it is easy to be wise after the event, and to regret that a bolder course
+was not taken at the outset.&nbsp; If Butler and Paley had fought as
+men eager for the fray, as men who smelt the battle from afar, it is
+impossible to believe that infidelity could have lasted as long as it
+has.&nbsp; What can be done now could have been done just as effectively
+then, and though we cannot be surprised at the caution shewn at first,
+we are bound to deplore it as short-sighted.</p>
+<p>The question, however, for ourselves is not what dead men might have
+done better long ago, but what living men and women can do most wisely
+now; and in answer to it I would say that there is no policy so unwise
+as fear in a good cause: the bold course is also the wise one; it consists
+in being on the lookout for objections, in finding the very best that
+can be found and stating them in their most intelligible form, in shewing
+what are the logical consequences of unbelief, and thus carrying the
+war into the enemy&rsquo;s country; in fighting with the most chivalrous
+generosity and a determination to take no advantage which is not according
+to the rules of war most strictly interpreted against ourselves, but
+within such an interpretation showing no quarter.&nbsp; This is the
+bold course and the true course: it will beget a confidence which can
+never be felt in the wariness, however well-intentioned, of the old
+defenders.</p>
+<p>Let me, therefore, beg the reader to follow me patiently while I
+do my best to put before him the main difficulties felt by unbelievers.&nbsp;
+When he is once acquainted with these he will run in no danger of confirming
+doubt through his fear in turning away from it in the first instance.&nbsp;
+How many die hardened unbelievers through the treatment which they have
+received from those to whom their Christianity has been a matter of
+circumstances and habit only?&nbsp; Hell is no fiction.&nbsp; Who, without
+bitter sorrow, can reflect upon the agonies even of a single soul as
+being due to the selfishness or cowardice of others?&nbsp; Awful thought!&nbsp;
+Yet it is one which is daily realised in the case of thousands.</p>
+<p>In the commonest justice to brethren, however sinful, each one of
+us who tries to lead them to the Saviour is bound not only to shew them
+the whole strength of our own arguments, but to make them see that we
+understand the whole strength of theirs; for men will not seriously
+listen to those whom they believe to know one side of a question only.&nbsp;
+It is this which makes the educated infidel so hard to deal with; he
+knows very well that an intelligent apprehension of the position held
+by an opponent is indispensable for profitable discussion; but he very
+rarely meets with this in the case of those Christians who try to argue
+with him; he therefore soon acquires a habit of avoiding the subject
+of religion, and can seldom be induced to enter upon an argument which
+he is convinced can lead to nothing.</p>
+<p>He who would cure a disease must first know what it is, and he who
+would convert an infidel must know what it is that he is to be converted
+from, as well as what he is to be led to; nothing can be laid hold of
+unless its whereabouts is known.&nbsp; It is deplorable that such commonplaces
+should be wanted; but, alas! it is impossible to do without them.&nbsp;
+People have taken a panic on the subject of infidelity as though it
+were so infectious that the very nurses and doctors should run away
+from those afflicted with it; but such conduct is no less absurd than
+cruel and disgraceful.&nbsp; <i>Infidelity is only infectious when it
+is not understood</i>.&nbsp; The smallest reflection should suffice
+to remind us that a faith which has satisfied the most brilliant and
+profound of human intellects for nearly two thousand years must have
+had very sure foundations, and that any digging about them for the purpose
+of demonstrating their depth and solidity, will result, not in their
+disturbance, but in its being made clear to every eye that they are
+laid upon a rock which nothing can shake - that they do indeed satisfy
+every demand of human reason, which suffers violence not from those
+who accept the scheme of the Christian redemption, but from those who
+reject it.</p>
+<p>This being the case, and that it is so will, I believe, appear with
+great clearness in the following pages, what need to shrink from the
+just and charitable course of understanding the nature of what is urged
+by those who differ from us?&nbsp; How can we hope to bring them to
+be of one mind in Christ Jesus with ourselves, unless we can resolve
+their difficulties and explain them?&nbsp; And how can we resolve their
+difficulties until we know what they are?&nbsp; Infidelity is as a reeking
+fever den, which none can enter safely without due precautions, but
+the taking these precautions is within our own power; we can all rely
+upon the blessed promises of the Saviour that he will not desert us
+in our hour of need if we will only truly seek him; there is more infidelity
+in this shrinking and fear of investigation than in almost any open
+denial of Christ; the one who refuses to examine the doubts felt by
+another, and is prevented from making any effort to remove them through
+fear lest he should come to share them, shews either that he has no
+faith in the power of Christianity to stand examination, or that he
+has no faith in the promises of God to guide him into all truth.&nbsp;
+In either case he is hardly less an unbeliever than those whom he condemns.</p>
+<p>Let the reader therefore understand that he will here find no attempt
+to conceal the full strength of the arguments relied on by unbelievers.&nbsp;
+This manner of substantiating the truth of Christianity has unhappily
+been tried already; it has been tried and has failed as it was bound
+to fail.&nbsp; Infidelity lives upon concealment.&nbsp; Shew it in broad
+daylight, hold it up before the world and make its hideousness manifest
+to all - then, and not till then, will the hours of unbelief be numbered.&nbsp;
+<i>We</i> have been the mainstay of unbelief through our timidity.&nbsp;
+Far be it from me, therefore, that I should help any unbeliever by concealing
+his case for him.&nbsp; This were the most cruel kindness.&nbsp; On
+the contrary, I shall insist upon all his arguments and state them,
+if I may say so without presumption, more clearly than they have ever
+been stated within the same limits.&nbsp; No one knows what they are
+better than I do.&nbsp; No one was at one time more firmly persuaded
+that they were sound.&nbsp; May it be found that no one has so well
+known how also to refute them.</p>
+<p>The reader must not therefore expect to find fictitious difficulties
+in the way of accepting Christianity set up with one hand in order to
+be knocked down again with the other: he will find the most powerful
+arguments against all that he holds most sacred insisted on with the
+same clearness as those on his own side; it is only by placing the two
+contending opinions side by side in their utmost development that the
+strength of our own can be made apparent.&nbsp; Those who wish to cry
+peace, peace, when there is no peace, those who would take their faith
+by fashion as the take their clothes, those who doubt the strength of
+their own cause and do not in their heart of heart believe that Christianity
+will stand investigation, those, again, who care not who may go to Hell
+provided they are comfortably sure of going to Heaven themselves, such
+persons may complain of the line which I am about to take.&nbsp; They
+on the other hand whose faith is such that it knows no fear of criticism,
+and they whose love for Christ leads them to regard the bringing of
+lost souls into his flock as the highest earthly happiness - such will
+admit gladly that I have been right in tearing aside the veil from infidelity
+and displaying it uncloaked by the side of faith itself.</p>
+<p>At the same time I am bound to confess that I never should have been
+able to see the expediency, not to say the absolute necessity for such
+a course, unless I had been myself for many years an unbeliever.&nbsp;
+It is this experience, so bitterly painful, that has made me feel so
+strongly as to the only manner in which others can be brought from darkness
+into light.&nbsp; The wisdom of the Almighty recognised that if man
+was to be saved it must be done by the assumption of man&rsquo;s nature
+on the part of the Deity.&nbsp; God must make himself man, or man could
+never learn the nature and attributes of God.&nbsp; Let us then follow
+the sublime example of the incarnation, and make ourselves as unbelievers
+that we may teach unbelievers to believe.&nbsp; If Paley and Butler
+had only been <i>real infidels</i> for a single year, instead of taking
+the thoughts and reasonings of their opponents at second-hand, what
+a difference should we not have seen in the nature of their work.&nbsp;
+Alas! their clear and powerful intellects had been trained early in
+the severest exercises; they could not be misled by any of the sophistries
+of their opponents; but, on the other hand, never having been misled
+they knew not the thread of the labyrinth as one who has been shut up
+therein.</p>
+<p>I should also warn the reader of another matter.&nbsp; He must not
+expect to find that I can maintain everything which he could perhaps
+desire to see maintained.&nbsp; I can prove, to such a high degree of
+presumption as shall amount virtually to demonstration, that our Lord
+died upon the cross, rose again from the dead upon the third day, and
+ascended into Heaven: but I cannot prove that none of the accounts of
+these events which have come down to us have suffered from the hand
+of time: on the contrary, I must own that the reasons which led me to
+conclude that there must be confusion in some of the accounts of the
+Resurrection continue in full force with me even now.&nbsp; I see no
+way of escaping from this conclusion: but it seems equally strange that
+the Christian should have such an indomitable repugnance to accept it,
+and that the unbeliever should conceive that it inflicts any damage
+whatever upon the Christian evidences.&nbsp; Perhaps the error of each
+confirms that of the other, as will appear hereafter.</p>
+<p>I have spoken hitherto as though I were writing only for men, but
+the help of good women can never be so precious as in the salvation
+of human souls; if there is one work for which women are better fitted
+than another, it is that of arresting the progress of unbelief.&nbsp;
+Can there be a nobler one?&nbsp; Their superior tact and quickness give
+them a great advantage over men; men will listen to them when they would
+turn away from one of their own sex; and though I am well aware that
+courtesy is no argument, yet the natural politeness shewn by a man to
+a woman will compel attention to what falls from her lips, and will
+thus perhaps be the means of bringing him into contact with Divine truths
+which would never otherwise have reached him.&nbsp; Yet this is a work
+from which too many women recoil in horror - they know that they can
+do nothing unless they are intimately acquainted with the opinions of
+those from whom they differ, and from such an intimacy they believe
+that they are right in shrinking.</p>
+<p>Oh, my sisters, my sisters, ye who go into the foulest dens of disease
+and vice, fearless of the pestilence and of man&rsquo;s brutality, ye
+whose whole lives bear witness to the cross of Christ and the efficacy
+of the Divine love, did one of you ever fear being corrupted by the
+vice with which you came in contact?&nbsp; Is there one of you who fears
+to examine why it is that even the most specious form of vice is vicious?&nbsp;
+You fear not infection here, for you know that you are on sure ground,
+and that there is no form of vice of which the viciousness is not clearly
+provable; but can you doubt that the foundation of your faith is sure
+also, and can you not see that your cowardice in not daring to examine
+the foul and soul-destroying den of infidelity is a stumbling-block
+to those who have not yet known their Saviour?&nbsp; Your fear is as
+the fear of children who dare not go in the dark; but alas! the unbeliever
+does not understand it thus.&nbsp; He says that your fear is not of
+the darkness but of the light, and that you dare not search lest you
+should find that which would make against you.&nbsp; Hideous blasphemy
+against the Lord!&nbsp; But is not the sin to be laid partly at the
+door of those whose cowardice has given occasion for it?</p>
+<p>Is there none of you who knows that as to the pure all things are
+pure, so to the true and loyal heart all things will confirm its faith?&nbsp;
+You shrink from this last trial of your allegiance, partly from the
+pain of even seeing the wounds of your Redeemer laid open - of even
+hearing the words of those enemies who have traduced him and crucified
+him afresh - but you lose the last and highest of the prizes, for great
+as is your faith now, be very sure that from this crowning proof of
+your devotion you would emerge with greater still.</p>
+<p>Has none of you seen a savage dog barking and tearing at the end
+of his chain as though he were longing to devour you, and yet if you
+have gone bravely up to him and bade him be still, he is cowed and never
+barks again?&nbsp; Such is the genius of infidelity; it loves to threaten
+those who retreat, yet it shrinks daunted back from those who meet it
+boldly; it is the lack of boldness on the part of the Christian which
+gives it all its power; when Christians are strong in the strength of
+their own cause infidels will know their impotence, but as long as there
+are cowards there will be those who prey upon cowardice, and as long
+as those who should defend the cross of Christ hide themselves behind
+battlements, so long will the enemy come up to the very walls of the
+defence and trouble them that are within.&nbsp; The above words must
+have sounded harsh and will I fear have given pain to many a tender
+heart which is conscious of the depth of its own love for the Redeemer,
+and would be shocked at the thought that anything had been neglected
+in his service, but has not the voice of such a heart returned answer
+to itself that what I have written is just?</p>
+<p>Again, I have been told by some that they have been aware of the
+necessity of doing their best towards putting a stop to infidelity,
+and that they have been unceasing in their prayers for friends or husbands
+or relations who know not Christ, but that with prayers their efforts
+have ended.&nbsp; Now, there can be no one in the whole world who has
+had more signal proofs of the efficacy of prayer than the writer of
+these pages, but he would lie if he were to say that prayer was ever
+answered when it was only another name for idleness, a cloak for the
+avoidance of obvious duty.&nbsp; God is no helper of the indolent and
+the coward; if this were so, what need to work at all?&nbsp; Why not
+sit still, and trust in prayer for everything?&nbsp; No; to the women
+who have prayed, and prayed only, the answer is ready at hand, that
+work without prayer is bad, but prayer without work worse.&nbsp; Let
+them do their own utmost in the way of sowing, planting, and watering,
+and then let them pray to God that he will vouchsafe them the increase;
+but they can no more expect the increase to be of God&rsquo;s free gift
+without the toil of sowing than did the blessed Apostle St. Paul.&nbsp;
+If God did not convert the heathen for Paul and Apollos in answer to
+their prayers alone, how can we expect that he will convert the infidel
+for ourselves, unless we have first followed in the footsteps of the
+Apostles?&nbsp; The sin of infidelity will rest upon us and our children
+until we have done our best to shake it off; and this not timidly and
+disingenuously as those who fear for the result, but with the certainty
+that it is the infidel and not the Christian who need fear investigation,
+if the investigation only goes deep enough.&nbsp; Herein has lain our
+error, we have feared to allow the unbeliever to put forth all his strength
+lest it should prove stronger than we thought it was, when in truth
+the world would only have known the sooner of its weakness; and this
+shall now at last be abundantly shewn, for, as I said above, I will
+help no infidel by concealing his case; it shall appear in full, and
+as nearly in his own words as the limits at my disposal will allow.&nbsp;
+Out of his own mouth shall he be condemned, and yet, I trust, not condemned
+alone; but converted as I myself, and by the same irresistible chain
+of purest reason; one thing only is wanted on the part of the reader,
+it is this, the desire to attain truth regardless of past prejudices.</p>
+<p>If an unbeliever has made up his mind that we must be wrong, without
+having heard our side, and if he presumes to neglect the most ordinary
+precaution against error - that of understanding the position of an
+opponent - I can do nothing with him or for him.&nbsp; No man can make
+another see, if the other persists in shutting his eyes and bandaging
+them: if it is a victory to be able to say that they cannot see the
+truth under these circumstances, the victory is with our opponents;
+but for those who can lay their hands upon their heart and say truly
+before God and man that they care nothing for the maintenance of their
+own opinions, but only that they may come to know the truth, for such
+I can do much.&nbsp; I can put the matter before them in so clear a
+light that they shall never doubt hereafter.</p>
+<p>Never was there a time when such an exposition was wanted so much
+as now.&nbsp; The specious plausibilities of a pseudo-science have led
+hundreds of thousands into error; the misapplication of geology has
+ensnared a host of victims, and a still greater misapplication of natural
+history seems likely to devour those whom the perversion of geology
+has spared.&nbsp; Not that I have a word to say against <i>true</i>
+science: true science can never be an enemy of the Bible, which is the
+text-book of the science of the salvation of human souls as written
+by the great Creator and Redeemer of the soul itself, but the Enemy
+of Mankind is never idle, and no sooner does God vouchsafe to us any
+clearer illumination of his purposes and manner of working, than the
+Evil One sets himself to consider how he can turn the blessing into
+a curse; and by the all-wise dispensation of Providence he is allowed
+so much triumph as that he shall sift the wise from the foolish, the
+faithful from the traitors.&nbsp; God knoweth his own.&nbsp; Still there
+is no surer mark that one is among the number of those whom he hath
+chosen than the desire to bring all to share in the gracious promises
+which he has vouchsafed to those that will take advantage of them; and
+there are few more certain signs of reprobation than indifference as
+to the existence of unbelief, and faint-heartedness in trying to remove
+it.&nbsp; It is the duty of all those who love Christ to lead their
+brethren to love him also; but how can they hope to succeed in this
+until they understand the grounds on which he is rejected?</p>
+<p>For there <i>are</i> grounds, insufficient ones, untenable ones,
+grounds which a little loving patience and, if I may be allowed the
+word, ingenuity, will shew to be utterly rotten; but as long as their
+rottenness is only to be asserted and not proved, so long will deluded
+people build upon them in fancied security.&nbsp; As yet the proof has
+never been made sufficiently clear.&nbsp; If displayed sufficiently
+for one age it has been necessary to do the work again for the next.&nbsp;
+As soon as the errors of one set of people have been made apparent,
+another set has arisen with fresh objections, or the old fallacies have
+reappeared in another shape.&nbsp; It is not too much to say that it
+has never yet been so clearly proved that Christ rose again from the
+dead, that a jury of educated Englishmen should be compelled to assent
+to it, even though they had never before heard of Christianity.&nbsp;
+This therefore it is my object to do once and for ever now.</p>
+<p>It is not for me to pry into the motives of the Almighty, nor to
+inquire why it is that for nearly two thousand years the perfection
+of proof should never have been duly produced, but if I dare hazard
+an opinion I should say that such proof was never necessary until now,
+but that it has lain ready to be produced at a moment&rsquo;s notice
+on the arrival of the fitting time.&nbsp; In the early stages of the
+Church the <i>viv&acirc; voce</i> testimony of the Apostles was still
+so near that its force was in no way spent; from those times until recently
+the universality of belief was such that proof was hardly needed; it
+is only for a hundred years or so (which in the sight of God are but
+as yesterday) that infidelity has made real progress.&nbsp; Then God
+raised his hand in wrath; revolution taught men to see the nature of
+unbelief and the world shrank back in horror; the time of fear passed
+by; unbelief has again raised itself; whereon we can see that other
+and even more fearful revolutions <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a>
+are daily threatening.&nbsp; What country is safe?&nbsp; In what part
+of the world do not men feel an uneasy foreboding of the wrath which
+will surely come if they do not repent and turn unto the Lord their
+God?&nbsp; Go where we will we are conscious of that heaviness and oppression
+which is the precursor of the hurricane and the earthquake; none escape
+it: an all-pervading sense of rottenness and fearful waiting upon judgment
+is upon the hearts of all men.&nbsp; May it not be that this awe and
+silence have been ordained in order that the still small voice of the
+Lord may be the more clearly heard and welcomed as salvation?&nbsp;
+Is it not possible that the infinite mercy of God is determined to give
+mankind one last chance, before the day of that coming which no creature
+may abide?&nbsp; I dare not answer: yet I know well that the fire burneth
+within me, and that night and day I take no rest but am consumed until
+the work committed to me is done, that I may be clear from the blood
+of all men.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II - STRAUSS AND THE HALLUCINATION THEORY</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It has been well established by Paley, and indeed has seldom been
+denied, that within a very few years of Christ&rsquo;s crucifixion a
+large number of people believed that he had risen from the dead.&nbsp;
+They believed that after having suffered actual death he rose to actual
+life, as a man who could eat and drink and talk, who could be seen and
+handled.&nbsp; Some who held this were near relations of Christ, some
+had known him intimately for a considerable time before his crucifixion,
+many must have known him well by sight, but all were unanimous in their
+assertion that they had seen him alive after he had been dead, and in
+consequence of this belief they adopted a new mode of life, abandoning
+in many cases every other earthly consideration save that of bearing
+witness to what they had known and seen.&nbsp; I have not thought it
+worth while to waste time and space by introducing actual proof of the
+above.&nbsp; This will be found in Paley&rsquo;s opening chapters, to
+which the reader is referred.</p>
+<p>How then did this intensity of conviction come about?&nbsp; Differ
+as they might and did upon many of the questions arising out of the
+main fact which they taught, as to the fact itself they differed not
+in the least degree.&nbsp; In their own life-time and in that of those
+who could confute them their story gained the adherence of a very large
+and ever increasing number.&nbsp; If it could be shewn that the belief
+in Christ&rsquo;s reappearance did not arise until after the death of
+those who were said to have seen him, when actions and teachings might
+have been imputed to them which were not theirs, the case would then
+be different; but this cannot be done; there is nothing in history better
+established than that the men who said that they had seen Christ alive
+after he had been dead, were themselves the first to lay aside all else
+in order to maintain their assertion.&nbsp; If it could be maintained
+that they taught what they did in order to sanction laxity of morals,
+the case would again be changed.&nbsp; But this too is impossible.&nbsp;
+They taught what they did because of the intensity of their own conviction
+and from no other motive whatsoever.</p>
+<p>What then can that thing have been which made these men so beyond
+all measure and one-mindedly certain?&nbsp; Were they thus before the
+Crucifixion?&nbsp; Far otherwise.&nbsp; Yet the men who fled in the
+hour of their master&rsquo;s peril betrayed no signs of flinching when
+their own was no less imminent.&nbsp; How came it that the cowardice
+and fretfulness of the Gospels should be transformed into the lion-hearted
+steadfastness of the Acts?</p>
+<p>The Crucifixion had intervened.&nbsp; Yes, but surely something more
+than the Crucifixion.&nbsp; Can we believe that if their experience
+of Christ had ended with the Cross, the Apostles would have been in
+that state of mind which should compel them to leave all else for the
+sake of preaching what he had taught them?&nbsp; It is a hard thing
+for a man to change the scheme of his life; yet this is not a case of
+one man but of many, who became changed as if struck with an enchanter&rsquo;s
+wand, and who, though many, were as one in the vehemence with which
+they protested that their master had reappeared to them alive.&nbsp;
+Their converse with Christ did not probably last above a year or two,
+and was interrupted by frequent absence.&nbsp; If Christ had died once
+and for all upon the Cross, Christianity must have died with him; but
+it did not die; nay, it did not begin to live with full energy until
+after its founder had been crucified.&nbsp; We must ask again, what
+could that thing have been which turned these querulous and faint-hearted
+followers into the most earnest and successful body of propagandists
+which the world has ever seen, if it was not that which they said it
+was - namely, that Christ had reappeared to them alive after they had
+themselves known him to be dead?&nbsp; This would account for the change
+in them, but is there anything else that will?</p>
+<p>They had such ample opportunities of knowing the truth that the supposition
+of mistake is fraught with the greatest difficulties; they gave such
+guarantees of sincerity as that none have given greater; their unanimity
+is perfect; there is not the faintest trace of any difference of opinion
+amongst them as to the main fact of the Resurrection.&nbsp; These are
+things which never have been and never can be denied, but if they do
+not form strong <i>prim&acirc; facie</i> ground for believing in the
+truth and actuality of Christ&rsquo;s Resurrection, what is there which
+will amount to a <i>prim&acirc; facie</i> case for anything whatever?</p>
+<p>Nevertheless the matter does not rest here.&nbsp; While there exists
+the faintest possibility of mistake we may be sure that we shall deal
+most wisely by examining its character and value.&nbsp; Let us inquire
+therefore whether there are any circumstances which seem to indicate
+that the early Christians might have been mistaken, and been firmly
+persuaded that they had seen Christ alive, although in point of fact
+they had not really seen him?&nbsp; Men have been very positive and
+very sincere about things wherein we should have conceived mistake impossible,
+and yet they have been utterly mistaken.&nbsp; A strong predisposition,
+a rare coincidence, an unwonted natural phenomenon, a hundred other
+causes, may turn sound judgments awry, and we dare not assume forthwith
+that the first disciples of Christ were superior to influences which
+have misled many who have had better chances of withstanding them.&nbsp;
+Visions and hallucinations are not uncommon even now.&nbsp; How easily
+belief in a supernatural occurrence obtains among the peasantry of Italy,
+Ireland, Belgium, France, and Spain; and how much more easily would
+it do so among Jews in the days of Christ, when belief in supernatural
+interferences with this world&rsquo;s economy was, so to speak, omnipresent.&nbsp;
+Means of communication, that is to say of verification, were few, and
+the tone of men&rsquo;s minds as regards accuracy 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; few could read and fewer write, so that
+a story could seldom be confined to its original limits; error, therefore,
+had much chance and truth little as compared with our own times.&nbsp;
+What more is needed to make us feel how possible it was for the purest
+and most honest of men to become parents of all fallacy?</p>
+<p>Strauss believes this to have been the case.&nbsp; He supposes that
+the earliest Christians were under hallucination when they thought that
+they had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion; in other words, that
+they never saw him at all, but only thought that they had done so.&nbsp;
+He does not imagine that they conceived this idea at once, but that
+it grew up gradually in the course of a few years, and that those who
+came under its influence antedated it unconsciously afterwards.&nbsp;
+He appears to believe that within a few months of the Crucifixion, and
+in consequence of some unexplained combination of internal and external
+causes, some one of the Apostles came to be impressed with the notion
+that he had seen Christ alive; the impression, however made, was exceedingly
+strong, and was communicated as soon as might be to some other or others
+of the Apostles: the idea was welcome - as giving life to a hope which
+had been fondly cherished; each inflamed the imagination of the other,
+until the original basis of the conception slipped unconsciously from
+recollection, while the intensity of the conviction itself became stronger
+and stronger the more often the story was repeated.&nbsp; Strauss supposes
+that on seeing the firm conviction of two or three who had hitherto
+been leaders among them, the other Apostles took heart, and that thus
+the body grew together again perhaps within a twelve-month of the Crucifixion.&nbsp;
+According to him, the idea of the Resurrection having been once started,
+and having once taken root, the soil was so congenial that it grew apace;
+the rest of the Apostles, perhaps assembled together in a high state
+of mental enthusiasm and excitement, conceived that they saw Christ
+enter the room in which they were sitting and afford some manifest proof
+of life and identity; or some one else may have enlarged a less extraordinary
+story to these dimensions, so that in a short time it passed current
+everywhere (there have been instances of delusions quite as extraordinary
+gaining a foothold among men whose sincerity is not to be disputed),
+and finally they conceived that these appearances of their master had
+commenced a few months - and what is a few months? - earlier than they
+actually had, so that the first appearance was soon looked upon as having
+been vouchsafed within three days of the Crucifixion.</p>
+<p>The above is not in Strauss&rsquo;s words, but it is a careful <i>r&eacute;sum&eacute;</i>
+of what I gather to be his conception of the origin of the belief in
+the Resurrection of Christ.&nbsp; The belief, and the intensity of the
+belief, need explanation; the supernatural explanation, as we should
+ourselves readily admit, cannot be accepted unless all others are found
+wanting; he therefore, if I understand him rightly, puts forward the
+above as being a reasonable and natural solution of the difficulty -
+the only solution which does not fail upon examination, and therefore
+the one which should be accepted.&nbsp; It is founded upon the affection
+which the Apostles had borne towards their master, and their unwillingness
+to give up their hope that they had been chosen, as the favoured lieutenants
+of the promised Messiah.</p>
+<p>No man would be willing to give up such hope easily; all men would
+readily welcome its renewal; it was easy in the then intellectual condition
+of Palestine for hallucination to originate, and still easier for it
+to spread; the story touched the hearts of men too nearly to render
+its propagation difficult.&nbsp; Men and women like believing in the
+marvellous, for it brings the chance of good fortune nearer to their
+own doors; but how much more so when they are themselves closely connected
+with the central figure of the marvel, and when it appears to give a
+clue to the solution of that mystery which all would pry into if they
+could - our future after death?&nbsp; There can be no great cause for
+wonder that an hallucination which arose under such conditions as these
+should have gained ground and conquered all opposition, even though
+its origin may be traced to the brain of but a single person.</p>
+<p>He would be a bold man who should say that this was impossible; nevertheless
+it cannot be accepted.&nbsp; For, in the first place, we collect most
+certainly from the Gospel records that the Apostles were <i>not</i>
+a compact and devoted body of adherents at the time of the Crucifixion;
+yet it is hard to see how Strauss&rsquo;s hallucination theory can be
+accepted, unless this was the case.&nbsp; If Strauss believed the earliest
+followers of Christ to have been already immovably fixed in their belief
+that he was the Son of God - the promised Messiah, of whom they were
+themselves the especially chosen ministers - if he considered that they
+believed in their master as the worker of innumerable miracles which
+they had themselves witnessed; as one whom they had seen raise others
+from death to life, and whom, therefore, death could not be expected
+to control - if he held the followers of Christ to have been in this
+frame of mind at the time of the Crucifixion, it might be intelligible
+that he should suppose the strength of their faith to have engendered
+an imaginary reappearance in order to save them from the conclusion
+that their hopes had been without foundation; that, in point of fact,
+they should have accepted a new delusion in order to prop up an old
+one; but we know very well that Strauss does not accept this position.&nbsp;
+He denies that the Apostles had seen any miracles; independently therefore
+of the many and unmistakable traces of their having been but partial
+and wavering adherents, which have made it a matter of common belief
+among those who have studied the New Testament that the faith of the
+Apostles was unsteadfast before the Crucifixion, he must have other
+and stronger reasons for thinking that this was so, inasmuch as he does
+not look upon them as men who had seen our Lord raise any one from the
+dead, nor restore the eyes of the blind.</p>
+<p>According to him, they may have seen Christ exercise unusual power
+over the insane, and temporary alleviations of sickness, due perhaps
+to mental excitement, may have taken place in their presence and passed
+for miracles; he would doubt how far they had even seen this much, for
+he would insist on many passages in the Gospels which would point in
+the direction of our Lord&rsquo;s never having professed to work a single
+miracle; but even though he granted that they had seen certain extraordinary
+cases of healing, there is no amount of testimony which would for a
+moment satisfy him of their having seen more.&nbsp; <i>We</i> see the
+Apostles as men who before the Crucifixion had seen Lazarus raised from
+death to life after the corruption of the grave had begun its work,
+and who had seen sight given to one that had been born sightless; as
+men who had seen miracle after miracle, with every loophole for escape
+from a belief in the miraculous carefully excluded; who had seen their
+master walking upon the sea, and bidding the winds be still; our difficulty
+therefore is to understand the incredulity of the Apostles as displayed
+abundantly in the Gospels; but Strauss can have none such; for he must
+see them as men over whom the influence of their master had been purely
+personal, and due to nothing more than to a strength and beauty of character
+which his followers very imperfectly understood.&nbsp; <i>He</i> does
+not believe that Lazarus was raised at all, or that the man who had
+been born blind ever existed; he considers the fourth gospel, which
+alone records these events, to be the work of a later age, and not to
+be depended on for facts, save here and there; certainly not where the
+facts recorded are miraculous.&nbsp; He must therefore be even more
+ready than we are to admit that the faith of the Apostles was weak before
+the Crucifixion; but whether he is or not, we have it on the highest
+authority that their faith was not strong enough to maintain them at
+the very first approach of danger, nor to have given them any hope whatever
+that our Lord should rise again; whereas for Strauss&rsquo;s theory
+to hold good, it must already have been in a white heat of enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>But even granting that this was so - in the face of all the evidence
+we can reach - men so honest and sincere as the Apostles proved themselves
+to be, would have taken other ground than the assertion that their master
+had reappeared to them alive, unless some very extraordinary occurrences
+had led them to believe that they had indeed seen him.&nbsp; If their
+faith was glowing and intense at the time of the Crucifixion - so intense
+that they believed in Christ as much, or nearly as much, after the Crucifixion
+as before it (and unless this were so the hallucinations could never
+have arisen at all, or at any rate could never have been so unanimously
+accepted) - it would have been so intense as to stand in no need of
+a reappearance.&nbsp; In this case, if they had found that their master
+did not return to them, the Apostles would probably have accepted the
+position that he had, contrary to their expectation, been put to a violent
+death; they would, perhaps, have come sooner or later to the conclusion
+that he was immediately on death received into Heaven, and was sitting
+on the right hand of God; while some extraordinary dream might have
+been construed into a revelation of the fact with the manner of its
+occurrence, and been soon generally believed; but the idea of our Lord&rsquo;s
+return to earth in a gross material body whereon the wounds were still
+unhealed, was perhaps the last thing that would have suggested itself
+to them by way of hallucination.&nbsp; If their faith had been great
+enough, and their spirits high enough to have allowed hallucination
+to originate at all, their imagination would have presented them at
+once with a glorious throne, and the splendours of the highest Heaven
+as appearing through the opened firmament; it would not surely have
+rested satisfied with a man whose hands and side were wounded, and who
+could eat of a piece of broiled fish and of an honeycomb.&nbsp; A fabric
+so utterly baseless as the reappearances of our Lord (on the supposition
+of their being unhistoric) would have been built of gaudier materials.&nbsp;
+To repeat, it seems impossible that the Apostles should have attempted
+to connect their hallucinations circumstantially and historically with
+the events which had immediately preceded them.&nbsp; Hallucination
+would have been conscious of a hiatus and not have tried to bridge it
+over.&nbsp; It would not have developed the idea of our Lord&rsquo;s
+return to this grovelling and unworthy earth prior to his assumption
+into glory, unless those who were under its influence had either seen
+other resurrections from the dead - in which case there is no difficulty
+attaching to the Resurrection of our Lord himself - or been forced into
+believing it by the evidence of their own senses; this, on the supposition
+that the devotion of the first disciples was intense before the Crucifixion;
+but if, on the other hand, they were at that time anything but steadfast,
+as both <i>a priori</i> and <i>a posteriori</i> evidence would seem
+to indicate, if they were few and wavering, and if what little faith
+they had was shaken to its foundations and apparently at an end for
+ever with the death of Christ, it becomes indeed difficult to see how
+the idea of his return to earth alive could have ever struck even a
+single one of them, much less that hallucinations which could have had
+no origin but in the disordered brain of some one member of the Apostolic
+body, should in a short time have been accepted by all as by one man
+without a shadow of dissension, and been strong enough to convert them,
+as was said above, into the most earnest and successful body of propagandists
+that the world has ever seen.</p>
+<p>Truly this is not too much to say of them; and yet we are asked to
+believe that this faith, so intensely energetic, grew out of one which
+can hardly be called a faith at all, in consequence of day-dreams whose
+existence presupposes a faith hardly if any less intense than that which
+it is supposed to have engendered.&nbsp; Are we not warranted in asserting
+that a movement which is confined to a few wavering followers, and which
+receives any very decisive check, which scatters and demoralises the
+few who have already joined it, will be absolutely sure to die a speedy
+natural death unless something utterly strange and new occurs to give
+it a fresh impetus?&nbsp; Such a resuscitating influence would have
+been given to the Christian religion by the reappearance of Christ alive.&nbsp;
+This would meet the requirements of the case, for we can all feel that
+if we had already half believed in some gifted friend as a messenger
+from God, and if we had seen that friend put to death before our eyes,
+and yet found that the grave had no power over him, but that he could
+burst its bonds and show himself to us again unmistakably alive, we
+should from that moment yield ourselves absolutely his; but our faith
+would die with him unless it had been utter before his death.</p>
+<p>The devotion of the Apostles is explained by their belief in the
+Resurrection, but their belief in the Resurrection is not explained
+by a supposed hallucination; for their minds were not in that state
+in which alone such a delusion could establish itself firmly, and unless
+it were established firmly by the most apparently irrefragable evidence
+of many persons, it would have had no living energy.&nbsp; How an hallucination
+could occur in the requisite strength to the requisite number of people
+is neither explained nor explicable, except upon the supposition that
+the Apostles were in a very different frame of mind at the time of Christ&rsquo;s
+Crucifixion from that which all the evidence we can get would seem to
+indicate.&nbsp; If Strauss had first made this point clear we could
+follow him.&nbsp; But he has not done so.</p>
+<p>Strauss says, the conception that Christ&rsquo;s body had been reawakened
+and changed, &ldquo;a double miracle, exceeding far what had occurred
+in the case of Enoch and Elijah, could only be credible to one who saw
+in him a prophet far superior to them&rdquo; - <i>i.e</i>., to one who
+notwithstanding his death was persuaded that he was the Messiah: &ldquo;this
+conviction&rdquo; (that a double miracle had been performed) &ldquo;was
+the first to which the Apostles had to attain in the days of their humiliation
+after the Crucifixion.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yes - but how were they to attain
+to it, being now utterly broken down and disillusioned?&nbsp; Strauss
+admits that before they could have come to hold what he supposes them
+to have held, they must have seen in Christ even after his Crucifixion
+a prophet far greater than either Moses or Elias; whereas in point of
+fact it is very doubtful whether they ever believed this much of their
+master even before the Crucifixion, and hardly questionable that after
+it they disbelieved in him almost entirely, until he shewed himself
+to them alive.&nbsp; Is it possible that from the dead embers of so
+weak a faith, so vast a conflagration should have been kindled?</p>
+<p>I submit, therefore, that independently of any direct evidence as
+to the when and where of Christ&rsquo;s reappearances, the fact that
+the Apostles before the Crucifixion were irresolute, and after it unspeakably
+resolute, affords strong ground for believing that they must have seen
+something, or come to know something, which to their minds was utterly
+overwhelming in its convincing power: when we find the earliest and
+most trustworthy records unanimously asserting that that something was
+the reappearance of Christ alive, we feel that such a reappearance was
+an adequate cause for the result actually produced; and when we think
+over the condition of mind which both probability and evidence assign
+to the Apostles, we also feel that no other circumstance would have
+been adequate, nor even this unless the proof had been such as none
+could reasonably escape from.</p>
+<p>Again, Strauss&rsquo;s supposition that the Apostles antedated their
+hallucinations suggests no less difficulty.&nbsp; Suppose that, after
+all, Strauss is right, and that there was no actual reappearance; whatever
+it was that led the Apostles to believe in such reappearance must have
+been, judging by its effect, intense and memorable: it must have been
+as a shock obliterating everything save the memory of itself and the
+things connected with it: the time and manner of such a shock could
+never have been forgotten, nor misplaced without deliberate intention
+to deceive, and no one will impute any such intention to the Apostles.</p>
+<p>It may be said that if they were capable of believing in the reality
+of their visions they would be also capable of antedating them; this
+is true; but the double supposition of self-delusion, first in seeing
+the visions at all, and then in unconsciously antedating them, reduces
+the Apostles to such an exceedingly low level of intelligence and trustworthiness,
+that no good and permanent work could come from such persons; the men
+who could be weak enough, and crazed enough, if the reader will pardon
+the expression, to do as Strauss suggests, could never have carried
+their work through in the way they did.&nbsp; Such men would have wrecked
+their undertaking a hundred times over in the perils which awaited it
+upon every side; they would have become victims of their own fancies
+and desires, with little or no other grounds than these for any opinions
+they might hold or teach: from such a condition of mind they must have
+gone on to one still worse; and their tenets would have perished with
+them, if not sooner.</p>
+<p>Again, as regards this antedating; unless the visions happened at
+once, it is inconceivable that they should have happened at all.&nbsp;
+Strauss believes that the disciples fled in their first terror to their
+homes: that when there, &ldquo;outside the range to which the power
+of the enemies and murderers of their master extended, the spell of
+terror and consternation which had been laid upon their minds gave way,&rdquo;
+and that under the circumstances a reaction up to the point at which
+they might have visions of Christ is capable of explanation.&nbsp; The
+answer to this is that it is indeed likely that the spell of terror
+would give way when they found themselves safe at home, but that it
+is not at all likely that any reaction would take place in favour of
+one to whom their allegiance had never been thorough, and whom they
+supposed to have met with a violent and accursed end.&nbsp; It might
+be easy to imagine such a reaction if we did not also attempt to imagine
+the circumstances that must have preceded it; the moment we try to do
+this, we find it to be an impossibility.&nbsp; If once the Apostles
+had been dispersed, and had returned home to their former avocations
+without having seen or heard anything of their master&rsquo;s return
+to earth, all their expectations would have been ended; they would have
+remained peaceable fishermen for the rest of their lives, and been cured
+once and for ever of their enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>Can we believe that the disciples, returning to Galilee in fear,
+and bereaved of that master mind which had kept them from falling out
+with one another, would have remained a united and enthusiastic body?&nbsp;
+Strauss admits that their enthusiasm was for the time ended.&nbsp; Is
+it then likely that they would have remained in any sense united, or
+is it not much more likely that they would have shunned each other and
+disliked allusions to the past?&nbsp; What but Christ&rsquo;s actual
+reappearance could rekindle this dead enthusiasm, and fan it to such
+a burning heat?&nbsp; Suppose that one or two disciples recovered faith
+and courage, the majority would never do so.&nbsp; If Christ himself
+with the magic of his presence could not weld them into a devoted and
+harmonious company, would the rumour arising at a later time that some
+one had seen him after death, be acceptable enough to make the others
+believe that they too had actually seen and handled him?&nbsp; Perhaps
+- if the rumour was believed.&nbsp; But <i>would</i> it have been believed?&nbsp;
+Or at any rate have been believed so utterly?</p>
+<p>We cannot think it.&nbsp; For the belief and assertion are absolutely
+without trace of dissent within the Christian body, and that body was
+in the first instance composed entirely of the very persons who had
+known and followed Christ before the Crucifixion.&nbsp; If some of the
+original twelve had remained aloof and disputed the reappearances of
+Christ, is it possible that no trace of such dissension should appear
+in the Epistles of St. Paul?&nbsp; Paul differed widely enough from
+those who were Apostles before him, and his language concerning them
+is occasionally that of ill-concealed contempt and hatred rather than
+of affection; but is there a word or hint which would seem to indicate
+that a single one of those who had the best means of knowing doubted
+the Resurrection?&nbsp; There is nothing of the kind; on the contrary,
+whatever we find is such as to make us feel perfectly sure that none
+of them <i>did</i> doubt it.&nbsp; Is it then possible that this unanimity
+should have sprung from the original hallucinations of a small minority?&nbsp;
+True - it is plain from the Epistle to the Corinthians that there were
+some of Paul&rsquo;s contemporaries who denied the Resurrection.&nbsp;
+But who were they?&nbsp; We should expect that many among the more educated
+Gentile converts would throw doubt upon so stupendous a miracle, but
+is there anything which would point in the direction of these doubts
+having been held within the original body of those who said that they
+had seen Christ alive?&nbsp; By the eleven, or by the five hundred who
+saw him at once?&nbsp; There is not one single syllable.&nbsp; Those
+who heard the story second-hand would doubtless some of them attempt
+to explain away its miraculous character, but if it had been founded
+on hallucination it is not from these alone that the doubts would have
+come.</p>
+<p>Something is imperatively demanded in order to account for the intensity
+of conviction manifested by the earliest Christians shortly after the
+Crucifixion; for until that time they were far from being firmly convinced,
+and the Crucifixion was the very last thing to have convinced them.&nbsp;
+Given (to speak of our Lord as he must probably appear to Strauss) an
+unusually gifted teacher of a noble and beautiful character: given also,
+a small body of adherents who were inclined to adopt him as their master
+and to regard him as the coming liberator, but who were nevertheless
+far from settled in their conviction: given such a man and such followers:
+the teacher is put to a shameful death about two years after they had
+first known him, and the followers forsake him instantly: surely without
+his reappearing in some way upon the scene they would have concluded
+that their doubts had been right and their hopes without foundation:
+but if he reappeared, their faith would, for the first time, become
+intense, all-absorbing.&nbsp; Surely also they might be trusted to know
+whether they had really seen their master return to them or not, and
+not to sacrifice themselves in every way, and spend their whole lives
+in bearing testimony to pure hallucination?</p>
+<p>There is one other point on which a few words will be necessary,
+before we proceed to the arguments in favour of the objective character
+of Christ&rsquo;s Resurrection as derivable from the conversion and
+testimony of St. Paul.&nbsp; It is this.&nbsp; Strauss and those who
+agree with him will perhaps maintain that the Apostles were in truth
+wholly devoted to Christ before the Crucifixion, but that the Evangelists
+have represented them as being only half-hearted, in order to heighten
+the effect of their subsequent intense devotion.&nbsp; But this looks
+like falling into the very error which Rationalists condemn most loudly
+when it comes from so-called orthodox writers.&nbsp; They complain,
+and with too much justice, that our apologists have made &ldquo;anything
+out of anything.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet if the Apostles were not unsteadfast,
+and did not desert their master in his hour of peril, and if all the
+accounts of Christ&rsquo;s reappearances are the creations of disordered
+fancy, we may as well at once declare the Evangelists to be worthless
+as historians, and had better give up all attempt at the construction
+of history with their assistance.&nbsp; We cannot take whatever we wish,
+and leave whatever we wish, and alter whatever we wish.&nbsp; If we
+admit that upon the whole the Gospel writings or at any rate the first
+three Gospels, contain a considerable amount of historic matter, we
+should also arrive at some general principles by which we will consistently
+abide in separating the historic from the unhistoric.&nbsp; We cannot
+deal with them arbitrarily, accepting whatever fits in with our fancies,
+and rejecting whatever is at variance with them.</p>
+<p>Now can it be maintained that the Evangelists would be so likely
+to overrate the half-heartedness of the Apostles, that we should look
+with suspicion upon the many and very plain indications of their having
+been only half-hearted?&nbsp; Certainly not.&nbsp; If there was any
+likelihood of a tendency one way or the other it would be in the direction
+of overrating their faith.&nbsp; Would not the unbelief of the Apostles
+in the face of all the recorded miracles be a most damaging thing in
+the eyes of the unconverted?&nbsp; Would not the Apostles themselves,
+after they were once firmly convinced, be inclined to think that they
+had from the first believed more firmly than they really had done?&nbsp;
+This at least would be in accordance with the natural promptings of
+human instinct: we are all of us apt to be wise after the event, and
+are far more prone to dwell upon things which seem to give some colour
+to a pretence of prescience, than upon those which force from us a confession
+of our own stupidity.&nbsp; It might seem a damaging thing that the
+Apostles should have doubted as much as long as they clearly did; would
+then the Evangelists go out of their way to introduce more signs of
+hesitation?&nbsp; Would any one suggest that the signs of doubt and
+wavering had been overrated, unless there were some theory or other
+to be supported, in order to account for which this overrating was necessary?&nbsp;
+Would the opinion that the want of faith had been exaggerated arise
+prior to the formation of a theory, or subsequently?&nbsp; This is the
+fairest test; let the reader apply it for himself.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, there are many reasons which should incline us
+to believe that, before the Resurrection, the Apostles were less convinced
+than is generally supposed, but it would be dangerous to depart either
+to the right hand or to the left of that which we find actually recorded,
+namely, that in the main the Apostles were prepared to accept Christ
+before the Crucifixion, but that they were by no means resolute and
+devoted followers.&nbsp; I submit that this is a fair rendering of the
+spirit of what we find in the Gospels.&nbsp; It is just because Strauss
+has chosen to depart from it that he has found himself involved in the
+maze of self-contradiction through which we have been trying to follow
+him.&nbsp; There is no position so absurd that it cannot be easily made
+to look plausible, if the strictly scientific method of investigation
+is once departed from.</p>
+<p>But if I had been in Strauss&rsquo;s place, and had wished to make
+out a case against Christianity without much heed of facts, I should
+not have done it by a theory of hallucinations.&nbsp; A much prettier,
+more novel and more sensational opening for such an attempt is afforded
+by an attack upon the Crucifixion itself.&nbsp; A very neat theory might
+be made, that there may have been some disturbance at one of the Jewish
+passovers, during which some persons were crucified as an example by
+the 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 he had been
+absent during the tumult, little by little worked themselves up into
+the belief that on his reappearance they had seen wounds upon him, and
+that the details of the Crucifixion were afterwards revealed in a vision
+to some favoured believer, until in the course of a few years the narrative
+assumed its present shape: that then the reappearance of Christ was
+denied among the Jews, while the Crucifixion as attaching disgrace to
+him was not disputed, and that it thus became so generally accepted
+as to find its way into Pliny and Josephus.&nbsp; This tissue of absurdity
+may serve as an example of what the unlicensed indulgence of theory
+might lead to; but truly it would be found quite as easy of belief as
+that the early Christian faith in the Resurrection was due to hallucination
+only.</p>
+<p>Considering, then, that Christianity was not crushed but overran
+the most civilised portions of the world; that St. Paul was undoubtedly
+early told, in such a manner as for him to be thoroughly convinced of
+the fact, that on some few but sufficient occasions Christ was seen
+alive after he had been crucified; that the general belief in the reappearance
+of our Lord was so strong that those who had the best means of judging
+gave up all else to preach it, with a unanimity and singleness of purpose
+which is irreconcilable with hallucination; that all our records most
+definitely insist upon this belief and that there is no trace of its
+ever having been disputed among the Jewish Christians, it seems hard
+to see how we can escape from admitting that Jesus Christ was crucified,
+dead, and buried, and yet that he was verily and indeed seen alive again
+by those who expected nothing less, but who, being once convinced, turned
+the whole world after them.</p>
+<p>It is now incumbent upon us to examine the testimony of St. Paul,
+to which I would propose to devote a separate chapter.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III - THE CHARACTER AND CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Setting aside for the present the story of St. Paul&rsquo;s conversion
+as given in the Acts of the Apostles - for I am bound to admit that
+there are circumstances in connection with that account which throw
+doubt upon its historical accuracy - and looking at the broad facts
+only, we are struck at once with the following obvious reflection, namely,
+that Paul was an able man, a cultivated man, and a bitter opponent of
+Christianity; but that in spite of the strength of his original prejudices,
+he came to see what he thought convincing reasons for going over to
+the camp of his enemies.&nbsp; He went over, and with the result we
+are all familiar.</p>
+<p>Now even supposing that the miraculous account of Paul&rsquo;s conversion
+is entirely devoid of foundation, or again, as I believe myself, that
+the story given in the Acts is not correctly placed, but refers to the
+vision alluded to by Paul himself (I. Cor. xv.), and to events which
+happened, not coincidently with his conversion, but some years after
+it - does not the importance of the conversion itself rather gain than
+lose in consequence?&nbsp; A charge of unimportant inaccuracy may be
+thus sustained against one who wrote in a most inaccurate age; but what
+is this in comparison with the testimony borne to the strength of the
+Christian evidences by the supposition that <i>of their own weight alone,
+and without miraculous assistance, they succeeded in convincing the
+most bitter, and at the same time the ablest, of their opponents</i>?&nbsp;
+This is very pregnant.&nbsp; No man likes to abandon the side which
+he has once taken.&nbsp; The spectacle of a man committing himself deeply
+to his original party, changing without rhyme or reason, and then remaining
+for the rest of his life the most devoted and courageous adherent of
+all that he had opposed, without a single human inducement to make him
+do so, is one which has never been witnessed since man was man.&nbsp;
+When men who have been committed deeply and spontaneously to one cause,
+leave it for another, they do so either because facts have come to their
+knowledge which are new to them and which they cannot resist, or because
+their temporal interests urge them, or from caprice: but if they change
+from caprice in important matters and after many pledges given, they
+will change from caprice again: they will not remain for twenty-five
+or thirty years without changing a jot of their capriciously formed
+opinions.&nbsp; We are therefore warranted in assuming that St. Paul&rsquo;s
+conversion to Christianity was not dictated by caprice: it was not dictated
+by self-interest: it must therefore have sprung from the weight of certain
+new facts which overbore all the resistance which he could make to them.</p>
+<p>What then could these facts have been?</p>
+<p>Paul&rsquo;s conduct as a Jew was logical and consistent: he did
+what any seriously-minded man who had been strictly brought up would
+have done in his situation.&nbsp; Instead of half believing what he
+had been taught, he believed it wholly.&nbsp; Christianity was cutting
+at the root of what was in his day accepted as fundamental: it was therefore
+perfectly natural that he should set himself to attack it.&nbsp; There
+is nothing against him in this beyond the fact of his having done it,
+as far as we can see, with much cruelty.&nbsp; Yet though cruel, he
+was cruel from the best of motives - the stamping out of an error which
+was harmful to the service of God; and cruelty was not then what it
+is now: the age was not sensitive and the lot of all was harder.&nbsp;
+From the first he proved himself to be a man of great strength of character,
+and like many such, deeply convinced of the soundness of his opinions,
+and deeply impressed with the belief that nothing could be good which
+did not also commend itself as good to him.&nbsp; He tested the truth
+of his earlier convictions not by external standards, but by the internal
+standard of their own strength and purity - a fearful error which but
+for God&rsquo;s mercy towards him would have made him no less wicked
+than well-intentioned.</p>
+<p>Even after having been convinced by a weight of evidence which no
+prejudice could resist, and after thus attaining to a higher conception
+of right and truth and goodness than was possible to him as a Jew, there
+remained not a few traces of the old character.&nbsp; Opposition beyond
+certain limits was a thing which to the end of his life he could not
+brook.&nbsp; It is not too much to say that he regarded the other Apostles
+- and was regarded by them - with suspicion and dislike; even if an
+angel from Heaven had preached any other doctrine than what Paul preached,
+the angel was to be accursed (Gal. i., 8), and it is not probable that
+he regarded his fellow Apostles as teaching the same doctrine as himself,
+or that he would have allowed them greater licence than an angel.&nbsp;
+It is plain from his undoubted Epistles to the Corinthians and Galatians
+that the other Apostles, no less than his converts, exceedingly well
+knew that he was not a man to be trifled with.&nbsp; If the arm of the
+law had been as much on his side after his conversion as before it,
+it would have gone hardly with dissenters; they would have been treated
+with politic tenderness the moment that they yielded, but woe betide
+them if they presumed on having any very decided opinions of their own.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, his sagacity is beyond dispute; it is certain
+that his perception of what the Gentile converts could and could not
+bear was the main proximate cause of the spread of Christianity.&nbsp;
+He prevented it from becoming a mere Jewish sect, and it has been well
+said that but for him the Jews would now be Christians, and the Gentiles
+unbelievers.&nbsp; Who can doubt his tact and forbearance, where matters
+not essential were concerned?&nbsp; His strength in not yielding a fraction
+upon vital points was matched only by his suppleness and conciliatory
+bearing upon all others.&nbsp; To use his own words, he did indeed become
+&ldquo;all things to all men&rdquo; if by any means he could gain some,
+and the probability is that he pushed this principle to its extreme
+(see Acts xxi., 20-26).</p>
+<p>Now when we see a man so strong and yet so yielding - the writer
+moreover of letters which shew an intellect at once very vigorous and
+very subtle (not to say more of them), and when we know that there was
+no amount of hardship, pain, and indignity, which he did not bear and
+count as gain in the service of Jesus Christ; when we also remember
+that he continued thus for all the known years of his life after his
+conversion, can we think that that conversion could have been the result
+of anything even approaching to caprice?&nbsp; Or again, is it likely
+that it could have been due to contact with the hallucinations of his
+despised and hated enemies?&nbsp; Paul the Christian appears to be the
+same sort of man in most respects as Paul the Jew, yet can we imagine
+Paul the Christian as being converted from Christianity to some other
+creed, by the infection of hallucinations?&nbsp; On the contrary, no
+man would more quickly have come to the bottom of them, and assigned
+them to diabolical agency.&nbsp; What then can that thing have been,
+which wrenched the strong and able man from all that had the greatest
+hold upon him, and fixed him for the rest of his life as the most self-sacrificing
+champion of Christianity?&nbsp; In answer to this question we might
+say, that it is of no great importance how the change was made, inasmuch
+as the fact of its having been made at all is sufficiently pregnant.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless it will be interesting to follow Strauss in his remarks
+upon the account given in the Acts, and I am bound to add that I think
+he has made out his case.&nbsp; Strange! that he should have failed
+to see that the evidences in support of the Resurrection are incalculably
+strengthened by his having done so.&nbsp; How short-sighted is mere
+ingenuity!&nbsp; And how weak and cowardly are they who shut their eyes
+to facts because they happen to come from an opponent!</p>
+<p>Strauss, however, writes as follows:- &ldquo;That we are not bound
+to the individual features of the account in the Acts is shewn by comparing
+it with the substance of the statement twice repeated in the language
+of Paul himself: for there we find that the author&rsquo;s own account
+is not accurate, and that he attributed no importance to a few variations
+more or less.&nbsp; Not only is it said on one occasion that the attendants
+stood dumb-foundered: on another that they fell with Paul to the ground;
+on one occasion that they heard the voice but saw no one; on another
+that they saw the light but did not hear the voice of him who spoke
+with Paul: but also the speech of Jesus himself, in the third repetition,
+gets the well known addition about &ldquo;kicking against the pricks,&rdquo;
+to say nothing of the fact that the appointment to the Apostleship of
+the Gentiles, which according to the two earlier accounts was made partly
+by Ananias, partly on the occasion of a subsequent vision in the Temple
+at Jerusalem, is in this last account incorporated in the speech of
+Jesus.&nbsp; There is no occasion to derive the three accounts of this
+occurrence in the Acts from different sources, and even in this case
+one must suppose that the author of the Acts must have remarked and
+reconciled the discrepancies; that he did not do so, or rather that
+without following his own earlier narrative he repeated it in an arbitrary
+form, proves to us how careless the New Testament writers are about
+details of this kind, important as they are to one who strives after
+strict historical accuracy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 the history from the narrative of an eye witness.&nbsp; Even if
+we consider the person who in different places comprehends himself and
+the Apostle Paul under the word &lsquo;we&rsquo; or &lsquo;us&rsquo;
+to have been the composer of the whole work, that person was not on
+the occasion of the occurrence before Damascus as yet in the company
+of the Apostle.&nbsp; Into this he did not enter until much later, in
+the Troad, on the Apostle&rsquo;s second missionary journey (Acts xvi.,
+10).&nbsp; But that hypothesis with regard to the author of the Acts
+of the Apostles is, moreover, as we have seen above, erroneous.&nbsp;
+He only worked up into different passages of his composition the memoranda
+of a temporary companion of the Apostle about the journeys performed
+in his company, and we are therefore not justified in considering the
+narrator to have been an eye witness in those passages and sections
+in which the &lsquo;we&rsquo; is wanting.&nbsp; Now among these is found
+the very section in which appear the two accounts of his conversion
+which Paul gives, first, to the Jewish people in Jerusalem, secondly,
+to Agrippa and Festus in C&aelig;sarea.&nbsp; The last occasion on which
+the &lsquo;we&rsquo; was found was xxi., 18, that of the visit of Paul
+to James, and it does not appear again until xxvii., 1, when the subject
+is the Apostle&rsquo;s embarkation for Italy.&nbsp; Nothing therefore
+compels us to assume that we have in the reports of these speeches the
+account of any one who had been a party to the hearing of them, and,
+in them, Paul&rsquo;s own narrative of the occurrences that took place
+on his conversion.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures having been
+long given up by all who have considered the awful consequences which
+it 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 in with
+the feelings and customs of their own times, and must accordingly be
+allowed to have been occasionally guilty of what would in our own age
+be called inaccuracies.&nbsp; There is no dependence to be placed on
+the verbal, or indeed the substantial, accuracy of any ancient speeches,
+except those which we know to have been reported <i>verbatim</i>, they
+were (as with the Herodotean and Thucydidean speeches) in most cases
+the invention of the historian himself, as being what seemed most appropriate
+to be said by one in the position of the speaker.&nbsp; Reporting was
+a rare art among the ancients, and was confined to a few great centres
+of intellectual activity; accuracy, moreover, was not held to be of
+the same importance as at the present day.&nbsp; Yet without accurate
+reporting a speech perishes as soon as it is uttered, except in so far
+as it lives in the actions of those who hear it.&nbsp; Even a hundred
+years ago the invention of speeches was considered a matter of course,
+as in the well-known case of Dr. Johnson, than whom none could be more
+conscientious, and - according to his lights - accurate.&nbsp; I may
+perhaps be pardoned for quoting the passage in full from Boswell, who
+gives it on the authority of Mr. John Nichols; the italics are mine.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;He said that the Parliamentary debates were the only part of
+his writings which then gave him any compunction: <i>but that at the
+time he wrote them he had no conception that he was imposing upon the
+world, though they were frequently written from very slender materials,
+and often from none at all - the mere coinage of his own imagination.&nbsp;
+He</i> never wrote any part of his works with equal velocity.&nbsp;
+(Boswell&rsquo;s <i>Life of Johnson</i>, chap. lxxxii.)</p>
+<p>This is an extreme case, yet there can be no question about its truth.&nbsp;
+It is only one among the very many examples which could be adduced in
+order to shew that the appreciation of the value of accuracy is a thing
+of modern date only - a thing which we owe mainly to the chemical and
+mechanical sciences, wherein the inestimable difference between precision
+and inaccuracy became most speedily apparent.&nbsp; If the reader will
+pardon an apparent digression, I would remark that that sort of care
+is wanted on behalf of Christianity with 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 enough before he allowed it to leave his hands.&nbsp;
+This caution would have saved the wasting of many lives, and the breaking
+of many hearts.</p>
+<p>We, on the other hand, however reckless we may be ourselves, are
+in the habit of assuming that any historian whom we may have occasion
+to consult, and on whose testimony we would fain rely, must have himself
+weighed and re-weighed his words as the cashier his money; an error
+which arises from want of that sympathy which should make us bear constantly
+in mind what lights men had, under what influences they wrote, and what
+we should ourselves have done had we been so placed as they.&nbsp; But
+if any will maintain that though the general run of ancient speeches
+were, as those supposed to have been reported by Johnson, pure invention,
+yet that it is not likely that one reporting the words of Almighty God
+should have failed to feel the awful responsibility of his position,
+we can only answer that the writer of the Acts did most indisputably
+so fail, as is shewn by the various reports of those words which he
+has himself given: if he could in the innocency of his heart do this,
+and at one time report the Almighty as saying this, and at another that,
+as though, more or less, this or that were a matter of no moment, what
+certainty can we have concerning such a man that inaccuracy shall not
+elsewhere be found in him?&nbsp; None.&nbsp; He is a warped mirror which
+will distort every object that it reflects.</p>
+<p>It follows, then, that from the Acts of the Apostles we have no data
+for arriving at any conclusion as to the manner of Paul&rsquo;s change
+of faith, nor the circumstances connected with it.&nbsp; To us the accounts
+there given should be simply non-existent; but this is not easy, for
+we have heard them too often and from too early an age to be able to
+escape their influence; yet we must assuredly ignore them if we are
+anxious to arrive at truth.&nbsp; We cannot let the story told in the
+Acts enter into any judgement which we may form concerning Paul&rsquo;s
+character.&nbsp; The desire to represent him as having been converted
+by miracle was very natural.&nbsp; He himself tells us that he saw visions,
+and received his apostleship by revelation - not necessarily at the
+time of, or immediately after, his conversion, but still at some period
+or other in his life; it would be the most natural thing in the world
+for the writer of the Acts to connect some version of one of these visions
+with the conversion itself: the dramatic effect would be heightened
+by making the change, while the change itself would be utterly unimportant
+in the eyes of such a writer; be this however as it may, we are only
+now concerned with the fact that we know nothing about Paul&rsquo;s
+conversion from the Acts of the Apostles, which should make us believe
+that that conversion was wrought in him by any other means, than by
+such an irresistible pressure of evidence as no sane person could withstand.</p>
+<p>From the Apostle&rsquo;s own writings we can glean nothing about
+his conversion which would point in the direction of its having been
+sudden or miraculous.&nbsp; It is true that in the Epistle to the Galatians
+he says, &ldquo;After it had pleased God to reveal his Son in me,&rdquo;
+but this expression does not preclude the supposition that his conversion
+may have been led up to by a gradual process, the culmination of which
+(if that) he alone regarded as miraculous.&nbsp; Thus we are forced
+to admit that we know nothing from any source concerning the manner
+and circumstances of St. Paul&rsquo;s change from Judaism to Christianity,
+and we can only conclude therefore that he changed because he found
+the weight of the evidence to be greater than he could resist.&nbsp;
+And this, as we have seen, is an exceedingly telling fact.&nbsp; The
+probability is, that coming much into contact with Christians through
+his persecution of them, and submitting them to the severest questioning,
+he found that they were in all respects sober plainspoken men, that
+their conviction was intense, their story coherent, and the doctrines
+which they had received simple and ennobling; that these results of
+many inquisitions were so unvarying that he found conviction stealing
+gradually upon him against his will; common honesty compelled him to
+inquire further; the answers pointed invariably in one direction only;
+until at length he found himself utterly unable to resist the weight
+of evidence which he had collected, and resolved, perhaps at the last
+suddenly, to yield himself a convert to Christianity.</p>
+<p>Strauss says that, &ldquo;in the presence of the believers in Jesus,&rdquo;
+the conviction that he was a false teacher - an impostor - &ldquo;must
+have become every day more doubtful to him.&nbsp; They considered it
+not only publicly honourable to be as convinced of his Resurrection
+as they were of their own life - but they shewed also a state of mind,
+a quiet peace, a tranquil cheerfulness, even under suffering, which
+put to shame the restless and joyless zeal of their persecutor.&nbsp;
+Could <i>he</i> have been a false teacher who had adherents such as
+these?&nbsp; Could that have been a false pretence which gave such rest
+and security? on the one hand, he saw the new sect, in spite of all
+persecutions, nay, in consequence of them, extending their influence
+wider and wider round them; on the other, as their persecutor, he felt
+that inward tranquillity growing less and less which he could observe
+in so many ways in the persecuted.&nbsp; We cannot therefore be surprised
+if in hours of inward despondency and unhappiness he put to himself
+the question, &lsquo;Who after all is right, thou, or the crucified
+Galilean about whom these men are so enthusiastic?&rsquo;&nbsp; And
+when he had got as far as this, the result, with his bodily and mental
+characteristics, naturally followed in an ecstasy in which the very
+same Christ whom up to this time he had so passionately persecuted,
+appeared to him in all the glory of which his adherents spoke so much,
+shewed him the perversity and folly of his conduct, and called him to
+come over to his service.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The above comes simply to this, that Paul in his constant contact
+with Christians found that they had more to say for themselves than
+he could answer, and should, one would have thought, have suggested
+to Strauss what he supposes to have occurred to Paul, namely, that it
+was not likely that these men had made a mistake in thinking that they
+had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion.&nbsp; There can be no doubt
+about Strauss&rsquo;s being right as to the Christian intensity of conviction,
+strenuousness of assertion, and readiness to suffer for the sake of
+their faith in Christ; and these are the main points with which we are
+concerned.&nbsp; We arrive therefore at the conclusion that the first
+Christians were sufficiently unanimous, coherent and undaunted to convince
+the foremost of their enemies.&nbsp; They were not so <i>before</i>
+the Crucifixion; they could not certainly have been made so by the Crucifixion
+alone; something beyond the Crucifixion must have occurred to give them
+such a moral ascendancy as should suffice to generate a revulsion of
+feeling in the mind of the persecuting Saul.&nbsp; Strauss asks us to
+believe that this missing something is to be found in the hallucinations
+of two or three men whose names have not been recorded and who have
+left no mark of their own.&nbsp; Is there any occasion for answer?</p>
+<p>It is inconceivable that he who could write the Epistle to the Romans
+should not also have been as able as any man who ever lived to question
+the early believers as to their converse with Christ, and to report
+faithfully the substance of what they told him.&nbsp; That he knew the
+other Apostles, that he went up to Jerusalem to hold conferences with
+them, that he abode fifteen days with St. Peter - as he tells us, in
+order &ldquo;to question him&rdquo; - these things are certain.&nbsp;
+The Greek word &iota;&sigma;&tau;&omicron;&rho;&eta;&sigma;&alpha;&iota;
+is a very suggestive one.&nbsp; It is so easy to make too much out of
+anything that I hardly dare to say how strongly the use of the verb
+&iota;&sigma;&tau;&omicron;&rho;&epsilon;&iota;&nu; suggests to me &ldquo;getting
+at the facts of the case,&rdquo; &ldquo;questioning as to how things
+happened,&rdquo; yet such would be the most obvious meaning of the word
+from which our own &ldquo;history&rdquo; and &ldquo;story&rdquo; are
+derived.&nbsp; Fifteen days was time enough to give Paul the means of
+coming to an understanding with Peter as to what the value of Peter&rsquo;s
+story was, nor can we believe that Paul should not both receive and
+transmit perfectly all that he was then told.&nbsp; In fact, without
+supposing these men to be so utterly visionary that nothing durable
+could come out of them, there is no escape from holding that Peter was
+justified in firmly believing that he had seen Christ alive within a
+very few days of the Crucifixion, that he succeeded also in satisfying
+Paul that this belief was well-founded, and that in the account of Christ&rsquo;s
+reappearances, as given I. Cor. xv., we have a virtually <i>verbatim</i>
+report of what Paul heard from Peter and the other Apostles.&nbsp; Of
+course the possibility remains that Paul may have been too easily satisfied,
+and not have cross-examined Peter as closely as he might have done.&nbsp;
+But then Paul was converted <i>before</i> this interview; and this implies
+that he had already found a general consent among the Christians whom
+he had met with, that the story which he afterwards heard from Peter
+(or one to the same effect) was true.&nbsp; Whence then the unanimity
+of this belief?&nbsp; Strauss answers as before - from the hallucinations
+of an originally small minority.&nbsp; We can only again reply that
+for the reasons already given we find it quite impossible to agree with
+him.</p>
+<p>[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.&nbsp; I believe that my brother intended
+to make a fresh translation from the original passages, but he never
+carried out his intention, and in his MS. the page of the English translation
+with the first and last words of each passage are alone given.&nbsp;
+I could hardly venture to undertake the responsibility of making a fresh
+translation myself, and have therefore adhered almost word for word
+to the published English translation - here and there, however, a trifling
+alteration was really irresistible on the scores alike of euphony and
+clearness. - W. B. O.]</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV - PAUL&rsquo;S TESTIMONY CONSIDERED</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Enough has perhaps been said to cause the reader to agree with the
+view of St. Paul&rsquo;s conversion taken above - that is to say, to
+make him regard the conversion as mainly, if not entirely, due to the
+weight of evidence afforded by the courage and consistency of the early
+Christians.</p>
+<p>But, the change in Paul&rsquo;s mind being thus referred to causes
+which preclude all possibility of hallucination or ecstasy on his own
+part, it becomes unnecessary to discuss the attempts which have been
+made to explain away the miraculous character of the account given in
+the Acts.&nbsp; I believe that this account is founded upon fact, and
+that it is derived from some description furnished by St. Paul himself
+of the vision mentioned, I. Cor. xv., which again is very possibly the
+same as that of II. Cor. xii.&nbsp; For the purposes of the present
+investigation, however, the whole story must be set aside.&nbsp; At
+the same time it should be borne in mind, that any detraction from the
+historical accuracy of the writer of the Acts, is more than compensated
+for, by the additional weight given to the conversion of St. Paul, whom
+we are now able to regard as having been converted by evidence which
+was in itself overpowering, and which did not stand in need of any miraculous
+interference in order to confirm it.</p>
+<p>It is important to observe that the testimony of Paul should carry
+more weight with those who are bent upon close critical investigation
+than that even of the Evangelists.&nbsp; St. Paul is one whom we know,
+and know well.&nbsp; No syllable of suspicion has ever been breathed,
+even in Germany, against the first four of the Epistles which have been
+generally assigned to him; friends and foes of Christianity are alike
+agreed to accept them as the genuine work of the Apostle.&nbsp; Few
+figures, therefore, in ancient history stand out more clearly revealed
+to us than that of St. Paul, whereas a thick veil of darkness hangs
+over that of each one of the Evangelists.&nbsp; Who St. Matthew was,
+and whether the gospel that we have is an original work, or a translation
+(as would appear from Papias, our highest authority), and how far it
+has been modified in translation, are things which we shall never know.&nbsp;
+The Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke are involved in even greater obscurity.&nbsp;
+The authorship, date, and origin of the fourth Gospel have been, and
+are being, even more hotly contested than those of the other three,
+and all that can be affirmed with certainty concerning it is, that no
+trace of its existence 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&rsquo;s
+Epistles to have been a pillar of Judaism.</p>
+<p>With St. Paul all is changed: we not only know him better than we
+know nine-tenths of our own most eminent countrymen of the last century,
+but we feel a confidence in him which grows greater and greater the
+more we study his character.&nbsp; He combines to perfection the qualities
+that make a good witness - capacity and integrity: add to this that
+his conclusions were forced upon him.&nbsp; We therefore feel that,
+whereas from a scientific point of view, the Gospel narratives can only
+be considered as the testimony of early and sincere writers of whom
+we know little or nothing, yet that in the evidence of St. Paul we find
+the missing link which connects us securely with actual eye-witnesses
+and gives us a confidence in the general accuracy of the Gospels which
+they could never of themselves alone have imparted.&nbsp; We could indeed
+ill spare either the testimony of the Evangelists or that of St. Paul,
+but if we were obliged to content ourselves with one only, we should
+choose the Apostle.</p>
+<p>Turning then to the evidence of St. Paul as derivable from I. Cor.
+xv. we find the following:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I
+preached unto you, which also ye have received and wherein ye stand.&nbsp;
+By which also ye are saved if ye keep in memory what I preached unto
+you, unless ye have believed in vain.&nbsp; For I delivered unto you
+first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our
+sins according to the Scriptures: and that He was buried, and that He
+rose again the third day according to the Scriptures; and that He was
+seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: after that He was seen of above
+five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater portion remain unto
+this present, but some are fallen asleep.&nbsp; After that He was seen
+of James; then of all the Apostles.&nbsp; And last of all He was seen
+of me also, as of one born out of due time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the first place we must notice Paul&rsquo;s assertion that the
+Gospel which he was then writing was identical with that which he had
+originally preached.&nbsp; We may assume that each of the appearances
+of Christ here mentioned had in Paul&rsquo;s mind a definite time and
+place, derived from the account which he had received and which probably
+led to his conversion; the words &ldquo;that which I also received&rdquo;
+surely imply &ldquo;that which I also received <i>in the first instance</i>&rdquo;:
+now we know from his own mouth (Gal. i., 16, 17) that <i>after</i> his
+conversion he &ldquo;conferred not with flesh and blood&rdquo; - &ldquo;neither,&rdquo;
+he continues, &ldquo;went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles
+before me, but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus:
+then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see (&iota;&sigma;&tau;&omicron;&rho;&eta;&sigma;&alpha;&iota;)
+Peter, and abode with him fifteen days, but others of the Apostles saw
+I none, save James the Lord&rsquo;s brother.&rdquo;&nbsp; Since, then,
+he must have heard <i>some</i> story concerning Christ&rsquo;s reappearances
+before his conversion and subsequent sojourn in Arabia, and since he
+had heard nothing from eye-witnesses until the time of his going up
+to Jerusalem three years later, it is probable that the account quoted
+above is the substance of what he found persisted in by the Christians
+whom he was persecuting at Damascus, and was at length compelled to
+believe.&nbsp; But this is very unimportant: it is more to the point
+to insist upon the fact 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 it was subsequently confirmed to him by Peter, and probably
+by James and John, during his stay of fifteen days in Peter&rsquo;s
+house.</p>
+<p>This account can have been nothing new even then, for it is plain
+that at the time of Paul&rsquo;s conversion the Christian Church had
+spread far: Paul speaks of <i>returning</i> to Damascus, as though the
+writer of the Acts was right as regards the place of his conversion;
+but the fact of there having been a church in Damascus of sufficient
+importance for Paul to go thither to persecute it, involves the lapse
+of considerable time since the original promulgation of our Lord&rsquo;s
+Resurrection, and throws back the origin of the belief in that event
+to a time closely consequent upon the Crucifixion itself.</p>
+<p>Now Paul informs us that he was told (we may assume by Peter and
+James) that Christ first reappeared <i>within three days of the Crucifixion</i>.&nbsp;
+There is no sufficient reason for doubting this; and one fact of weekly
+recurrence even to this day, affords it striking confirmation - I refer
+to the institution of Sunday as the Lord&rsquo;s day.&nbsp; We know
+that the observance of this day in commemoration of the Resurrection
+was a very early practice, nor is there anything which would seem to
+throw doubt upon the fact of the first &ldquo;Sunday&rdquo; having been
+also the Sunday of the Resurrection.&nbsp; Another confirmation of the
+early date assigned to the Resurrection by St. Paul, is to be found
+in the fact that every instinct would warn the Apostles <i>against</i>
+the third day as being dangerously early, and as opening a door for
+the denial of the completeness of the death.&nbsp; The fortieth day
+would far more naturally have been chosen.</p>
+<p>Turning now from the question of the date of the first reappearance
+to what is told us of the reappearances themselves, we find that the
+earliest was vouchsafed to St. Peter, which is at first sight opposed
+to the Evangelistic records; but this is a discrepancy upon which no
+stress should be laid; St. Paul might well be aware that Mary Magdalene
+was the first to look upon her risen Lord, and yet have preferred to
+dwell upon the more widely known names of Peter and his fellow Apostles.&nbsp;
+The facts are probably these, that our Lord first shewed Himself to
+the women, but that Peter was the first of the Apostolic body to see
+Him; it was natural that if our Lord did not choose to show Himself
+to the Apostles without preparation, Peter should have been chosen as
+the one best fitted to prepare them: Peter probably collected the other
+Apostles, and then the Redeemer shewed Himself alive to all together.&nbsp;
+This is what we should gather from St. Paul&rsquo;s narrative; a narrative
+which it would seem arbitrary to set aside in the face of St. Paul&rsquo;s
+character, opportunities and antecedent prejudices against Christianity
+- in the face also of the unanimity of all the records we have, as well
+as of the fact that the Christian religion triumphed, and of the endless
+difficulties attendant on the hallucination theory.</p>
+<p>We conclude therefore that Paul was satisfied by sufficient evidence
+that our Lord had appeared to Peter on the third day after the Crucifixion,
+nor can any reasonable doubt be thrown upon the other appearances of
+which he tells us.&nbsp; It is true that on the occasion of his visit
+to Peter he saw none other of the Apostles save James - but there is
+nothing to lead us to suppose that there was any want of unanimity among
+them: no trace of this has come down to us, and would surely have done
+so if it had existed.&nbsp; If any dependence at all is to be placed
+on the writers of the New Testament it did not exist.&nbsp; Stronger
+evidence than this unanimity it would be hard to find.</p>
+<p>Another most noticeable feature is the fewness of the recorded appearances
+of Christ.&nbsp; They commenced according to Paul (and this is virtually
+according to Peter and James) immediately after the Crucifixion.&nbsp;
+Paul mentions only five appearances: this does not preclude the supposition
+that he knew of more, nor that the women who came to the sepulchre had
+also seen Him, but it does seem to imply that the reappearances were
+few in number, and that they continued only for a very short time.&nbsp;
+They were sufficient for their purpose: one of preparation to Peter
+- another to the Apostles - another to the outside world, and then one
+or two more - but still not more than enough to establish the fact beyond
+all possibility of dispute.&nbsp; The writer of the Acts tells us that
+Christ was seen for a space of forty days - presumably not every day,
+but from time to time.&nbsp; Now forty days is a mystical period, and
+one which may mean either more or less, within a week or two, than the
+precise time stated; it seems upon the whole most reasonable to conclude
+that the reappearances recorded by Paul, and some few others not recorded,
+extended over a period of one or two months after the Crucifixion, and
+that they then came to an end; for there can be no doubt that St. Paul
+conceived them as having ended with the appearance to the assembled
+Apostles mentioned I. Cor. xv., 7, and, though he does not say so expressly,
+there is that in the context which suggests their having been confined
+to a short space of time.</p>
+<p>It is perfectly clear that St. Paul did not believe that any one
+had seen Christ in the interval between the last recorded appearance
+to the eleven, and the vision granted to himself.&nbsp; The words &ldquo;and
+last of all he was seen also of me <i>as of one born out of due time</i>&rdquo;
+point strongly in the direction of a lapse of some years between the
+second appearance to the eleven and his own vision.&nbsp; This confirms
+and is confirmed by the writer of the Acts.&nbsp; St. Paul never could
+have used the words quoted above, if he had held that the appearances
+which he records had been spread over a space of years intervening between
+the Crucifixion and his own vision.&nbsp; Where would be the force of
+&ldquo;born out of due time&rdquo; unless the time of the previous appearances
+had long passed by?&nbsp; But if, at the time of St. Paul&rsquo;s conversion,
+it was already many years since the last occasion upon which Christ
+had been seen by his disciples, we find ourselves driven back to a time
+closely consequent upon the Crucifixion as the only possible date of
+the reappearances.&nbsp; But this is in itself sufficient condemnation
+of Strauss&rsquo;s theory: that theory requires considerable time for
+the development of a perfectly unanimous and harmonious belief in the
+hallucinations, while every particle of evidence which we can get points
+in the direction of the belief in the Resurrection having followed very
+closely upon the Crucifixion.</p>
+<p>To repeat: had the reappearances been due to hallucination only,
+they would neither have been so few in number nor have come to an end
+so soon.&nbsp; When once the mind has begun to run riot in hallucination,
+it is prodigal of its own inventions.&nbsp; Favoured believers would
+have been constantly seeing Christ even up to the time of Paul&rsquo;s
+letter to the Corinthians, and the Apostle would have written that even
+then Christ was still occasionally seen of those who trusted in him,
+and served him faithfully.&nbsp; But we meet with nothing of the sort:
+we are told that Christ was seen a few times shortly after the Crucifixion,
+then <i>after a lapse of several years</i> (I am surely warranted in
+saying this) Paul himself saw Him - but no one in the interval, and
+no one afterwards.&nbsp; This is not the manner of the hallucinations
+of uneducated people.&nbsp; It is altogether too sober: the state of
+mind from which alone so baseless a delusion could spring, is one which
+never could have been contented with the results which were evidently
+all, or nearly all, that Paul knew of.&nbsp; St. Paul&rsquo;s words
+cannot be set aside without more cause than Strauss has shewn: instead
+of betraying a tendency towards exaggeration, they contain nothing whatever,
+with the exception of his own vision, that is not imperatively demanded
+in order to account for the rise and spread of Christianity.</p>
+<p>Concerning that vision Strauss writes as follows:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With regard to the appearance he (Paul) witnessed - he uses
+the same word (&omega;&phi;&theta;&eta;) as with regard to the others:
+he places it in the same category with them only in the last place,
+as he names himself the last of the Apostles, but in exactly the same
+rank with the others.&nbsp; Thus much, therefore, Paul knew - or supposed
+- that the appearances which the elder disciples had seen soon after
+the Resurrection of Jesus had been of the same kind as that which had
+been, only later, vouchsafed to himself.&nbsp; Of what sort then was
+this?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I confess that I am wholly unable to feel the force of the above.&nbsp;
+Strauss says that Paul&rsquo;s vision was ecstatic - subjective and
+not objective - that Paul thought he saw Christ, although he never really
+saw him.&nbsp; But, says Strauss, he uses the same word for his own
+vision and for the appearances to the earlier Apostles: it is plain
+therefore that he did not suppose the earlier Apostles to have seen
+Christ in the same sort of way in which they saw themselves and other
+people, but to have seen him as Paul himself did, <i>i.e</i>., by supernatural
+revelation.</p>
+<p>But would it not be more fair to say that Paul&rsquo;s using the
+same word for all the appearances - his own vision included - implies
+that he considered this last to have been no less real than those vouchsafed
+earlier, though he may have been perfectly well aware that it was different
+in kind?&nbsp; The use of the same word for all the appearances is quite
+compatible with a belief in Paul&rsquo;s mind that the manner in which
+he saw Christ was different from that in which the Apostles had seen
+him: indeed, so long as he believed that he had seen Christ no less
+really than the others, one cannot see why he should have used any other
+word for his own vision than that which he had applied to the others:
+we should even expect that he would do so, and should be surprised at
+his having done otherwise.&nbsp; That Paul did believe in the reality
+of his own vision is indisputable, and his use of the word &omega;&phi;&theta;&eta;
+was probably dictated by a desire to assert this belief in the strongest
+possible way, and to place his own vision in the same category with
+others, which were so universally known among Christians to have been
+material and objective, that there was no occasion to say so.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless there is that in Paul&rsquo;s words on which Strauss does
+not dwell, but which cannot be passed over without notice.&nbsp; Paul
+does not simply say, &ldquo;and last of all he was seen also of me&rdquo;
+- but he adds the words &ldquo;as of one born out of due time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It is impossible to say decisively that this addition implies that
+Paul recognised a difference in kind between the appearances, inasmuch
+as the words added may only refer to time - still they would explain
+the possible use of [&omega;&phi;&theta;&eta;] in a somewhat different
+sense, and I cannot but think that they will suggest this possibility
+to the reader.&nbsp; They will make him feel, if he does not feel it
+without them, how strained a proceeding it is to bind Paul down to a
+rigorously identical meaning on every occasion on which the same word
+came from his pen, and to maintain that because he once uses it on the
+occasion of an appearance which he held to be vouchsafed by revelation,
+therefore, wherever else he uses it, he must have intended to refer
+to something seen by revelation: the words &ldquo;as of one born out
+of due time&rdquo; imply the utterly unlooked for and transcendent nature
+of the favour, and suggest, even though they do not compel, the inference
+that while the other Apostles had seen Christ in the common course of
+nature, as a visible tangible being before their waking eyes, he had
+himself seen Him not less truly, but still only by special and unlooked
+for revelation.&nbsp; If such thoughts were in his mind he would not
+probably have expressed them farther than by the touching words which
+he has added concerning his own vision.&nbsp; So much for the objection
+that the evidence of Paul concerning the earlier appearances is impaired
+by his having used the same word for them, and for the appearance to
+himself.&nbsp; It only remains therefore to review in brief the general
+bearings of Paul&rsquo;s testimony as given I. Cor. xv., 1-8.</p>
+<p>Firstly, there is the early commencement of the reappearances: this
+is incompatible with hallucination, for the hallucination must be supposed
+to have occurred when most easy to refute, and when the spell of shame
+and fear was laid most heavily upon the Apostles.&nbsp; Strauss maintains
+that the appearances were unconsciously antedated by Peter; we can only
+say that the circumstances of the case, as entered into more fully above,
+render this very improbable; that if Peter told Paul that he saw Christ
+on the third day after the Crucifixion, he probably firmly believed
+that he did see Him; and that if he believed this, he was also probably
+right in so believing.</p>
+<p>Secondly, there is the fact that the reappearances were few, and
+extended over a short time only.&nbsp; Had they been due to hallucination
+there would have been no limit either to their number or duration.&nbsp;
+Paul seems to have had no idea that there ever had been, or ever would
+be, successors to the five hundred brethren who saw Christ at one time.&nbsp;
+Some were fallen asleep - the rest would in time follow them.&nbsp;
+It is incredible that men should have so lost all count of fact, so
+debauched their perception of external objects, so steeped themselves
+in belief in dreams which had no foundation but in their own disordered
+brains, as to have turned the whole world after them by the sheer force
+of their conviction of the truth of their delusions, and yet that suddenly,
+within a few weeks from the commencement of this intoxication, they
+should have come to a dead stop and given no further sign of like extravagance.&nbsp;
+The hallucinations must have been so baseless, and would argue such
+an utter subordination of judgement to imagination, that instead of
+ceasing they must infallibly have ended in riot and disorganisation;
+the fact that they did cease (which cannot be denied) and that they
+were followed by no disorder, but by a solemn sober steadfastness of
+purpose, as of reasonable men in deadly earnest about a matter which
+had come to their knowledge, and which they held it vital for all to
+know - this fact alone would be sufficient to overthrow the hallucination
+theory.&nbsp; Such intemperance could never have begotten such temperance:
+from such a frame of mind as Strauss assigns to the Apostles no religion
+could have come which should satisfy the highest spiritual needs of
+the most civilised nations of the earth for nearly two thousand years.</p>
+<p>When, therefore, we look at the want of faith of the Apostles before
+the Crucifixion, and to their subsequent intense devotion; at their
+unanimity at their general sobriety; at the fact that they succeeded
+in convincing the ablest of their enemies and ultimately the whole of
+Europe; at the undeviating consent of all the records we have; at the
+early date at which the reappearances commenced, - at their small number
+and short duration - things so foreign to the nature of hallucination;
+at the excellent opportunities which Paul had for knowing 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 its truth; at the impossibility
+of accounting for the rise of Christianity without the reappearance
+of its Founder after His Crucifixion; when we look at all these things
+we shall admit that it is impossible to avoid the belief that after
+having died, Christ <i>did</i> reappear to his disciples, and that in
+this fact we have the only intelligible explanation of the triumph of
+Christianity.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER V - A CONSIDERATION OF CERTAIN ILL-JUDGED METHODS OF DEFENCE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The reader has now heard the utmost that can be said against the
+historic character of the Resurrection by the ablest of its impugners.&nbsp;
+I know of nothing in any of Strauss&rsquo;s works which can be considered
+as doing better justice to his opinions than the passages which I have
+quoted and, I trust, refuted.&nbsp; I have quoted fully, and have kept
+nothing in the background.&nbsp; If I had known of anything stronger
+against the Resurrection from any other source, I should certainly have
+produced it.&nbsp; I have answered in outline only, but I do not believe
+that I have passed any difficulty on one side.</p>
+<p>What then does the reader think?&nbsp; Was the attack so dangerous,
+or the defence so far to seek?&nbsp; I believe he will agree with me
+that the combat was one of no great danger when it was once fairly entered
+upon.&nbsp; But the wonder, and, let me add, the disgrace, to English
+divines, is that the battle should have been shirked so long.&nbsp;
+What is it that has made the name of Strauss so terrible to the ears
+of English Churchmen?&nbsp; Surely nothing but the ominous silence which
+has been maintained concerning him in almost all quarters of our Church.&nbsp;
+For what can he say or do against the other miracles if he be powerless
+against the Resurrection?&nbsp; He can make sentences which sound plausible,
+but that is no great feat.&nbsp; Can he show that there is any <i>a
+priori</i> improbability whatever, in the fact of miracles having been
+wrought by one who died and rose from the dead?&nbsp; If a man did this
+it is a small thing that he should also walk upon the waves and command
+the winds.&nbsp; But if there is no <i>a priori</i> difficulty with
+regard to these miracles, there is certainly none other.</p>
+<p>Let this, however, for the present pass, only let me beg of the reader
+to have patience while I follow out the plan which I have pursued up
+to the present point, and proceed to examine certain difficulties of
+another character.&nbsp; I propose to do so with the same unflinching
+examination as heretofore, concealing nothing that has been said, or
+that can be said; going out of my way to find arguments for opponents,
+if I do not think that they have put forward all that from their own
+point of view they might have done, and careless how many difficulties
+I may bring before the reader which may never yet have occurred to him,
+provided I feel that I can also shew him how little occasion there is
+to fear them.</p>
+<p>I must, however, maintain two propositions, which may perhaps be
+unfamiliar to some of those who have not as yet given more than a conventional
+and superficial attention to the Scriptural records, but which will
+meet with ready assent from all whose studies have been deeper.&nbsp;
+Fain would I avoid paining even a single reader, but I am convinced
+that the arresting of infidelity depends mainly upon the general recognition
+of two broad facts.&nbsp; The first is this - that the Apostles, even
+after they had received the gift of the Holy Spirit were still fallible
+though holy men; the second - that there are certain passages in each
+of the Gospels as we now have them, which were not originally to be
+found therein, and others which, though genuine, are still not historic.&nbsp;
+This much of concession we must be prepared to make, and we shall find
+(as in the case of the conversion of St. Paul) that our position is
+indefinitely strengthened by doing so.</p>
+<p>When shall we Christians learn that the truest ground is also the
+strongest?&nbsp; We may be sure that until we have done so we shall
+find a host of enemies who will say that truth is not ours.&nbsp; It
+is we who have created infidelity, and who are responsible for it.&nbsp;
+<i>We</i> are the true infidels, for we have not sufficient faith in
+our own creed to believe that it will bear the removal of the incrustations
+of time and superstition.&nbsp; When men see our cowardice, what can
+they think but that we must know that we have cause to be afraid?&nbsp;
+We drive men into unbelief in spite of themselves, by our tenacious
+adherence to opinions which every unprejudiced person must see at a
+glance that we cannot rightfully defend, and then we pride ourselves
+upon our love for Christ and our hatred of His enemies.&nbsp; If Christ
+accepts this kind of love He is not such as He has declared Himself.</p>
+<p>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 zeal against
+His enemies.&nbsp; If those to whom the unfamiliarity of an opinion
+or its inconvenience to themselves is a test of its hatefulness to Christ,
+had been born Jews, they would have crucified Him whom they imagine
+that they are now serving: if Turks, they would have massacred both
+Jew and Christian; if Papists at the time of the Reformation they would
+have persecuted Protestants: if Protestants, under Elizabeth, Papists.&nbsp;
+Truth is to them an accident of birth and training, and the Christian
+faith is in their eyes true because these accidents, as far as they
+are concerned, have decided in its favour.&nbsp; But such persons are
+not Christians.&nbsp; It is they who crucify Christ, who drive men from
+coming to Him whose every instinct would lead them to love and worship
+Him, but who are warned off by observing the crowd of sycophants and
+time-servers who presume to call Him Lord.</p>
+<p>But to look at the matter from another point of view; when there
+is a long sustained contest between two bodies of capable and seriously
+disposed people, (and none can deny that many of our adversaries have
+been both one and the other), and when this contest shews no sign of
+healing, but rather widens from generation to generation, and each party
+accuses the other of disingenuousness, obstinacy and other like serious
+defects of mind - it may be certainly assumed that the truth lies wholly
+with neither side, but that each should make some concessions to the
+other.&nbsp; A third party sees this at a glance, and is amazed because
+neither of the disputants can perceive that his opponent must be possessed
+of some truths, in spite of his trying to defend other positions which
+are indefensible.&nbsp; Strange! that a thing which it seems so easy
+to avoid, should so seldom be avoided!&nbsp; Homer said well:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Perish strife, both from among gods and men,<br />And wrath
+which maketh even him that is considerate, cruel,<br />Which getteth
+up in the heart of a man like smoke,<br />And the taste thereof is sweeter
+than drops of honey.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>But strife can never cease without concessions upon both sides.&nbsp;
+We agree to this readily in the abstract, but we seldom do so when any
+given concession is in question.&nbsp; We are all for concession in
+the general, but for none in the particular, as people who say that
+they will retrench when they are living beyond their income, but will
+not consent to any proposed retrenchment.&nbsp; Thus many shake their
+heads and say that it is impossible to live in the present age and not
+be aware of many difficulties in connection with the Christian religion;
+they have studied the question more deeply than perhaps the unbeliever
+imagines; and having said this much they give themselves credit for
+being wide-minded, liberal and above vulgar prejudices: but when pressed
+as to this or that particular difficulty, and asked to own that such
+and such an objection of the infidel&rsquo;s needs explanation, they
+will have none of it, and will in nine cases out of ten betray by their
+answers that they neither know nor want to know what the infidel means,
+but on the contrary that they are resolute to remain in ignorance.&nbsp;
+I know this kind of liberality exceedingly well, and have ever found
+it to harbour more selfishness, idleness, cowardice and stupidity than
+does open bigotry.&nbsp; The bigot is generally better than his expressed
+opinions, these people are invariably worse than theirs.</p>
+<p>The above principle has been largely applied in the writings of so-called
+orthodox commentators, not unfrequently even by men who might have been
+assumed to be above condescending to such trickery.&nbsp; A great preface
+concerning candour, with a flourish of trumpets in the praise of truth,
+seems to have exhausted every atom of truth and candour from the work
+that follows it.</p>
+<p>It will be said that I ought not to make use of language such as
+this without bringing forward examples.&nbsp; I shall therefore adduce
+them.</p>
+<p>One of the most serious difficulties to the unbeliever is the inextricable
+confusion in which the accounts of the Resurrection have reached us:
+no one can reconcile these accounts with one another, not only in minute
+particulars, but in matters on which it is of the highest importance
+to come to a clear understanding.&nbsp; Thus, to omit all notice of
+many other discrepancies, the accounts of Mark, Luke, and John concur
+in stating that when the women came to the tomb of Jesus very early
+on the Sunday morning, they found it <i>already empty</i>: the stone
+was gone when they came there, and, according to John, there was not
+even an angelic vision for some time afterwards.&nbsp; There is nothing
+in any of these three accounts to preclude the possibility of the stone&rsquo;s
+having been removed within an hour or two of the body&rsquo;s having
+been laid in the tomb.</p>
+<p>But when we turn to Matthew we find all changed: we are told that
+the stone was gone <i>not</i> when the women came, but that on their
+arrival there was a great earthquake, and that an angel came down from
+Heaven, and rolled away the stone, <i>and sat upon it</i>, and that
+the guard who had been set over the tomb (of whom we hear nothing from
+any of the other evangelists) became as dead men while the angel addressed
+the women.</p>
+<p>Now this is not one of those cases in which the supposition can be
+tolerated that all would be clear if the whole facts of the case were
+known to us.&nbsp; No additional facts can make it come about that the
+tomb should have been sealed and guarded, and yet <i>not</i> sealed
+and guarded; that the same women, at the same time and place, should
+have witnessed an earthquake, and yet <i>not</i> witnessed one; have
+found a stone already gone from a tomb, and yet <i>not</i> found it
+gone; have seen it rolled away, and <i>not</i> seen it, and so on; those
+who say that we should find no difficulty if we knew <i>all</i> the
+facts are still careful to abstain from any example (so far as I know)
+of the sort of additional facts which would serve their purpose.&nbsp;
+They cannot give one; any mind which is truly candid - white - not scrawled
+and scribbled over till no character is decipherable - will feel at
+once that the only question to be raised is, which is the more correct
+account of the Resurrection - Matthew&rsquo;s or those given by the
+other three Evangelists?&nbsp; How far is Matthew&rsquo;s account true,
+and how far is it exaggerated?&nbsp; For there must be either exaggeration
+or invention somewhere.&nbsp; It is inconceivable that the other writers
+should have known the story told by Matthew, and yet not only made no
+allusion to it, but introduced matter which flatly contradicts it, and
+it is also inconceivable that the story should be true, and yet that
+the other writers should not have known it.</p>
+<p>This is how the difficulty stands - a difficulty which vanishes in
+a moment if it be rightly dealt with, but which, when treated after
+our unskilful English method, becomes capable of doing inconceivable
+mischief to the Christian religion.&nbsp; Let us see then what Dean
+Alford - a writer whose professions of candour and talk about the duty
+of unflinching examination leave nothing to be desired - has to say
+upon this point.&nbsp; I will first quote the passage in full from Matthew,
+and then give the Dean&rsquo;s note.&nbsp; I have drawn the greater
+part of the comments that will follow it from an anonymous pamphlet
+<a name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2">{2}</a> upon the Resurrection,
+dated 1865, but without a publisher&rsquo;s name, so that I presume
+it must have been printed for private circulation only.</p>
+<p>St. Matthew&rsquo;s account runs:-</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation,
+the chief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate, saying, &lsquo;Sir,
+we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, &ldquo;After
+three days I will rise again.&rdquo;&nbsp; Command therefore that the
+sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come
+by night and steal him away and say unto the people, &ldquo;He is risen
+from the dead:&rdquo; so the last error shall be worse than the first.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Pilate said unto them, &lsquo;Ye have a watch: go your way, make it
+as sure as ye can.&rsquo;&nbsp; So they went and made the sepulchre
+sure, sealing the stone and setting a watch.&nbsp; In the end of the
+Sabbath, as it began to dawn towards the first day of the week, came
+Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.&nbsp; And, behold,
+there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from
+heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon
+it.&nbsp; His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white
+as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead
+men.&nbsp; And the angel answered and said unto the women, &lsquo;Fear
+not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.&nbsp; He
+is not here: for he is risen, as he said.&nbsp; Come, see the place
+where the Lord lay.&nbsp; And go quickly, 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.&rsquo;&nbsp; And they departed
+quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring
+his disciples word.&nbsp; And as they went to tell his disciples, Jesus
+met them, saying, &lsquo;All hail.&rsquo;&nbsp; And they came and held
+him by the feet, and worshipped him (<i>cf</i>. John xx., 16, 17).&nbsp;
+Then said Jesus unto them, &lsquo;Be not afraid: go tell my brethren
+that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into the city,
+and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.&nbsp;
+And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel,
+they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, &lsquo;Say ye, His
+disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.&nbsp; And
+if this come to the governor&rsquo;s ears, we will persuade him and
+secure you.&rsquo;&nbsp; So they took the money, and did as they were
+taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this
+day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Let us turn now to the Dean&rsquo;s note on Matt. xxvii., 62-66.</p>
+<p>With regard to the setting of the watch and sealing of the stone,
+he tells us that the narrative following (<i>i.e</i>., the account of
+the guard and the earthquake) &ldquo;has been much impugned and its
+historical accuracy very generally given up even by the best of the
+German commentators (Olshausen, Meyer; also De Wette, Hase, and others).&nbsp;
+The chief difficulties found in it seem to be: (1) How should the chief
+priests, &amp;c., <i>know of His having said</i> &lsquo;in three days
+I will rise again,&rsquo; when the saying was hid even from His own
+disciples?&nbsp; The answer to this is easy.&nbsp; The <i>meaning</i>
+of the saying may have been, and was hid from the disciples; <i>but
+the fact of its having been said</i> could be no secret.&nbsp; Not to
+lay any stress on John ii., 19 (Jesus answered and said unto them, &lsquo;Destroy
+this temple and in three days I will build it up&rsquo;), we have the
+direct prophecy of Matt. xii., 40 (&lsquo;For as Jonah was three days
+and three nights in the whale&rsquo;s belly, so shall the Son of Man
+be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth): besides this
+there would be a rumour current, through the intercourse of the Apostles
+with others, that He had been in the habit of so saying.&nbsp; (From
+what source can Dean Alford know that our Lord <i>was</i> in the habit
+of so saying?&nbsp; What particle of authority is there for this alleged
+habit of our Lord?)&nbsp; As to the <i>understanding</i> of the words
+we must remember that <i>hatred is keener sighted than love</i>: that
+the <i>raising of Lazarus</i> would shew <i>what sort of a thing rising
+from the dead was to be</i>; and the fulfilment of the Lord&rsquo;s
+announcement of his <i>crucifixion</i> would naturally lead them to
+look further to <i>what more</i> he had announced. (2) How should the
+women who were solicitous about the <i>removal</i> of the stone not
+have been still more so about its being sealed and a guard set?&nbsp;
+The answer to this last has been given above - <i>they</i> <i>were not
+aware of the circumstance because the guard was not set till the evening
+before</i>.&nbsp; There would be no need of the application before the
+<i>approach of the third day</i> - it is only made for a watch, &epsilon;&omega;&sigmaf;
+&tau;&eta;&sigmaf; &tau;&rho;&iota;&tau;&eta;&sigmaf; &eta;&mu;&epsilon;&rho;&alpha;&sigmaf;
+(ver. 64), and it is not probable that the circumstance would transpire
+that night - certainly it 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) had really happened, he need not have expressed himself
+doubtfully (Acts v., 39), but would have been certain that this was
+from God.&nbsp; But, first, it does not necessarily follow that <i>every
+member</i> of the Sanhedrim was present, and applied to Pilate, or even
+had they done so, that all bore a part in the act of xxviii., 12&rdquo;
+(the bribing of the guard to silence).&nbsp; &ldquo;One who like Joseph
+had not consented to the deed before - and we may safely say that there
+were others such - would naturally withdraw himself from further proceedings
+against the person of Jesus. (4) Had this been so the three other Evangelists
+would not have passed over so important a testimony to the Resurrection.&nbsp;
+But surely we cannot argue in this way - for thus every important fact
+narrated by <i>one Evangelist alone</i> must be rejected, e.g. (which
+stands in much the same relation), <i>the satisfaction of Thomas - another
+such narrations.&nbsp; Till we know more about the circumstances under
+which, and the scope with which, each Gospel was compiled, all a priori
+arguments of this kind are good for nothing</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>(The italics in the above, and throughout the notes quoted, are the
+Dean&rsquo;s, unless it is expressly stated otherwise.)</p>
+<p>I will now proceed to consider this defence of Matthew&rsquo;s accuracy
+against the objections of the German commentators.</p>
+<p>I.&nbsp; The German commentators maintain that the chief priests
+are not likely to have known of any prophecy of Christ&rsquo;s Resurrection
+when His own disciples had evidently heard of nothing to this effect.&nbsp;
+Dean Alford&rsquo;s answer amounts to this:-</p>
+<p>1.&nbsp; They had heard the words but did not understand their meaning;
+hatred enabled the chief priests to see clearly what love did not reveal
+to the understanding of the Apostles.&nbsp; True, according to Matthew,
+Christ had said that as Jonah was three days and three nights in the
+whale&rsquo;s belly, so the Son of Man should be three days and three
+nights in the heart of the earth; but it would be only hatred which
+would suggest the interpretation of so obscure a prophecy: love would
+not be sufficiently keen-sighted to understand it.</p>
+<p>But in the first place I would urge that if the Apostles had ever
+heard any words capable of suggesting the idea that Christ should rise,
+after they had already seen the raising of Lazarus, on whom corruption
+had begun its work, they <i>must</i> have expected the Resurrection.&nbsp;
+After having seen so stupendous a miracle, any one would expect anything
+which was even suggested by the One who had performed it.&nbsp; And,
+secondly, hatred is not keener sighted than love.</p>
+<p>2.&nbsp; Dean Alford says that the raising of Lazarus would shew
+the chief priests what sort of a thing the Resurrection from the dead
+was to be, and that the fulfilment of Christ&rsquo;s prophecy concerning
+his Crucifixion would naturally lead them to look further to what else
+he had announced.</p>
+<p>But, if the raising of Lazarus would shew the chief priests what
+sort of thing the Resurrection was to be, it would shew the Apostles
+also; and again if the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Crucifixion
+would lead the chief priests to look further to the fulfilment of the
+prophecy of the Resurrection, so would it lead the Apostles; this supposition
+of one set of men who can see everything, and of another with precisely
+the same opportunities and no less interest, who can see nothing, is
+vastly convenient upon the stage, but it is not supported by a reference
+to Nature; self-interest would have opened the eyes of the Apostles.</p>
+<p>II.&nbsp; The German commentators ask how was it possible that the
+women who were solicitous about the removal of the stone, should not
+be still more so about &ldquo;its being sealed and a guard set?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+If the German commentators have asked their question in this shape,
+they have asked it badly, and Dean Alford&rsquo;s answer is sufficient:
+they might have asked, how the other three writers could all tell us
+that the stone was already gone when the women got there, and yet Matthew&rsquo;s
+story be true? and how Matthew&rsquo;s story could be true without the
+other writers having known it? and how the other writers could have
+introduced matter contradictory to it, if they had known it to be true?</p>
+<p>III.&nbsp; The German commentators say that in the Acts of the Apostles
+we find Gamaliel expressing himself as doubtful whether or no Christianity
+was of God, whereas had he known the facts related by Matthew he could
+have had no doubt at all.&nbsp; He must have <i>known</i> that Christianity
+was of God.</p>
+<p>Dean Alford answers that perhaps Gamaliel was not there.&nbsp; To
+which I would rejoin that though Gamaliel might have had no hand in
+the bribery, supposing it to have taken place, it is inconceivable that
+such a story should have not reached him; the matter could never have
+been kept so quiet but that it must have leaked out.&nbsp; Men are not
+so utterly bad or so utterly foolish as Dean Alford seems to imply;
+and whether Gamaliel was or was not present when the guard were bribed,
+he must have been equally aware of the fact before making the speech
+which is assigned to him in the Acts.</p>
+<p>IV.&nbsp; The German commentators argue from the silence of the other
+Evangelists: Dean Alford replies by denying that this silence is any
+argument: but I would answer, that on a matter which the other three
+writers must have known to have been of such intense interest, their
+silence is a conclusive proof either of their ignorance or their indolence
+as historians.&nbsp; Dean Alford has well substantiated the independence
+of the four narratives, he has well proved that the writer of the fourth
+Gospel could never have seen the other Gospels, and yet he supposes
+that that writer either did not know the facts related by Matthew, or
+thought it unnecessary to allude to them.&nbsp; Neither of these suppositions
+is tenable: but there would nevertheless be a shadow of ground for Dean
+Alford to stand upon if the other Evangelists were simply silent: but
+why does he omit all notice of their introducing matter which is absolutely
+incompatible with Matthew&rsquo;s accuracy?</p>
+<p>There is one other consideration which must suggest itself to the
+reader in connection with this story of the guard.&nbsp; It refers to
+the conduct of the chief priests and the soldiers themselves.&nbsp;
+The conduct assigned to the chief priests in bribing the guard to lie
+against one whom they must by this time have known to be under supernatural
+protection, is contrary to human nature.&nbsp; The chief priests (according
+to Matthew) knew that Christ had said he should rise: in spite of their
+being well aware that Christ had raised Lazarus from the dead but very
+recently they did not believe that he <i>would</i> rise, but feared
+(so Matthew says) that the Apostles would steal the body and pretend
+a resurrection: up to this point we admit that the story, though very
+improbable, is still possible: but when we read of their bribing the
+guards to tell a lie under such circumstances as those which we are
+told had just occurred, we say that such conduct is impossible: men
+are too great cowards to be capable of it.&nbsp; The same applies to
+the soldiers: they would never dare to run counter to an agency which
+had nearly killed them with fright on that very selfsame morning.&nbsp;
+Let any man put himself in their position: let him remember that these
+soldiers were previously no enemies to Christ, nor, as far as we can
+judge, is it likely that they were a gang of double-dyed villains: but
+even if they were, they would not have dared to act as Matthew says
+they acted.</p>
+<p>And now let us turn to another note of Dean Alford&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>Speaking of the independence of the four narratives (in his note
+on Matt. xxviii., 1-10) and referring to their &ldquo;minor discrepancies,&rdquo;
+the Dean says <i>Supposing us to be acquainted with every thing said
+and done in its order and exactness, we should doubtless be able to
+reconcile, or account for, the present forms of the narratives</i>;
+but not having this key to the harmonising of them, all attempts to
+do so in minute particulars must be full of arbitrary assumptions, and
+carry no certainty with them: and I may remark that <i>of all harmonies</i>
+those of the <i>incidents of these chapters</i> are to me the <i>most
+unsatisfactory</i>.&nbsp; Giving their compilers all credit for the
+best intentions, I confess they seem to me to <i>weaken</i> instead
+of strengthening the evidence, which now rests (speaking merely <i>objectively</i>)
+on the unexceptionable testimony of three independent narrators, and
+one who besides was an eye witness of much that happened.&nbsp; If we
+are to compare the four and ask which is to be taken as most nearly
+reporting the <i>exact</i> words and incidents, on this there can, I
+think, be no doubt.&nbsp; On internal as well as external ground <i>that
+of John</i> takes the <i>highest place</i>, but not of course to the
+exclusion of those parts of the narrative which he <i>does not touch</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Surely the above is a very extraordinary note.&nbsp; The difficulty
+of the irreconcilable differences between the four narratives is not
+met nor attempted to be met: the Dean seems to consider the attempt
+as hopeless: no one, according to him, has been as yet successful, neither
+can he see any prospect of succeeding better himself: the expedient
+therefore which he proposes is that the whole should be taken on trust;
+that it should be assumed that no discrepancy which could not be accounted
+for would be found, if the facts were known in the exact order in which
+they occurred.&nbsp; In other words, he leaves the difficulty where
+it was.&nbsp; Yet surely it is a very grave one.&nbsp; The same events
+are recorded by three writers (one being professedly an eye-witness,
+and the others independent writers), in a way which is virtually the
+same, in spite of some unimportant variations in the manner of telling
+it, while a fourth gives a totally different and irreconcilable account;
+the matter stands in such confusion at present that even Dean Alford
+admits that any attempt to reconcile the differences leaves them in
+worse confusion than ever; the ablest and most spiritually minded of
+the German commentators suggest a way of escape; nevertheless, according
+to the Dean we are not to profit by it, but shall avoid the difficulty
+better by a simpler process - the process of passing it over.</p>
+<p>A man does well to be angry when he sees so solemn and momentous
+a subject treated thus.&nbsp; What is trifling if this is not trifling?&nbsp;
+What is disingenuousness if not this?&nbsp; It involves some trouble
+and apparent danger to admit that the same thing has happened to the
+Christian records which has happened to all others<i> - i.e</i>., that
+they have suffered - miraculously little, but still something - at the
+hands of 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 by
+all means and at all risks to be avoided.&nbsp; Who can doubt that some
+such feeling as this was in Dean Alford&rsquo;s mind when the notes
+above criticised were written?&nbsp; Yet what are the means taken to
+avoid the recognition of obvious truth?&nbsp; They are disingenuous
+in the very highest degree.&nbsp; Can this prosper?&nbsp; Not if Christ
+is true.</p>
+<p>What is the practical result?&nbsp; The loss of many souls who would
+gladly come to the Saviour, but who are frightened off by seeing the
+manner in which his case is defended.&nbsp; And what after all is the
+danger that would follow upon candour?&nbsp; None.&nbsp; Not one particle.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless, danger or no danger, we are bound to speak the truth.&nbsp;
+We have nothing to do with consequences and moral tendencies and risk
+to this or that fundamental principle of our belief, nor yet with the
+possibility of lurid lights being thrown here or there.&nbsp; What are
+these things to us?&nbsp; They are not our business or concern, but
+rest with the Being who has required of <i>us</i> that we should reverently,
+patiently, unostentatiously, yet resolutely, strive to find out what
+things are true and what false, and that we should give up all, rather
+than forsake our own convictions concerning the truth.</p>
+<p>This is our plain and immediate duty, in pursuance of which we proceed
+to set aside the account of the Resurrection given in St. Matthew&rsquo;s
+Gospel.&nbsp; That account must be looked upon as the invention of 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 of the Resurrection
+were becoming scarce, and when it was felt that some more unmistakably
+miraculous account than that given in the other three Gospels would
+be a comfort and encouragement to succeeding generations.&nbsp; We,
+however, must now follow the example of &ldquo;even the best&rdquo;
+of the German commentators, and discard it as soon as possible.&nbsp;
+On having done this the whole difficulty of the confusion of the four
+accounts of the Resurrection vanishes like smoke, and we find ourselves
+with three independent writers whose differences are exactly those which
+we might expect, considering the time and circumstances in which they
+wrote, but which are still so trifling as to disturb no man&rsquo;s
+faith.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER VI - MORE DISINGENUOUSNESS</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>[Here, perhaps, will be the fittest place for introducing a letter
+to my brother from a gentleman who is well known to the public, but
+who does not authorise me to give his name.&nbsp; I found this letter
+among my brother&rsquo;s papers, endorsed with the words &ldquo;this
+must be attended to,&rdquo; but with nothing more.&nbsp; I imagine that
+my brother would have incorporated the substance of his correspondent&rsquo;s
+letter into this or the preceding chapter, but not venturing to do so
+myself, I have thought it best to give the letter and extract in full,
+and thus to let them speak for themselves. - W. B. O.]</p>
+<p>June 15, 1868.</p>
+<p>My dear Owen,</p>
+<p>Your brother has told me what you are doing, and the general line
+of your argument.&nbsp; I am sorry that you should be doing it, for
+I need not tell you that I do not and cannot sympathise with the great
+and unexpected change in your opinions.&nbsp; You are the last man in
+the world from whom I should have expected such a change: but, as you
+well know, you are also the last man in the world whose sincerity in
+making it I should be inclined to question.&nbsp; May you find peace
+and happiness in whatever opinions you adopt, and let me trust also
+that you will never forget the lessons of toleration which you learnt
+as the disciple of what you will perhaps hardly pardon me for calling
+a freer and happier school of thought than the one to which you now
+believe yourself to belong.</p>
+<p>Your brother tells me that you are ill; I need not say that I am
+sorry, and that I should not trouble you with any personal matter -
+I write solely in reference to the work which I hear that you have undertaken,
+and which I am given to understand consists mainly in the endeavour
+to conquer unbelief, by really entering into the difficulties felt by
+unbelievers.&nbsp; The scheme is a good one <i>if thoroughly carried
+out</i>.&nbsp; We imagine that we stand in no danger from any such course
+as this, and should heartily welcome any book which tried to grapple
+with us, even though it were to compel us to admit a great deal more
+than I at present think it likely that even you can extort from us.&nbsp;
+Much more should we welcome a work which made people understand us better
+than they do; this would indeed confer a lasting benefit both upon them
+and us.</p>
+<p>However, I know you wish to do your work thoroughly; I want, therefore,
+to make a trifling suggestion which you will take <i>pro tanto</i>:
+it is this:-Paley, in his third book, professes to give &ldquo;a brief
+consideration of some popular objections,&rdquo; and begins Chap.&nbsp;
+I. with &ldquo;The discrepancies between the several Gospels.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now, I know you have a Paley, but I know also that you are ill, and
+that people who are ill like being saved from small exertions.&nbsp;
+I have, therefore, bought a second-hand Paley for a shilling, and have
+cut out the chapter to which I especially want to call your attention.&nbsp;
+Will you kindly read it through from beginning to end?</p>
+<p>Is it fair?&nbsp; Is the statement of our objections anything like
+what we should put forward ourselves?&nbsp; And can you believe that
+Paley with his profoundly critical instinct, and really great knowledge
+of the New Testament, should not have been perfectly well aware that
+he was misrepresenting and ignoring the objections which he professed
+to be removing?</p>
+<p>He must have known very well that the principle of confirmation by
+discrepancy is one of very limited application, and that it will not
+cover anything approaching to such wide divergencies as those which
+are presented to us in the Gospels.&nbsp; Besides, how <i>can</i> he
+talk about Matthew&rsquo;s object as he does, and yet omit all allusion
+to the wide and important differences between his account of the Resurrection,
+and those of Mark, Luke, and John?&nbsp; Very few know what those differences
+really are, in spite of their having the Bible always open to them.&nbsp;
+I suppose that Paley felt pretty sure that his readers would be aware
+of no difficulty unless he chose to put them up to it, and wisely declined
+to do so.&nbsp; Very prudent, but very (as it seems to me) wicked.&nbsp;
+Now don&rsquo;t do this yourself.&nbsp; If you are going to meet us,
+meet us fairly, and let us have our say.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t pretend to
+let us have our say while taking good care that we get no chance of
+saying it.&nbsp; I know you won&rsquo;t.</p>
+<p>However, will you point out Paley&rsquo;s unfairness in heading this
+part of his work &ldquo;A brief consideration of some popular objections,&rdquo;
+and then proceeding to give a chapter on &ldquo;the discrepancies between
+the several Gospels,&rdquo; without going into the details of any of
+those important discrepancies which can have been known to none better
+than himself?&nbsp; This is the only place, so far as I remember, in
+his whole book, where he even touches upon the discrepancies in the
+Gospels.&nbsp; Does he do so as a man who felt that they were unimportant
+and could be approached with safety, or as one who is determined to
+carry the reader&rsquo;s attention away from them, and fix it upon something
+else by a <i>coup de main</i>?</p>
+<p>This chapter alone has always convinced me that Paley did not believe
+in his own book.&nbsp; No one could have rested satisfied with it for
+moment, if he felt that he was on really strong ground.&nbsp; Besides,
+how insufficient for their purpose are his examples of discrepancies
+which do not impair the credibility of the main fact recorded!</p>
+<p>How would it have been if Lord Clarendon and three other historians
+had each told us that the Marquis of Argyll <i>came to life again after
+being beheaded</i>, and then set to work to contradict each other hopelessly
+as to the manner of his reappearance?&nbsp; How if Burnet, Woodrow,
+and Heath had given an account which was not at all incompatible with
+a natural explanation of the whole matter, while Clarendon gave a circumstantial
+story in flat contradiction to all the others, and carefully excluded
+any but a supernatural explanation?&nbsp; Ought we to, or should we,
+allow the discrepancies to pass unchallenged?&nbsp; Not for an hour
+- if indeed we did not rather order the whole story out of court at
+once, as too wildly improbable to deserve a hearing.</p>
+<p>You will, I know, see all this, and a great deal more, and will point
+it better than I can.&nbsp; Let me as an old friend entreat you not
+to pass this over, but to allow me to continue to think of you as I
+always have thought of you hitherto, namely, as the most impartial disputant
+in the world. - Yours, &amp;c.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(<i>Extract from Paley&rsquo;s</i> &ldquo;<i>Evidences.&rdquo; -
+Part III., Chapter 1</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>The Discrepancies between
+the Gospels</i>.&rdquo;)</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of the understanding,
+than to reject the substance of a story, by reason of some diversity
+in the circumstances with which it is related.&nbsp; The usual character
+of human testimony is substantial truth under circumstantial variety.&nbsp;
+This is what the daily experience of courts of justice teaches.&nbsp;
+When accounts of a transaction come from the mouths of different witnesses,
+it is seldom that it is not possible to pick out apparent or real inconsistencies
+between them.&nbsp; These inconsistencies are studiously displayed by
+an adverse pleader, but oftentimes with little impression upon the minds
+of the judges.&nbsp; On the contrary, close and minute agreement induces
+the suspicion of confederacy and fraud.&nbsp; When written histories
+touch upon the same scenes of action, the comparison almost always affords
+ground for a like reflection.&nbsp; Numerous and sometimes important
+variations present themselves; not seldom, also, absolute and final
+contradictions; yet neither one nor the other are deemed sufficient
+to shake the credibility of the main fact.&nbsp; The embassy of the
+Jews to deprecate the execution of Claudian&rsquo;s order to place his
+statue in their temple Philo places in harvest, Josephus in seed-time,
+both contemporary writers.&nbsp; No reader is led by this inconsistency
+to doubt whether such an embassy was sent, or whether such an order
+was given.&nbsp; Our own history supplies examples of the same kind.&nbsp;
+In the account of the Marquis of Argyll&rsquo;s death in the reign of
+Charles II., we have a very remarkable contradiction.&nbsp; Lord Clarendon
+relates that he was condemned to be hanged, which was performed the
+same day; on the contrary, Burnet, Woodrow, Heath, Echard, concur in
+stating that he was condemned upon the Saturday, and executed upon a
+Monday. <a name="citation3"></a><a href="#footnote3">{3}</a>&nbsp; Was
+any reader of English history ever sceptic enough to raise from hence
+a question, whether the Marquis of Argyll was executed or not?&nbsp;
+Yet this ought to be left in uncertainty, according to the principles
+upon which the Christian religion has sometimes been attacked.&nbsp;
+Dr. Middleton contended that the different hours of the day assigned
+to the Crucifixion of Christ by John and the other Evangelists, did
+not admit of the reconcilement which learned men had proposed; and then
+concludes the discussion with this hard remark: &lsquo;We must be forced,
+with several of the critics, to leave the difficulty just as we found
+it, chargeable with all the consequences of manifest inconsistency.&rsquo;
+<a name="citation4"></a><a href="#footnote4">{4}</a>&nbsp; But what
+are these consequences?&nbsp; By no means the discrediting of the history
+as to the principal fact, by a repugnancy (even supposing that repugnancy
+not to be resolvable into different modes of computation) in the time
+of the day in which it is said to have taken place.</p>
+<p>A great deal of the discrepancy observable in the Gospels arises
+from <i>omission</i>; from a fact or a passage of Christ&rsquo;s life
+being noticed by one writer, which is unnoticed by another.&nbsp; Now,
+omission is at all times a very uncertain ground of objection.&nbsp;
+We perceive it not only in the comparison of different writers, but
+even in the same writer, when compared with himself.&nbsp; There are
+a great many particulars, and some of them of importance, mentioned
+by Josephus in his Antiquities, which as we should have supposed, ought
+to have been put down by him in their place in the Jewish Wars. <a name="citation5"></a><a href="#footnote5">{5}</a>&nbsp;
+Suetonius, Tacitus, Dion Cassius have all three written of the reign
+of Tiberius.&nbsp; Each has mentioned many things omitted by the rest,
+<a name="citation6"></a><a href="#footnote6">{6}</a> yet no objection
+is from thence taken to the respective credit of their histories.&nbsp;
+We have in our own times, if there were not something indecorous in
+the comparison, the life of an eminent person, written by three of his
+friends, in which there is very great variety in the incidents selected
+by them, some apparent, and perhaps some real, contradictions: yet without
+any impeachment of the substantial truth of their accounts, of the authenticity
+of the books, of the competent information or general fidelity of the
+writers.</p>
+<p>But these discrepancies will be still more numerous, when men do
+not write histories, but <i>memoirs</i>; which is perhaps the true name
+and proper description of our Gospels; that is, when they do not undertake,
+or ever meant to deliver, in order of time, a regular and complete account
+of <i>all</i> the things of importance which the person who is the subject
+of their history did or said; but only, out of many similar ones, to
+give such passages, or such actions and discourses, as offered themselves
+more immediately to their attention, came in the way of their enquiries,
+occurred to their recollection, or were suggested by their <i>particular
+design</i> at the time of writing.</p>
+<p>This particular design may appear sometimes, but not always, nor
+often.&nbsp; Thus I think that the particular design which St. Matthew
+had in view whilst he was writing the history of the Resurrection, was
+to attest the faithful performance of Christ&rsquo;s promise to his
+disciples to go before them into Galilee; because he alone, except Mark,
+who seems to have taken it from him, has recorded this promise, and
+he alone has confined his narrative to that single appearance to the
+disciples which fulfilled it.&nbsp; It was the preconcerted, the great
+and most public manifestation of our Lord&rsquo;s person.&nbsp; It was
+the thing which dwelt upon St. Matthew&rsquo;s mind, and he adapted
+his narrative to it.&nbsp; But, that there is nothing in St. Matthew&rsquo;s
+language which negatives other appearances, or which imports that this
+his appearance to his disciples in Galilee, in pursuance of his promise,
+was his first or only appearance, is made pretty evident by St. Mark&rsquo;s
+Gospel, which uses the same terms concerning the appearance in Galilee
+as St. Matthew uses, yet itself records two other appearances prior
+to this: &lsquo;Go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth
+before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you&rsquo;
+(xvi., 7).&nbsp; We might be apt to infer from these words, that this
+was the <i>first</i> time they were to see him: at least, we might infer
+it with as much reason as we draw the inference from the same words
+in Matthew; yet the historian himself did not perceive that he was leading
+his readers to any such conclusion, for in the twelfth and two following
+verses of this chapter, he informs us of two appearances, which, by
+comparing the order of events, are shown to have been prior to the appearance
+in Galilee.&nbsp; &lsquo;He appeared in another form unto two of them,
+as they walked, and went into the country: and they went and told it
+unto the residue: neither believed they them.&nbsp; Afterward He appeared
+unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief,
+because they believed not them which had seen Him after He was risen.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Probably the same observation, concerning the <i>particular design</i>
+which guided the historian, may be of use in comparing many other passages
+of the Gospels.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>[My brother&rsquo;s work, which has been interrupted by the letter
+and extract just given, will now be continued.&nbsp; What follows should
+be considered as coming immediately after the preceding chapter. - W.&nbsp;
+B. O.]</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>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 should put an
+end to such a style of argument, and get into a manner which shall commend
+itself to sincere and able adversaries, that I shall not apologise for
+giving them in full here.&nbsp; They refer to the spear wound recorded
+in St. John&rsquo;s Gospel as having been inflicted upon the body of
+our Lord.</p>
+<p>The passage in St. John&rsquo;s Gospel stands thus (John xix., 32-37)
+- &ldquo;Then came the soldiers and brake the legs of the first and
+of the other which was crucified with Him.&nbsp; But when they came
+to Jesus and saw that He was dead already they brake not His legs: but
+one of the soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and forthwith came
+there out blood and water.&nbsp; And he that saw it bare record, and
+we know that his record is true, and he knoweth that he saith true that
+ye might believe.&nbsp; For these things were done that the Scripture
+should be fulfilled, &lsquo;A bone of Him shall not be broken&rsquo;
+and again another Scripture saith, &lsquo;They shall look on Him whom
+they pierced.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>In his note upon the thirty-fourth verse Dean Alford writes - &ldquo;The
+lance must have penetrated deep, for the object was to <i>ensure</i>
+death.&rdquo;&nbsp; Now what warrant is there for either of these assertions?&nbsp;
+We are told that the soldiers saw that our Lord was dead already, and
+that for this reason they did not break his legs: if there had been
+any doubt about His being dead can we believe that they would have hesitated?&nbsp;
+There is ample proof of the completeness of the death in the fact that
+those whose business it was to assure themselves of its having taken
+place were so satisfied that they would be at no further trouble; what
+need to kill a dead man?&nbsp; If there had been any question as to
+the possibility of life remaining, it would not have been resolved by
+the thrust of the spear, but in a way which we must shudder to think
+of.&nbsp; It is most painful to have had to write the foregoing lines,
+but are they not called for when we see a man so well intentioned and
+so widely read as the late Dean Alford condescending to argument which
+must only weaken the strength of his cause in the eyes of those who
+have not yet been brought to know the blessings and comfort of Christianity?&nbsp;
+From the words of St. John no one can say whether the wound was a deep
+one, or why it was given - yet the Dean continues, &ldquo;and see John
+xx., 27,&rdquo; thereby implying that the wound must have been large
+enough for Thomas to get his hand into it, because our Lord says, &ldquo;reach
+hither thine hand and thrust it into my side.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is simply
+shocking.&nbsp; Words cannot be pressed in this way.&nbsp; Dean Alford
+then says that the spear was thrust &ldquo;probably into the <i>left</i>
+side on account of the position of the soldier&rdquo; (no one can arrive
+at the position of the soldier, and no one would attempt to do so, unless
+actuated by a nervous anxiety to direct the spear into the heart of
+the Redeemer), &ldquo;and of what followed&rdquo; (the Dean here implies
+that the water must have come from the pericardium; yet in his next
+note we are led to infer that he rejects this supposition, inasmuch
+as the quantity of water would have been &ldquo;so small as to have
+scarcely been observed&rdquo;).&nbsp; Is this fair and manly argument,
+and can it have any other effect than to increase the scepticism of
+those who doubt?</p>
+<p>Here this note ends.&nbsp; The next begins upon the words &ldquo;blood
+and water.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The spear,&rdquo; says the Dean, &ldquo;perhaps pierced the
+pericardium or envelope of the heart&rdquo; (but why introduce a &ldquo;perhaps&rdquo;
+when there is ample proof of the death without it?), &ldquo;in which
+case a liquid answering to the description of water may have&rdquo;
+(<i>may</i> have) &ldquo;flowed with the blood, but the quantity would
+have been so small as scarcely to have been observed&rdquo; (yet in
+the preceding note he has led us to suppose that he thinks the water
+&ldquo;probably came from near the heart).&nbsp; &ldquo;It is scarcely
+possible that the separation of the blood into placenta and serum should
+have taken place so soon, or that if it had, it should have been described
+by an observe as blood and water.&nbsp; It is more probable that the
+fact here so strongly testified was a consequence of the extreme exhaustion
+of the body of the Redeemer.&rdquo;&nbsp; (Now if this is the case,
+the spear-wound does not prove the death of Him on whom it was inflicted,
+and Dean Alford has weakened a strong case for nothing.)&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+medical opinions on the subject are very various and by no means satisfactory.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Satisfactory!&nbsp; What does Dean Alford mean by satisfactory?&nbsp;
+If the evidence does not go to prove that the spear-wound must have
+been necessarily fatal why not have said so at once, and have let the
+whole matter rest in the obscurity from which no human being can remove
+it.&nbsp; The wound may have been severe or may not have been severe,
+it may have been given in mere wanton mockery of the dead King of the
+Jews, for the indignity&rsquo;s sake: 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 the object of its having been recorded is no mystery,
+for we are expressly told that it was in order to shew <i>that prophecy
+was thus fulfilled</i>: the Evangelist tells us so in the plainest language:
+he even goes farther, for he says that these things were <i>done</i>
+for this end (not only that they were <i>recorded</i>) - so that the
+primary motive of the Almighty in causing the soldier to be inspired
+with a desire to inflict the wound is thus graciously vouchsafed to
+us, and we have no reason to harrow our feelings by supposing that a
+deeper thrust was given than would suffice for the fulfilment of the
+prophecy.&nbsp; May we not then well rest thankful with the knowledge
+which the Holy Spirit has seen fit to impart to us, without causing
+the weak brother to offend by our special pleading?</p>
+<p>The reader has now seen the two first of Dean Alford&rsquo;s notes
+upon this subject, and I trust he will feel that I have used no greater
+plainness, and spoken with no greater severity than the case not only
+justifies but demands.&nbsp; We can hardly suppose that the Dean himself
+is not firmly convinced that our Lord died upon the Cross, but there
+are millions who are not convinced, and whose conviction should be the
+nearest wish of every Christian heart.&nbsp; How deeply, therefore,
+should we not grieve at meeting with a style of argument from the pen
+of one of our foremost champions, which can have no effect but that
+of making the sceptic suspect that the evidences for the death of our
+Lord are felt, even by Christians, to be insufficient.&nbsp; For this
+is what it comes to.</p>
+<p>Let us, however, go on to the note on John xix., 35, that is to say
+on St. John&rsquo;s emphatic assertion of the truth of what he is recording.&nbsp;
+The note stands thus, &ldquo;This emphatic assertion of the fact seems
+rather to regard the whole incident than the mere outflowing of the
+blood and water.&nbsp; It was the object of John to shew that the Lord&rsquo;s
+body was a <i>real body</i> and <i>underwent real death</i>.&nbsp; (This
+is not John&rsquo;s own account - supposing that John is the writer
+of the fourth Gospel - either of his own object in recording, or yet
+of the object of the wound&rsquo;s having been inflicted; his words,
+as we have seen above, run thus:- &ldquo;and he that saw it bare record,
+and we know that his record is true; and he knoweth that he saith true
+that ye might believe.&nbsp; <i>For these things were done that the
+Scripture should be fulfilled</i> which saith &lsquo;a bone of him shall
+not be broken,&rsquo; and, again, another Scripture saith, &lsquo;they
+shall look upon&rsquo; him whom they pierced.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; Who
+shall dare to say that St. John had any other object than to show that
+the event which he relates had been long foreseen, and foretold by the
+words of the Almighty?)&nbsp; And both these were shewn by what took
+place, <i>not so much by the phenomenon of the water and blood</i>&rdquo;
+(then here we have it admitted that so much disingenuousness has been
+resorted to for no advantage, inasmuch as the fact of the water and
+blood having flowed is not <i>per se</i> proof of a necessarily fatal
+wound) &ldquo;as by the infliction of such a wound&rdquo; (Such a wound!&nbsp;
+What can be the meaning of this?&nbsp; What has Dean Alford made clear
+about the wound?&nbsp; We know absolutely nothing about the severity
+or intention of the wound, and it is mere baseless conjecture and assumption
+to say that we do; neither do we know anything concerning its effect
+unless it be shewn that the issuing of the blood and water <i>prove</i>
+that death must have ensued, and this Dean Alford has just virtually
+admitted to be not shewn), after which, <i>even if death had not taken
+place before</i> (this is intolerable), <i>there could not by any possibility
+be life remaining</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; (The italics on this page are mine.)</p>
+<p>With this climax of presumptuous assertion these disgraceful notes
+are ended.&nbsp; They have shewn clearly that the wound does not in
+itself prove the death: they shew no less clearly that the Dean does
+not consider that the death is proved beyond possibility of doubt <i>without</i>
+the wound; what therefore should be the legitimate conclusion?&nbsp;
+Surely that we have no proof of the completeness of Christ&rsquo;s death
+upon the Cross - or in other words no proof of His having died at all!&nbsp;
+Couple this with the notes upon the Resurrection considered above, and
+we feel rather as though we were in the hands of some Jesuitical unbeliever,
+who was trying to undermine our faith in our most precious convictions
+under the guise of defending them, than in those of one whom it is almost
+impossible to suspect of such any design.&nbsp; What should we say if
+we had found Newton, Adam Smith or Darwin, arguing for their opinions
+thus?&nbsp; What should we think concerning any scientific cause which
+we found thus defended?&nbsp; We should exceedingly well know that it
+was lost.&nbsp; And yet our leading theologians are to be applauded
+and set in high places for condescending to such sharp practice as would
+be despised even by a disreputable attorney, as too transparently shallow
+to be of the smallest use to him.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s
+body was wounded more severely, or less severely, as the case may be,
+with the point of a spear, that from this wound there flowed something
+which to the eyes of the writer resembled blood and water, and that
+the whole was done in order that a well-known prophecy might be fulfilled.&nbsp;
+Yet his sentences in reference to this fact being ended, without his
+having added one iota to our knowledge upon the subject, the Dean gravely
+winds up by throwing a doubt upon the certainty of our Lord&rsquo;s
+death which was not felt by a single one of those upon the spot, and
+resting his clenching proof of its having taken place upon a wound,
+which he has just virtually admitted to have not been necessarily fatal.&nbsp;
+Nothing can be more deplorable either as morality or policy.</p>
+<p>Yet the Dean is justified by the event.&nbsp; One would have thought
+he could have been guilty of nothing short of infatuation in hoping
+that the above notes would pass muster with any ordinarily intelligent
+person, but he knew that he might safely trust to the force of habit
+and prejudice in the minds of his readers, and his confidence has not
+been misplaced.&nbsp; Of all those engaged in the training of our young
+men for Holy Orders, of all our Bishops and clergy and tutors at colleges,
+whose very profession it is to be lovers of truth and candour, who are
+paid for being so, and who are mere shams and wolves in sheep&rsquo;s
+clothing if they are not ever on the look-out for falsehood, to make
+war upon it as the enemy of our souls - not one, <i>no, not a single
+one</i>, so far as I know, has raised his voice in protest.&nbsp; If
+a man has not lost his power of weeping let him weep for this; if there
+is any who realises the crime of self-deception, as perhaps the most
+subtle and hideous of all forms of sin, let him lift up his voice and
+proclaim it now; for the times are not of peace, but of a sowing of
+wind for the reaping of whirlwinds, and of the calm that is the centre
+of the hurricane.</p>
+<p>Either Christianity is the truth of truths - the one which should
+in this world overmaster all others in the thoughts of all men, and
+compared with which all other truths are insignificant except as grouping
+themselves around it - or it is at the best a mistake which should be
+set right as soon as possible.&nbsp; There is no middle course.&nbsp;
+Either Jesus Christ was the Son of God, or He was not.&nbsp; If He was,
+His great Father forbid that we should juggle in order to prove Him
+so - that we should higgle for an inch of wound more, or an inch less,
+and haggle for the root &nu;&upsilon;y in the Greek word &epsilon;&nu;&upsilon;&xi;&epsilon;.&nbsp;
+Better admit that the death of Christ must be ever a matter of doubt,
+should so great a sacrifice be demanded of us, than go near to the handling
+of a lie in order to make assurance doubly sure.&nbsp; No truthful mind
+can doubt that the cause of Christ is far better served by exposing
+an insufficient argument than by silently passing it over, or else that
+the cause of Christ is one to be attacked and not defended.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER VII - DIFFICULTIES FELT BY OUR OPPONENTS</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>There are some who avoid all close examination into the circumstances
+attendant upon the death of our Lord, using the plea that however excellent
+a quality intellect may be, and however desirable that the facts connected
+with the Crucifixion should be intelligently considered, yet that after
+all it is spiritual insight which is wanted for a just appreciation
+of spiritual truths, and that the way to be preserved from error is
+to cultivate holiness and purity of life.&nbsp; This is well for those
+who are already satisfied with the evidences for their convictions.&nbsp;
+We could hardly give them any better advice than simply to &ldquo;depart
+from evil, do good, seek peace and ensue it&rdquo; (Psalm xxxiv., 14),
+if we could only make sure that their duty would never lead them into
+contact with those who hold the external evidences of Christianity to
+be insufficient.&nbsp; When, however, they meet with any of these unhappy
+persons they will find their influence for good paralysed; for unbelievers
+do not understand what is meant by appealing to their spiritual insight
+as a thing which can in any way affect the evidence for or against an
+alleged fact in history - or at any rate as forming evidence for a fact
+which they believe to be in itself improbable and unsupported by external
+proof.&nbsp; They have not got any spiritual insight in matters of this
+sort; nor, indeed, do they recognise what is meant by the words at all,
+unless they be interpreted as self-respect and regard for the feelings
+and usages of other people.&nbsp; What spiritual insight they have,
+they express by the very nearly synonymous terms, &ldquo;current feeling,&rdquo;
+or &ldquo;common sense,&rdquo; and however deep their reverence for
+these things may be, they will never admit that goodness or right feeling
+can guide them into intuitive accuracy upon a matter of history.&nbsp;
+On the contrary, in any such case they believe that sentiment is likely
+to mislead, and that the well-disciplined intellect is alone trustworthy.&nbsp;
+The question is, whether it is worth while to try and rescue those who
+are in this condition or not.&nbsp; If it <i>is</i> worth while, we
+must deal with them according to their sense of right and not ours:
+in other words, if we meet with an unbeliever we must not expect him
+to accept our faith unless we take much pains with him, and are prepared
+to make great sacrifice of our own peace and patience.</p>
+<p>Yet how many shrink from this, and think that they are doing God
+service by shrinking; the only thing from which they should really shrink,
+is the falsehood which has overlaid the best established fact in all
+history with so much sophistry, that even our own side has come to fear
+that there must be something lurking behind which will not bear daylight;
+to such a pass have we been brought by the desire to prove too much.</p>
+<p>Now for the comfort of those who may feel an uneasy sense of dread,
+as though any close examination of the events connected with the Crucifixion
+might end in suggesting a natural instead of a miraculous explanation
+of the Resurrection, for the comfort of such - and they indeed stand
+in need of comfort - let me say at once that the ablest of our adversaries
+would tell them that they need be under no such fear.&nbsp; Strauss
+himself admits that our Lord died upon the Cross; he does not even attempt
+to dispute it, but writes as though he were well aware that there was
+no room for any difference of opinion about the matter.&nbsp; He has
+therefore been compelled to adopt the hallucination theory, with a result
+which we have already considered.&nbsp; Yet who can question that Strauss
+would have maintained the position that our Lord did not die upon the
+Cross, unless he had felt that it was one in which he would not be able
+to secure the support even of those who were inclined to disbelieve?&nbsp;
+We cannot doubt that the conviction of the reality of our Lord&rsquo;s
+death has been forced upon him by a weight of testimony which, like
+St. Paul, he has found himself utterly unable to resist.</p>
+<p>Here then, we might almost pause.&nbsp; Strauss admits that our Lord
+died upon the Cross.&nbsp; Yet can the reader help feeling that the
+vindication of the reality of our Lord&rsquo;s reappearances, and the
+refutation of Strauss&rsquo;s theories with which this work opened,
+was triumphant and conclusive?&nbsp; Then what follows?&nbsp; That Christ
+died and rose again!&nbsp; The central fact of our faith is proved.&nbsp;
+It is proved externally by the most solid and irrefragable proofs, such
+as should appeal even to minds which reject all spiritual evidence,
+and recognise no canons of investigation but those of the purest reason.</p>
+<p>But anything and everything is believable concerning one whose resurrection
+from death to life has been established.&nbsp; What need, then, to enter
+upon any consideration of the other miracles?&nbsp; Of the Ascension?&nbsp;
+Of the descent of the Holy Spirit?&nbsp; Who can feel difficulty about
+these things?&nbsp; Would not the miracle rather be that they should
+<i>not</i> have happened!&nbsp; May we not now let the wings of our
+soul expand, and soar into the heaven of heavens, to the footstool of
+the Throne of Grace, secure that we have earned the right to hope and
+to glory by having consented to the pain of understanding?</p>
+<p>We may: and I have given the reader this foretaste of the prize which
+he may justly claim, lest he should be swallowed up in overmuch grief
+at the journey which is yet before him ere he shall have done all which
+may justly be required of him.&nbsp; For it is not enough that his own
+sense of security should be perfected.&nbsp; This is well; but let him
+also think of others.</p>
+<p>What then is their main difficulty, now that it has been shewn that
+the reappearances of our Lord were not due to hallucination?</p>
+<p>I propose to shew this by collecting from all the sources with which
+I was familiar in former years, and throwing the whole together as if
+it were my own.&nbsp; I shall spare no pains to make the argument tell
+with as much force as fairness will allow.&nbsp; I shall be compelled
+to be very brief, but the unbeliever will not, I hope, feel that anything
+of importance to his side has been passed over.&nbsp; The believer,
+on the other hand, will be thankful both to know the worst and to see
+how shallow and impotent it will appear when it comes to be tested.&nbsp;
+Oh! that this had been done at the beginning of the controversy, instead
+of (as I heartily trust) at the end of it.</p>
+<p>Our opponents, therefore, may be supposed to speak somewhat after
+the following manner:- &ldquo;Granted,&rdquo; they will say, &ldquo;for
+the sake of argument, that Jesus Christ did reappear alive after his
+Crucifixion; it does not follow that we should at once necessarily admit
+that his reappearance was due to miracle.&nbsp; What was enough, and
+reasonably enough, to make the first Christians accept the Resurrection,
+and hence the other miracles of Christ, is not enough and ought not
+to be enough to make men do so now.&nbsp; If we were to hear now of
+the reappearance of a man who had been believed to be dead, our first
+impulse would be to learn the when and where of the death, and the when
+and where of the first reappearance.&nbsp; What had been the nature
+of the death?&nbsp; What conclusive proof was there that the death had
+been actual and complete?&nbsp; What examination had been made of the
+body?&nbsp; And to whom had it been delivered on the completeness of
+the death having been established?&nbsp; How long had the body been
+in the grave - if buried?&nbsp; What was the condition of the grave
+on its being first revisited?&nbsp; It is plain to any one that at the
+present day we should ask the above questions with the most jealous
+scrutiny and that our opinion of the character of the reappearance would
+depend upon the answers which could be given to them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it is no less plain that the distance of the supposed
+event from our own time and country is no bar to the necessity for the
+same questions being as jealously asked concerning it, as would be asked
+if it were alleged to have happened recently and nearer home.&nbsp;
+On the contrary, distance of time and space introduces an additional
+necessity for caution.&nbsp; It is one thing to know that the first
+Christians unanimously believed that their master had miraculously risen
+from death to life; it is another to know their reasons for so thinking.&nbsp;
+Times have changed, and tests of truth are infinitely better understood,
+so that the reasonable of those days is reasonable to us no longer.&nbsp;
+Nor would it be enough that the answers given could be just strained
+into so much agreement with one another as to allow of a <i>modus vivendi</i>
+between them, <i>and not to exclude the possibility of death, they must
+exclude all possibility of life having remained</i>, or we should not
+hesitate for a moment about refusing to believe that the reappearance
+had been miraculous: indeed, so long as any chink or cranny or loophole
+for escape from the miraculous was afforded to us, we should unhesitatingly
+escape by it; this, at least, is the course which would be adopted by
+any judge and jury of sensible men if such a case were to come before
+their unprejudiced minds in the common course of affairs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We should not refuse to believe in a miracle even now, if
+it were supported by such evidence as was considered to be conclusive
+by the bench of judges and by the leading scientific men of the day:
+in such a case as this we should feel bound to accept it; but we cannot
+believe in a miracle, no matter how deeply it has been engrained into
+the creeds of the civilised world, merely because it was believed by
+&lsquo;unlettered fishermen&rsquo; two thousand years ago.&nbsp; This
+is not a source from which such an event as a miracle should be received
+without the closest investigation.&nbsp; We know, indeed, that the Apostles
+were sincere men, and that they firmly believed that Jesus Christ had
+risen from the dead; their lives prove their faith; but we cannot forget
+that the fact itself of Christ&rsquo;s having been crucified and afterwards
+seen alive, would be enough, under the circumstances, to incline the
+men of that day to believe that he had died and had been miraculously
+restored to life, although we should ourselves be bound to make a far
+more searching inquiry before we could arrive at any such conclusion.&nbsp;
+A miracle was not and could not be to them, what it is and ought to
+be to ourselves - a matter to be regarded <i>a priori</i> with the very
+gravest suspicion.&nbsp; To them it was what it is now to the lower
+and more ignorant classes of Irish, French, Spanish and Italian peasants:
+that is to say, a thing which was always more or less likely to happen,
+and which hardly demanded more than a <i>prim&acirc; facie</i> case
+in order to establish its credibility.&nbsp; If we would know what the
+Apostles felt concerning a miracle, we must ask ourselves how the more
+ignorant peasants of to-day feel: if we do this we shall have to admit
+that a miracle might have been accepted upon very insufficient grounds,
+and that, once accepted, it would not have had one-hundredth part so
+good a chance of being refuted as it would have now.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It should be borne in mind, and is too often lost sight of,
+that <i>we have no account of the Resurrection from any source whatever</i>.&nbsp;
+We have accounts of the visit of certain women to a tomb which they
+found empty; but this is not an account of a resurrection.&nbsp; We
+are told that Jesus Christ was seen alive after being thought to have
+been dead, but this again is not an account of a resurrection.&nbsp;
+It is a statement of a fact, but it is not an account of the circumstances
+which attended that fact.&nbsp; In the story told by Matthew we have
+what comes nearest to an account of the Resurrection, but even here
+the principal figure is wanting; the angel rolls away the stone and
+sits upon it, but we hear nothing about the body of Christ emerging
+from the tomb; we only meet with this, when we come to the Italian painters.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Moreover, St. Matthew&rsquo;s account is utterly incredible
+from first to last; we are therefore thrown back upon the other three
+Evangelists, none of whom professes to give us the smallest information
+as to the time and manner of Christ&rsquo;s Resurrection.&nbsp; <i>There
+is nothing in any of their accounts to preclude his having risen within
+two hours from his having been laid in the tomb.</i></p>
+<p>&ldquo;If a man of note were condemned to death, crucified and afterwards
+seen alive, the almost instantaneous conclusion in the days of the Apostles,
+and in such minds as theirs, would be that he had risen from the dead;
+but the almost instantaneous conclusion now, among all whose judgement
+would carry the smallest weight, would be that he had never died - that
+there must have been some mistake.&nbsp; Children and inexperienced
+persons believe readily in all manner of improbabilities and impossibilities,
+which when they become older and wiser they cannot conceive their having
+ever seriously accepted.&nbsp; As with men, so with ages; an unusual
+train of events brings about unusual results, whereon the childlike
+age turns instinctively to miracle for a solution of the difficulty.&nbsp;
+In the days of Christ men would ask for evidence of the Crucifixion
+and the reappearance; when these two points had been established they
+would have been satisfied - not unnaturally - that a great miracle had
+been performed: but no sane man would be contented now with the evidence
+that was sufficient then, any more than he would be content to accept
+many things which a child must take upon authority, and authority only.&nbsp;
+<i>We</i> ought to require the most ample evidence that not only the
+appearance of death, but death itself, must have inevitably ensued upon
+the Crucifixion, and if this were not forthcoming we should not for
+a moment hesitate about refusing to believe that the reappearance was
+miraculous.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And this is what would most assuredly be done now by impartial
+examiners - by men of scientific mind who had no wish either to believe
+or disbelieve except according to the evidence; but even now, if their
+affections and their hopes of a glorious kingdom in a world beyond the
+grave were enlisted on the side of the miracle, it would go hard with
+the judgement of most men.&nbsp; How much more would this be so, if
+they had believed from earliest childhood that miracles were still occasionally
+worked in England, and that a few generations ago they had been much
+more signal and common?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can we wonder then, if we ourselves feel so strongly concerning
+events which are hull down upon the horizon of time, that those who
+lived in the very thick of them should have been possessed with an all
+absorbing ecstasy or even frenzy of excitement?&nbsp; Assuredly there
+is no blame on the score of credulity to be attached to those who propagated
+the Christian religion, but the beliefs which were natural and lawful
+to them, are, if natural, yet not lawful to ourselves: they should be
+resisted: they are neither right nor wise, and do not form any legitimate
+ground for faith: if faith means only the believing facts of history
+upon insufficient evidence, we deny the merit of faith; on the contrary,
+we regard it as one of the most deplorable of all errors - as sapping
+the foundations of all the moral and intellectual faculties.&nbsp; It
+is grossly immoral to violate one&rsquo;s inner sense of truth by assenting
+to things which, though they may appear to be supported by much, are
+still not supported by enough.&nbsp; The man who can knowingly submit
+to such a derogation from the rights of his self-respect, deserves the
+injury to his mental eye-sight which such a course will surely bring
+with it.&nbsp; But the mischief will unfortunately not be confined to
+himself; it will devolve upon all who are ill-fated enough to be in
+his power; he will be reckless of the harm he works them, provided he
+can keep its consequences from being immediately offensive to himself.&nbsp;
+No: if a good thing can be believed legitimately, let us believe it
+and be thankful, otherwise the goodness will have departed out of it;
+it is no longer ours; we have no right to it, and shall suffer for it,
+we and our children, if we try to keep it.&nbsp; It has been said that
+the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children&rsquo;s teeth are
+set on edge, but, more truly, it is the eating of sweet and stolen fruit
+by the fathers that sets the teeth of the children jarring.&nbsp; Let
+those who love their children look to this, for on their own account
+they may be mainly trusted to avoid the sour.&nbsp; Hitherto the intensity
+of the belief of the Apostles has been the mainstay of our own belief.&nbsp;
+But that mainstay is now no longer strong enough.&nbsp; A rehearing
+of the evidence is imperatively demanded, that it may either be confirmed
+or overthrown.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It cannot be denied that there is much in the above with which all
+true Christians will agree, and little to find fault with except the
+self-complacency which would seem to imply that common sense and plain
+dealing belong exclusively to the unbelieving side.&nbsp; It is time
+that this spirit should be protested against not in word only but in
+deed.&nbsp; The fact is, that both we and our opponents are agreed that
+nothing should be believed unless it can be proved to be true.&nbsp;
+We repudiate the idea that faith means the accepting historical facts
+upon evidence which is insufficient to establish them.&nbsp; We do not
+call this faith; we call it credulity, and oppose it to the utmost of
+our power.</p>
+<p>Our opponents imply that we regard as a virtue well-pleasing in the
+sight of God, and dignify with the name of faith, a state of mind which
+turns out to be nothing but a willingness to stand by all sorts of wildly
+improbable stories which have reached us from a remote age and country,
+and which, if true, must lead us to think otherwise of the whole course
+of nature than we should think if we were left to ourselves.&nbsp; This
+accusation is utterly false and groundless.&nbsp; Faith is the &ldquo;evidence
+of things not seen,&rdquo; but it is not &ldquo;insufficient evidence
+for things alleged to have been seen.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is &ldquo;the
+substance of things hoped for,&rdquo; but &ldquo;reasonably hoped for&rdquo;
+was unquestionably intended by the Apostle.&nbsp; We base our faith
+in the deeper mysteries of our religion, as in the nature of the Trinity
+and the sacramental graces, upon the certainty that other things which
+are within the grasp of our reason can be shewn to be beyond dispute.&nbsp;
+We know that Christ died and rose again; therefore we believe whatever
+He sees fit to tell us, and follow Him, or endeavour to follow Him,
+whereinsoever He commands us, but we are not required to take both the
+commands of the Mediator <i>and His credentials</i> upon faith.&nbsp;
+It is because certain things within our comprehension are capable of
+the most irrefragable proof, that certain others out of it may justly
+be required to be believed, and indeed cannot be disbelieved without
+contumacy and presumption.&nbsp; And this applies to a certain extent
+to the credentials also: for although no man should be captious, nor
+ask for more evidence than would satisfy a well-disciplined mind concerning
+the truth of any ordinary fact (as one who not contented with the evidence
+of a seal, a handwriting and a matter not at variance with probability,
+would nevertheless refuse to act upon instructions because he had not
+with his own eyes actually seen the sender write and sign and seal),
+yet it is both reasonable and indeed necessary that a certain amount
+of care should be taken before the credentials are accepted.&nbsp; If
+our opponents mean no more than this we are at one with them, and may
+allow them to proceed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Turn then,&rdquo; they say, &ldquo;to the account of the events
+which are alleged to have happened upon the morning of the Resurrection,
+as given in the fourth Gospel: and assume for the sake of the argument
+that that account, if not from John&rsquo;s own hand, is nevertheless
+from a Johannean source, and virtually the work of the Apostle.&nbsp;
+The account runs as follows:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene while
+it was yet dark unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from
+the sepulchre.&nbsp; Then she runneth and cometh to Simon Peter and
+to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, &lsquo;They
+have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where
+they have laid Him.&rsquo;&nbsp; Peter therefore went forth and that
+other disciple, and came to the sepulchre.&nbsp; So they both ran together:
+and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.&nbsp;
+And he stooping down and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying, yet
+went he not in.&nbsp; Then cometh Simon Peter following him and went
+into the sepulchre and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin that
+was about His head not lying with the linen clothes but wrapped together
+in a place by itself.&nbsp; Then went in also that other disciple, which
+came first to the sepulchre, and he saw and believed.&nbsp; For as yet
+they knew not the Scripture that he must rise from the dead.&nbsp; Then
+the disciples went away again to their own home.&nbsp; But Mary stood
+without 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 Jesus
+had lain, and they say unto her, &lsquo;Woman, why weepest thou?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+She saith unto them, &lsquo;Because they have taken away my Lord and
+I know not where they have laid him.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then Mary sees Jesus himself, but does not at first recognise
+him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, let us see what the above amounts to, and, dividing it
+into two parts, let us examine first what we are told as having come
+actually under John&rsquo;s own observation, and, secondly, what happened
+afterwards.</p>
+<p>I.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is clear that Mary had seen nothing miraculous
+before she came running to the two Apostles, Peter and John.&nbsp; She
+had found the tomb empty when she reached it.&nbsp; She did not know
+where the body of her Lord then was, <i>nor was there anything to shew
+how long it had been removed</i>: all she knew was that within thirty-six
+hours from the time of its having been laid in the tomb it had disappeared,
+but how much earlier it had been gone neither did she know, nor shall
+we.&nbsp; Peter and John went into the sepulchre and thoroughly examined
+it: they saw no angel, nor anything approaching to the miraculous, simply
+the grave clothes <i>(which were probably of white linen</i>), lying
+<i>in two separate places</i>.&nbsp; Then, <i>and not till then</i>,
+do they appear to have entertained their first belief or hope that Christ
+might have risen from the dead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is plain and credible; but it amounts to an empty tomb,
+and to an empty tomb only.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here, for a moment, we must pause.&nbsp; Had these men but
+a few weeks previously seen Lazarus raised from the corruption of the
+grave - to say nothing of other resurrections from the dead?&nbsp; Had
+they seen their master override every known natural law, and prove that,
+as far as he was concerned, all human experience was worthless, by walking
+upon rough water, by actually talking to a storm of wind and making
+it listen to him, by feeding thousands with a few loaves, and causing
+the fragments that remained after all had eaten, to be more than the
+food originally provided?&nbsp; Had they seen events of this kind continually
+happening for a space of some two years, and finally had they seen their
+master transfigured, conversing with the greatest of their prophets
+(men who had been dead for ages), and recognised by a voice from heaven
+as the Son of the Almighty, and had they also heard anything approaching
+to an announcement that he should himself rise from the dead - or had
+they not?&nbsp; They might have seen the raising of Lazarus and the
+rest of the miracles, but might not have anticipated that Christ himself
+would rise, for want of any announcement that this should be so; or,
+again, they might have heard a prophecy of his Resurrection from the
+lips of Christ, but disbelieved it for the want of any previous miracles
+which should convince them that the prophecy came from no ordinary person;
+so that their not having expected the Resurrection is explicable by
+giving up either the prophecies, or the miracles, but it is impossible
+to believe that <i>in spite both of the miracles and the prophecies</i>,
+the Apostles should have been still without any expectation of the Resurrection.&nbsp;
+If they had both seen the miracles and heard the prophecies, they must
+have been in a state of inconceivably agitated excitement in anticipation
+of their master&rsquo;s reappearance.&nbsp; And this they were not;
+on the contrary, they were expecting nothing of the kind.&nbsp; The
+condition of mind ascribed to them considering their supposed surroundings,
+is one which belongs to the drama only; it is not of nature: it is so
+utterly at variance with all human experience that it should be dismissed
+at once as incredible.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it is very credible if Christ was seen alive after his
+Crucifixion, and his reappearance, though due to natural causes, was
+once believed to be miraculous, that this one seemingly well substantiated
+miracle should become the parent of all the others, and of the prophecies
+of the Resurrection.&nbsp; Thirty years in all probability elapsed between
+the reappearances of Christ and the earliest of the four Gospels; thirty
+years of oral communication and spiritual enthusiasm, among an oriental
+people, and in an unscientific age; an age by which the idea of an interference
+with the modes of the universe from a point outside of itself, was taken
+as a matter of course; an age which believed in an anthropomorphic Deity
+who had back parts, which Moses had been allowed to see through the
+hand of God; an age which, over and above all this, was at the time
+especially convulsed with expectations of deliverance from the Roman
+yoke.&nbsp; Have we not here a soil suitable for the growth of miracles,
+if the seed once fell upon it?&nbsp; Under such conditions they would
+even spring up of themselves, seedless.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Once let the reappearances of Christ have been believed to
+be miraculous (and under all the circumstances they might easily have
+been believed to be so, though due to natural causes), and it is not
+wonderful that, in such an age and among such a people, the other miracles
+and the prophecies of the Resurrection should have become current within
+thirty years.&nbsp; Even we ourselves, with all our incalculably greater
+advantages, could not withstand so great a temptation to let our wish
+become father to our thoughts.&nbsp; If we had been the especially favoured
+friends of one whom we believed to have died, but who yet was not to
+beholden by death, no matter how careful and judicially minded we might
+be by nature, we should be blind to everything except the fact that
+we had once been the chosen companions of an immortal.&nbsp; There lives
+no one who could withstand the intoxication of such an idea.&nbsp; A
+single well-substantiated miracle 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 sense of the continuity of nature, in which our
+judgements are, consciously or unconsciously, anchored; but if we were
+very closely connected with it in our own persons, we should dwell upon
+the recollection of it and on little else.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Few of us can realise what happened so very long ago.&nbsp;
+Men believe in the Christian miracles, though they would reject the
+notion of a modern miracle almost with ridicule, and would hardly even
+examine the evidence in its favour.&nbsp; But the Christian miracles
+stand in their minds as things apart; their <i>prestige</i> is greater
+than that attaching to any other events in the whole history of mankind.&nbsp;
+They are hallowed by the unhesitating belief of many, many generations.&nbsp;
+Every circumstance which should induce us to bow to their authority
+surrounds them with a bulwark of defences which may make us well believe
+that they must be impregnable, and sacred from attack.&nbsp; Small wonder
+then that the many should still believe them.&nbsp; Nevertheless they
+do not believe them so fully, nor nearly so fully, as they think they
+do.&nbsp; For even the strongest imagination can travel but a very little
+way beyond a man&rsquo;s own experience; it will not bear the burden
+of carrying him to a remote age and country; it will flag, wander and
+dream; it will not answer truly, but will lay hold of the most obvious
+absurdity, and present it impudently to its tired master, who will accept
+it gladly and have done with it.&nbsp; Even recollection fails, but
+how much more imagination!&nbsp; It is a high flight of imagination
+to be able to realise how weak imagination is.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We cannot therefore judge what would be the effect of immediate
+contact even with the wild hope of a miracle, from our conventional
+acceptance of the Christian miracles.&nbsp; If we would realise this
+we must look to modern alleged miracles - to the enthusiasm of the Irish
+and American revivals, when mind inflames mind till strong men burst
+into hysterical tears like children; we must look for it in the effect
+produced by the supposed Irvingite miracles on those who believed in
+them, or in the miracles that followed the Port Royal miracle of the
+holy thorn.&nbsp; There never was a miracle solitary yet: one will soon
+become the parent of many.&nbsp; The minds of those who have believed
+in a single miracle as having come within their own experience become
+ecstatic; so deeply impressed are they with the momentous character
+of what they have known, that their power of enlisting sympathy becomes
+immeasurably greater than that of men who have never believed themselves
+to have come into contact with the miraculous; their deep conviction
+carries others along with it, and so the belief is strengthened till
+adverse influences check it, or till it reaches a pitch of grotesque
+horror, as in the case of the later Jansenist miracles.&nbsp; There
+is nothing, therefore, extraordinary in the gradual development within
+thirty years of all the Christian miracles, if the Resurrection were
+once held to be well substantiated; and there is nothing wonderful,
+under the circumstances, in the reappearance of Christ alive after his
+Crucifixion having been assigned to miracle.&nbsp; He had already made
+sufficient impression upon his followers to require but little help
+from circumstances.&nbsp; He had not so impressed them as to want <i>no</i>
+help from any supposed miracle, but nevertheless any strange event in
+connection with him would pass muster, with little or no examination,
+as being miraculous.&nbsp; He had undoubtedly professed himself to be,
+and had been half accepted as, the promised Messiah.&nbsp; He had no
+less undoubtedly appeared to be dead, and had been believed to be so
+both by friends and foes.&nbsp; Let us also grant that he reappeared
+alive.&nbsp; Would it, then, be very astonishing that the little missing
+link in the completeness of the chain of evidence - <i>absolute certainty
+concerning the actuality of the death</i> - should have been allowed
+to drop out of sight?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Round such a centre, and in such an age, the other miracles
+would spring up spontaneously, and be accepted the moment that they
+arose; there is nothing in this which is foreign to the known tendencies
+of the human mind, but there would be something utterly foreign to all
+we know of human nature, in the fact of men not anticipating that Christ
+would rise, if they had already seen him raise others from the dead
+and work the miracles ascribed to him, and if they had also heard him
+prophesy that he should himself rise from the dead.&nbsp; In fact nothing
+can explain the universally recorded incredulity of the Apostles as
+to the reappearance of Christ, except the fact that they had never seen
+him work a single miracle, or else that they had never heard him say
+anything which could lead them to suppose that he was to rise from the
+dead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are therefore not unwilling to accept the facts recorded
+in the fourth Gospel, in so far as they inform us of things which came
+under the knowledge of the writer.&nbsp; Mary found the tomb empty.&nbsp;
+Ignorant alike of what had taken place and of what was going to happen,
+she came to Peter and John to tell them that the body was gone; this
+was all she knew.&nbsp; 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
+have flashed upon their minds, that the aspirations which they had already
+indulged in were to prove well founded.&nbsp; Within an hour or two
+Christ was seen alive, nor can we wonder if the years which intervened
+between the morning of the Resurrection and the writing of the fourth
+Gospel, should have sufficed to make the writer believe that John had
+had an actual belief in the Resurrection, while in truth he had only
+wildly hoped it.&nbsp; This much is at any rate plain, that neither
+he nor Peter had as yet heard any clearly intelligible prophecy that
+their master should rise from the dead.&nbsp; Whatever subsequent interpretation
+may have been given to some of the sayings of Jesus Christ, no saying
+was yet known which would of itself have suggested any such inference.&nbsp;
+We may justly doubt the caution and accuracy of the first founders of
+Christianity, without, even in our hearts, for one moment impugning
+the honesty of their intentions.&nbsp; We are ready to admit that had
+we been in their places we should in all likelihood have felt, believed,
+and, we will hope, acted as they did; but we cannot and will not admit,
+in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, that they were superior
+to the intelligence of their times, or, in other words, that they were
+capable critics of an event, in which both their feelings and the <i>prim&acirc;
+facie</i> view of the facts would be so likely to mislead them.</p>
+<p>II.&nbsp; &ldquo;Turning now to the narrative of what passed when
+Peter and John were gone, we find that Mary, stooping down, looked through
+her tears into the darkness of the tomb, and saw two angels clothed
+in white, who asked her why she wept.&nbsp; We must remember the wide
+difference between believing what the writer of the fourth Gospel tells
+us that John saw, and what he tells us that Mary Magdalene saw.&nbsp;
+All we know on this point is that he believed that Mary had spoken truly.&nbsp;
+Peter and John were men, they went into the tomb itself, and we may
+say for a certainty that they saw no angel, nor indeed anything at all,
+but the grave clothes <i>(which were probably of white linen</i>), lying
+<i>in two separate places</i> within it.&nbsp; Mary was a woman - a
+woman whose parallel we must look for among Spanish or Italian women
+of the lower orders at the present day; she had, we are elsewhere told,
+been at one time possessed with devils; she was in a state of tearful
+excitement, and looking through her tears from light into comparative
+darkness.&nbsp; Is it possible not to remember what Peter and John <i>did</i>
+see when they were in the tomb?&nbsp; Is it possible not to surmise
+that Mary in good truth saw nothing more?&nbsp; She thought she saw
+more, but the excitement under which she was labouring at the time,
+an excitement which would increase tenfold after she had seen Christ
+(as she did immediately afterwards and before she had had time to tell
+her story), would easily distort either her vision or her memory, or
+both.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The evidence of women of her class - especially when they
+are highly excited - is not to be relied upon in a matter of such importance
+and difficulty as a miracle.&nbsp; Who would dare to insist upon such
+evidence now?&nbsp; And why should it be considered as any more trustworthy
+eighteen hundred years ago?&nbsp; We are indeed told that the angels
+spoke to her; but the speech was very short; the angels simply ask her
+why she weeps; she answers them as though it were the common question
+of common people, and then leaves them.&nbsp; This is in itself incredible;
+but it is not incredible that if Mary looking into the tomb saw two
+white objects within, she should have drawn back affrighted, and that
+her imagination, thrown into a fever by her subsequent interview with
+Christ, should have rendered her utterly incapable of recollecting the
+true facts of the case; or, again, it is not incredible that she should
+have been believed to have seen things which she never did see.&nbsp;
+All we can say for certain is that before the fourth Gospel was written,
+and probably shortly after the first reappearance of Christ, Mary Magdalene
+believed, or was thought to have believed, that she had seen angels
+in the tomb; and this being so, the development of the short and pointless
+question attributed to them - possibly as much due to the eager cross-questioning
+of others as to Mary herself - is not surprising.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Before the Sunday of the Resurrection was over, the facts
+as derivable from the fourth Gospel would stand thus.&nbsp; Jesus Christ,
+who was supposed to have been verily and indeed dead, was known to be
+alive again.&nbsp; He had been seen, and heard to speak.&nbsp; He had
+been seen by those who were already prepared to accept him as their
+leader, and whose previous education, and tone of mind, would lead them
+rather to an excess of faith in a miracle, than of scepticism concerning
+its miraculous character.&nbsp; The Apostles would be in no impartial
+nor sceptical mood when they saw that Christ was alive.&nbsp; The miracle
+was too near themselves - too fascinating in its supposed consequences
+for themselves - to allow of their going into curious questions about
+the completeness of the death.&nbsp; The Master whom they had loved,
+and in whom they had hoped, had been crucified and was alive again.&nbsp;
+Is it a harsh or strained supposition, that what would have assuredly
+been enough for ourselves, if we had known and loved Christ and had
+been attuned in mind as the Apostles were, should also have been enough
+for them?&nbsp; Who can say so?&nbsp; The nature of our belief in our
+Master would have been changed once and for ever; and so we find it
+to have been with the Christian Apostles.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Over and above the reappearance of Christ, there would also
+be a report (probably current upon the very Sunday of the Resurrection),
+that Mary Magdalene had seen a vision of angels in the tomb in which
+Christ&rsquo;s body had been laid; and this, though a matter of small
+moment in comparison with the reappearance of Christ himself, will nevertheless
+concern us nearly when we come to consider the narratives of the other
+Evangelists.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER VIII - THE PRECEDING CHAPTER CONTINUED</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Let us now turn to Luke.&nbsp; His account runs as follows:-</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the
+morning, they came unto the sepulchre bringing the spices which they
+had prepared, and certain others with them.&nbsp; <i>And they found
+the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.&nbsp; And they entered in,
+and found not the body of the Lord Jesus</i>.&nbsp; And it came to pass
+as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them
+in shining garments, <i>and as they were afraid, and bowed their faces
+to the earth</i>, they said unto them, &ldquo;<i>Why seek ye the living
+among the dead</i>?&nbsp; He is not here, but is risen: <i>remember
+how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee</i>, saying, <i>&lsquo;The
+Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified,
+and the third day rise again</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; <i>And they remembered
+his words</i>, and returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things
+unto the eleven, and to all the rest.&nbsp; It was Mary Magdalene and
+Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with
+them which told these things unto the Apostles.&nbsp; <i>And their words
+seemed unto them as idle tales, and they believed them not</i>.&nbsp;
+Then arose Peter, and went unto the sepulchre: and, stooping down, he
+beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed wondering
+in himself at that which was come to pass.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When we compare this account with John&rsquo;s we are at once
+struck with the resemblances and the discrepancies.&nbsp; Luke and John
+indeed are both agreed that Christ was seen alive after the Crucifixion.&nbsp;
+Both agree that the tomb was found empty very early on the Sunday morning
+<i>(i.e</i>., within thirty-six hours of the deposition from the Cross),
+and neither writer affords us any clue whatever as to the time and manner
+of the removal of the body; but here the resemblances end; the angelic
+vision of Mary, seen <i>after</i> Peter and John had departed from the
+tomb, and seen apparently by Mary alone, in Luke finds its way into
+the van of the narrative, and Peter is represented as having gone to
+the tomb, <i>not in consequence of having been simply told that the
+body of Christ was missing, but because he refused to believe the miraculous
+story which was told him by the women</i>.&nbsp; In the fourth Gospel
+we heard of no miraculous story being carried by Mary to Peter and John.&nbsp;
+The angels instead of being seen by one person only, as would have appeared
+from the fourth Gospel, are now seen <i>by many</i>; and the women instead
+of being almost stolidly indifferent to the presence of supernatural
+beings, are afraid, and bow down their faces to the earth; instead of
+merely wanting to be informed why Mary was weeping, the angels speak
+with definite point, and as angels might be expected to speak; they
+allude, also, to past prophecy, which the women at once remember.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Strange, that they should want reminding!&nbsp; And stranger
+still that a few verses lower down we should find the Apostles remembering
+no prophetic saying, but regarding the story of the women as mere idle
+tales.&nbsp; What shall we say?&nbsp; Are not these differences precisely
+similar to those which we are continually meeting with, when a case
+of exaggeration comes before us?&nbsp; Can we accept <i>both</i> the
+stories?&nbsp; Is this one of those cases in which all would be made
+clear if we did but know <i>all</i> the facts, or is it rather one in
+which we can understand how easily the story given by the one writer
+might become distorted into the version of the other?&nbsp; Does it
+seem in any way improbable that within the forty years or so between
+the occurrences recorded by John and the writing of Luke&rsquo;s Gospel,
+the apparently trifling, yet truly most important, differences between
+the two writers should have been developed?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No one will venture to say that the facts, upon the face of
+them, do not strongly suggest such an inference, and that, too, with
+no conscious fraud on the part of any of those through whose mouths
+the story must have passed.&nbsp; If the fourth Gospel be assigned to
+John (and if it is <i>not</i> assigned to John the difficulties on the
+Christian side become so great that the cause may be declared lost),
+his story is that of a principal actor and eye-witness; it bears every
+impress of truth and none of exaggeration upon any point which came
+under his own observation.&nbsp; Even when he tells of what Mary Magdalene
+said she saw, we see the myth in its earliest and crudest form; there
+is no attempt at circumstance in connection with it, and abundant reason
+for suspecting its supernatural character is given along with it; reason
+which to our minds is at any rate sufficient to make us doubt it, but
+which would naturally have no weight whatever with John after he had
+once seen Christ alive, or indeed with us if we had been in his place.&nbsp;
+It is not to be wondered at that in such times many a fresh bud should
+be grafted on to the original story; indeed it was simply inevitable
+that this should have been the case.&nbsp; No one would mean to deceive,
+but we know how, among uneducated and enthusiastic persons, the marvellous
+has an irresistible tendency to become more marvellous still; and, as
+far as we can gather, all the causes which bring this about were more
+actively at work shortly after the time of Christ&rsquo;s first reappearance
+than at any other time which can be readily called to mind.&nbsp; The
+main facts, as we derive them from the consent of <i>both</i> writers,
+were simply these:- That the tomb of Christ was found unexpectedly empty
+on the Sunday morning; that this fact was reported to the Apostles;
+that Peter went into the tomb and saw the linen clothes laid by themselves;
+that Mary Magdalene said that she had seen angels; and that eventually
+Christ shewed himself undoubtedly alive.&nbsp; Both writers agree so
+far, but it is impossible to say that they agree farther.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Some may say that it is of little moment whether the angels
+appeared first or last; whether they were seen by many or by one; whether,
+if seen only by one, that one had previously been insane; whether they
+spoke as angels might be expected to speak, <i>i.e</i>., to the point,
+and are shewn to have been recognised as angels by the fear which their
+appearance caused; or whether they caused no alarm, and said nothing
+which was in the least equal to the occasion.&nbsp; But most men will
+feel that the whole complexion of the story changes according to the
+answers which can be made to these very questions.&nbsp; Surely they
+will also begin to feel a strong suspicion that the story told by Luke
+is one which has not lost in the telling.&nbsp; How natural was it that
+the angelic vision should find its way into the foreground of the picture,
+and receive those little circumstantial details of which it appeared
+most to stand in need; how desirable also that the testimony of Mary
+should be corroborated by that of others who were with her, and out
+of whom no devils had been cast.&nbsp; The first Christians would not
+have been men and women at all unless they had felt thus; but they <i>were</i>
+men and women, and hence they acted after the fashion of their age and
+unconsciously exaggerated; the only wonder is that they did not exaggerate
+more, for we must remember that even though the Apostles themselves
+be supposed to have been more judicially unimpassioned and less liable
+to inaccuracy than we have reason to believe they were, yet that from
+the very earliest ages of the Church there would be some converts of
+an inferior stamp.&nbsp; No matter how small a society is, there will
+be bad in it as well as good - there was a Judas even in the twelve.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But to speak less harshly, there must from the first have
+been some converts who would be capable of reporting incautiously; visions
+and dreams were vouchsafed to many, and not a few marvels may be referable
+to this source; there is no trusting an age in which men are liable
+to give a supernatural interpretation to an extraordinary dream, nor
+is there any end to what may come of it, if people begin seriously confounding
+their sleeping and waking impressions.&nbsp; In such times, then, Luke
+may have said with a clear conscience that he had carefully sifted the
+truth of what he wrote; but the world has not passed through the last
+two thousand years in vain, and we are bound to insist upon a higher
+standard of credibility.&nbsp; Luke would believe at once, and as a
+matter of course, things which we should as a matter of course reject;
+yet it is probable that he too had heard much that he rejected; he seems
+to have been dissatisfied with all the records with the existence of
+which he was aware; the account which he gives is possibly derived from
+some very early report; even if this report arose at Jerusalem, and
+within a week after the Crucifixion, it might well be very inaccurate,
+though apparently supported by excellent authority, so that there is
+no necessity for charging Luke with unusual credulity.&nbsp; No one
+can be expected to be greatly in advance of his surroundings; it is
+well for every one except himself if he should happen to be so, but
+no man is to be blamed if he is not; it is enough to save him if he
+is fairly up to the standard of his own times.&nbsp; &lsquo;Morality&rsquo;
+is rather of the custom which <i>is</i>, than of the custom which ought
+to be.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Turning now to the account of Mark, we find the following:-</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and
+Mary the mother of James, and Salome had bought sweet spices that they
+might come and anoint him.&nbsp; And very early in the morning, the
+first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of
+the sun.&nbsp; And they said among themselves,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And when they looked they saw that the stone was rolled away; for it
+was very great.&nbsp; And entering into the sepulchre they saw <i>a
+young man</i> sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment;
+and they were affrighted.&nbsp; And he saith unto them, &ldquo;Be not
+affrighted; ye seek Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified; he is risen;
+he is not here; behold the place where they laid him.&nbsp; But go your
+way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee:
+there ye shall see him, as he said unto you.&rdquo;&nbsp; And they went
+out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; <i>for they trembled and were
+amazed, neither said they any thing to any man, for they were afraid</i>.&nbsp;
+Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared
+first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.&nbsp;
+And she went and told them that had been with him as they mourned and
+wept.&nbsp; And they, when they heard that he was alive, and had been
+seen of her, <i>believed not</i>.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 is possible that there may have been another who is not mentioned,
+inasmuch as he remained silent; the angelic vision, however, is again
+brought into the foreground of the story and the fear of the women is
+even more strongly insisted on than it was in Luke.&nbsp; The angel
+reminds the women that Christ had said that he should be seen by his
+Apostles in Galilee, of which saying we again find that the Apostles
+seem to have had no recollection.&nbsp; The linen clothes have quite
+dropped out of the story, and we can detect no trace of Peter and John&rsquo;s
+visit to the tomb, but it is remarkable that the women are represented
+as not having said anything about the presence of the angel immediately
+on their having seen him; and this fact, which might be in itself suspicious,
+is apologised for on the score of fear, notwithstanding that their silence
+was a direct violation of the command of the being whom they so greatly
+feared.&nbsp; We should have expected that if they had feared him so
+much they would have done as he told them, but here again everybody
+seems to act as in a dream or drama, in defiance of all the ordinary
+principles of human action.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Throughout the preceding paragraph we have assumed that Mark
+intended his readers to understand that the young man seen in the tomb
+was an angel; but, after all, this is rather a bold assumption.&nbsp;
+On what grounds is it supported?&nbsp; Because Luke tells us that when
+the women reached the tomb they found <i>two</i> white angels within
+it, are we therefore to conclude that Mark, who wrote many years earlier,
+and as far as we can gather with much greater historical accuracy, must
+have meant an angel when he spoke of a &lsquo;young man&rsquo;?&nbsp;
+Yet this can be the only reason, unless the young man&rsquo;s having
+worn a long white robe is considered as sufficient cause for believing
+him to have been an angel; and this, again, is rather a bold assumption.&nbsp;
+But if St. Mark meant no more than he said, and when he wrote of a &lsquo;young
+man&rsquo; intended to convey the idea of a young man and of nothing
+more, what becomes of the angelic visions at the tomb of Christ?&nbsp;
+For St. Matthew&rsquo;s account is wholly untenable; St. Luke is a much
+later writer, who must have got all his materials second or third hand;
+and although we granted, and are inclined to believe, that the accounts
+of the visits of Mary Magdalene, and subsequently of Peter and John
+to the tomb, which are given in the fourth Gospel, are from a Johannean
+source, if we were asked our reasons for this belief, we should be very
+hard put to it to give them.&nbsp; Nevertheless we think it probable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But take it either way; if the account in the fourth Gospel
+is supposed to have been derived from the Apostle John, we have already
+seen that there is nothing miraculous about it, so far as it deals with
+what came under John&rsquo;s own observation; if, on the other hand,
+it is <i>not</i> authentic we are thrown back upon St. Mark as incomparably
+our best authority for the facts that occurred on the Sunday after the
+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 long white
+dress and told the women to tell the Apostles to go to Galilee, where
+they should see Christ.&nbsp; On the strength of this we are asked to
+believe that the reappearance of Christ alive, after a hurried crucifixion,
+must have been due to supernatural causes, and supernatural causes only!&nbsp;
+It will be easily seen what a number of threads might be taken up at
+this point, and followed with not uninteresting results.&nbsp; For the
+sake, however, of brevity, we grant it as most probable that St. Mark
+meant the young man said to have been seen in the tomb, to be considered
+as an angel; but we must also express our conviction that this supposed
+angelic vision is a misplaced offshoot of the report that Mary Magdalene
+had seen angels in the tomb after Peter and John had left it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is possible that Mark&rsquo;s account may be the most historic
+of all those that we have; but we incline to think otherwise, inasmuch
+as the angelic vision placed in the foreground by Mark and Luke, would
+not be likely to find its way into the background again, as it does
+in the fourth Gospel, unless in consequence of really authentic information;
+no unnecessary detraction from the miraculous element is conceivable
+as coming from the writer who has handed down to us the story of the
+raising of Lazarus, where we have, indeed, <i>a real account of a resurrection</i>,
+the continuity of the evidence being unbroken, and every link in the
+chain forged fast and strong, even to the unwrapping of the grave clothes
+from the body as it emerged from the sepulchre.&nbsp; Is it possible
+that the writer may have given the story of the raising of Lazarus (of
+which we find no trace except in the fourth Gospel), because he felt
+that in giving the Apostolic version with absolute or substantial accuracy,
+he was so weakening the miraculous element in connection with the Resurrection
+of Jesus Christ himself, that it became necessary to introduce an incontrovertible
+account of the resurrection of some other person, which should do, as
+it were, vicarious duty?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nevertheless there are some points on which all the three
+writers are agreed: we have the same substratum of facts, namely, <i>the
+tomb found already empty when the women reached it</i>, a confused and
+contradictory report of an angel or angels seen within it, and the subsequent
+reappearance of Christ.&nbsp; Not one of the three writers affords us
+the slightest clue as to the time and manner of the removal of the body
+from the tomb; there is nothing in any of the narratives which is incompatible
+with its having been taken away on the very night of the Crucifixion
+itself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is this a case in which the defenders of Christianity would
+clamour for <i>all</i> the facts, unless they exceedingly well knew
+that there was no chance of their getting them?&nbsp; <i>All</i> the
+facts, indeed - what tricks does our imagination play us!&nbsp; One
+would have thought that there were quite enough facts given as the matter
+stands to make the defenders of Christianity wish that there were not
+so many; and then for them to say that if we had more, those that we
+have would become less contradictory!&nbsp; What right have they to
+assume that if they had all the 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 find these accounts even more inexplicable than
+we do at present?&nbsp; Had <i>we</i> argued thus we should have been
+accused of shameless impudence; of a desire to maintain any position
+in which we happened to find ourselves, and by which we made money,
+regardless of every common principle of truth or honour, or whatever
+else makes the difference between upright men and self-deceivers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It may be said by some that the discrepancies between the
+three accounts given above are discrepancies concerning details only,
+but that all three writers agree about the &lsquo;main fact.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+We are continually hearing about this &lsquo;main fact,&rsquo; but nobody
+is good enough to tell us precisely what fact is meant.&nbsp; Is the
+main fact the fact that Jesus Christ was crucified?&nbsp; Then no one
+denies it.&nbsp; We all admit that Jesus Christ was crucified.&nbsp;
+Or, is it that he was seen alive several times after the Crucifixion?&nbsp;
+This also we are not disposed to deny.&nbsp; We believe that there is
+a considerable preponderance of evidence in its favour.&nbsp; But if
+the &lsquo;main fact&rsquo; turns out to be that Christ was crucified,
+<i>died</i>, and then came to life again, we admit that here too all
+the writers are agreed, but we cannot find with any certainty that one
+of them was present when Christ died or when his body was taken down
+from the Cross, or that there was any such examination of the body as
+would be absolutely necessary in order to prove that a man had been
+dead who was afterwards seen alive.&nbsp; If Christ reappeared alive,
+there is not only no tittle of evidence in support of his death which
+would be allowed for a moment in an English court of justice, but there
+is an overwhelming amount of evidence which points inexorably in the
+direction of his never having died.&nbsp; If he reappeared, there is
+no evidence of his having died.&nbsp; If he did not reappear, there
+is no evidence of his having risen from the dead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are inclined, however, as has been said already, to believe
+that Jesus Christ really did reappear shortly after the Crucifixion,
+and that his reappearance, though due to natural causes, was conceived
+to be miraculous.&nbsp; We believe also that Mary fancied that she had
+seen angels in the tomb, and openly said that she had done so; who would
+doubt her when so far greater a marvel than this had been made palpably
+manifest to all?&nbsp; Who would care to inquire very particularly whether
+there were two angels or only one?&nbsp; Whether there were other women
+with Mary or whether she was quite alone?&nbsp; Who would compare notes
+about the exact moment of their appearing, and what strictly accurate
+account of their words could be expected in the ferment of such excitement
+and such ignorance?&nbsp; Any speech which sounded tolerably plausible
+would be accepted under the circumstances, and none will complain of
+Mark as having wilfully attempted to deceive, any more than he will
+of Luke: the amplification of the story was inevitable, and the very
+candour and innocence with which the writers leave loophole after loophole
+for escape from the miraculous, is alone sufficient proof of their sincerity;
+nevertheless, it is also proof that they were all more or less inaccurate;
+we can only say in their defence, that in the reappearance of Christ
+himself we find abundant palliation of their inaccuracy.&nbsp; Given
+one great miracle, proved with a sufficiency of evidence for the capacities
+and proclivities of the age, and the rest is easy.&nbsp; The groundwork
+of the after-structure of the other miracles is to be found in the fact
+that Christ was crucified, and was afterwards seen alive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There is no occasion for me to examine St. Matthew&rsquo;s account
+of the Resurrection in company with the unhappy men whose views I have
+been endeavouring to represent above.&nbsp; For reasons which have already
+been sufficiently dwelt upon I freely own that I agree with them in
+rejecting it.&nbsp; I shall therefore admit that the story of the sealing
+of the tomb, and setting of the guard, the earthquake, the descent of
+the angel from Heaven, his rolling away the stone, sitting upon it,
+and addressing the women therefrom, is to be treated for all controversial
+purposes as though it had never been written.&nbsp; By this admission,
+I confess to complete ignorance of the time when the stone was removed
+from the mouth of the tomb, or the hour when the Redeemer rose.&nbsp;
+I should add that I agree with our opponents in believing that our Lord
+never foretold His Resurrection to the Apostles.&nbsp; But how little
+does it matter whether He foretold His Resurrection or not, and whether
+He rose at one hour or another.&nbsp; It is enough for me that he rose
+at all; for the rest I care not.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yet, see,&rdquo; our opponents will exclaim in answer, &ldquo;what
+a mighty river has come from a little spring.&nbsp; We heard first of
+two men going into an empty tomb, finding two bundles of grave clothes,
+and departing.&nbsp; Then there comes a certain person, concerning whom
+we are elsewhere told a fact which leaves us with a very uncomfortable
+impression, and <i>she</i> sees, not two bundles of grave clothes, but
+two white angels, who ask a dreamy pointless question, and receive an
+appropriate answer.&nbsp; Then we find the time of this apparition shifted;
+it is placed in the front, not in the background, and is seen by many,
+instead of being vouchsafed to no one but to a weeping woman looking
+into the bottom of a tomb.&nbsp; The speech of the angels, also, becomes
+effective, and the linen clothes drop out of sight entirely, unless
+some faint trace of them is to be found in the &lsquo;long white garment&rsquo;
+which Mark tells us was worn by the young man who was in the tomb when
+the women reached it.&nbsp; Finally, we have a guard set upon the tomb,
+and the stone which was rolled in front of it is sealed; the angel <i>is
+seen to descend from Heaven</i>, to roll away the stone, and sit upon
+it, and there is a great earthquake.&nbsp; Oh! how things grow, how
+things grow!&nbsp; And, oh! how people believe!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;See by what easy stages the story has grown up from the smallest
+seed, as the mustard tree in the parable, and how the account given
+by Matthew changes the whole complexion of the events.&nbsp; And see
+how this account has been dwelt upon to the exclusion of the others
+by the great painters and sculptors from whom, consciously or unconsciously,
+our ideas of the Christian era are chiefly drawn.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; These
+men have been the most potent of theologians, for their theology has
+reached and touched most widely.&nbsp; We have mistaken their echo of
+the sound for the sound itself, and what was to them an aspiration,
+has, alas! been to us in the place of science and reality.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Truly the ease with which the plainest inferences from the
+Gospel narratives have been overlooked is the best apology for those
+who have attributed unnatural blindness to the Apostles.&nbsp; If we
+are so blind, why not they also?&nbsp; A pertinent question, but one
+which raises more difficulties than it solves.&nbsp; The seeing of truth
+is as the finding of gold in far countries, where the shepherd has drunk
+of the stream and used it daily to cleanse the sweat of his brow, and
+recked little of the treasure which lay abundantly concealed therein,
+until one luckier than his fellows espies it, and the world comes flocking
+thither.&nbsp; So with truth; a little care, a little patience, a little
+sympathy, and the wonder is that it should have lain hidden even from
+the merest child, not that it should now be manifest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How early must it have been objected that there was no evidence
+that the tomb had not been tampered with (not by the Apostles, for they
+were scattered, and of him who laid the body in the tomb - Joseph of
+Arimath&aelig;a - we hear no more) and that the body had been delivered
+not to enemies, but friends; how natural that so desirable an addition
+to the completeness of the evidences in favour of a miraculous Resurrection
+should have been early and eagerly accepted.&nbsp; Would not twenty
+years of oral communication and Spanish or Italian excitability suffice
+for the rooting of such a story?&nbsp; Yet, as far as we can gather,
+the Gospel according to St. Matthew was even then unwritten.&nbsp; And
+who was Matthew?&nbsp; And what was his original Gospel?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is one part of his story, and one only, which will stand
+the test of criticism, and that is this:- That the saying that the disciples
+came by night and stole the body of Jesus away was current among the
+Jews, at the time when the Gospel which we now have appeared.&nbsp;
+Not that they did so - no one will believe this; but the allegation
+of the rumour (which would hardly have been ventured unless it would
+command assent as true) points in the direction of search having been
+made for the body of Jesus - and made in vain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We have now seen that there is no evidence worth the name,
+for any miracle in connection with the tomb of Christ.&nbsp; He probably
+reappeared alive, but not with any circumstances which we are justified
+in regarding as supernatural.&nbsp; We are therefore at length led to
+a consideration of the Crucifixion itself.&nbsp; Is there evidence for
+more than this - that Christ was crucified, was afterwards seen alive,
+and that this was regarded by his first followers as a sufficient proof
+of his having risen from the dead?&nbsp; This would account for the
+rise of Christianity, and for all the other miracles.&nbsp; Take the
+following passage from Gibbon:- &lsquo;The grave and learned Augustine,
+whose understanding scarcely admits the excuse of credulity, has attested
+the innumerable prodigies which were worked in Africa by the relics
+of St. Stephen, and this marvellous narrative is inserted in the elaborate
+work of &ldquo;The City of God,&rdquo; which the Bishop designed as
+a solid and immortal proof of the truth of Christianity.&nbsp; Augustine
+solemnly declares that he had selected those miracles only which had
+been publicly certified by persons who were either the objects or the
+spectators of the powers of the martyr.&nbsp; Many prodigies were omitted
+or forgotten, and Hippo had been less favourably treated than the other
+cities of the province, yet the Bishop enumerates above seventy miracles,
+of which three were resurrections from the dead, within the limits of
+his own diocese.&nbsp; If we enlarge our view to all the dioceses and
+all the saints of the Christian world, it will not be easy to calculate
+the fables and errors which issued from this inexhaustible source.&nbsp;
+But we may surely be allowed to observe that a miracle in that age of
+superstition and credulity lost its name and its merits, since it could
+hardly be considered as a deviation from the established laws of Nature.&rsquo;
+- (Gibbon&rsquo;s <i>Decline and Fall</i>, chap. xxviii., sec. 2).</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who believes in the miracles, or who would dare to quote them?&nbsp;
+Yet on what better foundation do those of the New Testament rest?&nbsp;
+For the death of Christ there is no evidence at all.&nbsp; There is
+evidence that he was believed to have been dead (under circumstances
+where a misapprehension was singularly likely to arise), by men whose
+minds were altogether in a different <i>clef</i> to ours as regards
+the miraculous, and whom we cannot therefore fairly judge by any modern
+standard.&nbsp; We cannot judge <i>them</i>, but we are bound to weigh
+the facts which they relate, not in their balance, but in our own.&nbsp;
+It is not what might have seemed reasonably believable to them, but
+what is reasonably believable in our own more enlightened age which
+can be alone accepted sinlessly by ourselves.&nbsp; Men&rsquo;s modes
+of thought concerning facts change from age to age; but the facts change
+not at all, and it is of them that we are called to judge.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We turn to the fourth Gospel, as that from which we shall
+derive the most accurate knowledge of the facts connected with the Crucifixion.&nbsp;
+Here we find that it was about twelve o&rsquo;clock when Pilate brought
+out Christ for the last time; the dialogue that followed, the preparations
+for the Crucifixion, and the leading Christ outside the city to the
+place where the Crucifixion was to take place, could hardly have occupied
+less than an hour.&nbsp; By six o&rsquo;clock (by consent of all writers)
+the body was entombed, so that the actual time during which Christ hung
+upon the cross was little more than four hours.&nbsp; Let us be thankful
+to hope that the time of suffering may have been so short - but say
+five hours, say six, say whatever the reader chooses, the Crucifixion
+was avowedly too hurried for death in an ordinary case to have ensued.&nbsp;
+The thieves had to be killed, as yet alive.&nbsp; Immediately before
+being taken down from the cross the body was delivered to friends.&nbsp;
+Within thirty-six hours afterwards the tomb 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 later Christ was seen alive.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let it be remembered also that the fact of the body having
+been delivered to Joseph <i>before</i> the taking down from the cross,
+greatly enhanced the chance of an escape from death, inasmuch as the
+duties of the soldiers would have ended with the presentation of the
+order from Pilate.&nbsp; If any faint symptom of returning animation
+shewed itself in consequence of the mere change of position and the
+inevitable shock attendant upon being moved, the soldiers would not
+know it; their task was ended, and they would not be likely either to
+wish, or to be allowed, to have anything to do with the matter.&nbsp;
+Joseph appears to have been a rich man, and would be followed by attendants.&nbsp;
+Moreover, although we are told by Mark that Pilate sent for the centurion
+to inquire whether Christ was dead, yet the same writer also tells us
+that this centurion had already come to the conclusion that Christ was
+the Son of God, a statement which is supported by the accounts of Matthew
+and Luke; Mark is the only Evangelist who tells us that the centurion
+<i>was</i> sent for, but even granting that this was so, would not one
+who had already recognised Christ as the Son of God be inclined to give
+him every assistance in his power?&nbsp; He would be frightened, and
+anxious to get the body down from the cross as fast as possible.&nbsp;
+So long as Christ appeared to be dead, there would be no unnecessary
+obstacle thrown in the way of the delivery of the body to Joseph, by
+a centurion who believed that he had been helping to crucify the Son
+of God.&nbsp; Besides Joseph was rich, and rich people have many ways
+of getting their wishes attended to.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We know of no one as assisting at the taking down or the removal
+of the body, except Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a, for the presence of Nicodemus,
+and indeed his existence, rests upon the slenderest evidence.&nbsp;
+None of the Apostles appear to have had anything to do with the deposition,
+nor yet the women who had come from Galilee, who are represented as
+seeing where the body was laid (and by Luke as seeing <i>how</i> it
+was laid), but do not seem to have come into close contact with the
+body.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would any modern jury of intelligent men believe under similar
+circumstances that the death had been actual and complete?&nbsp; Would
+they not regard - and ought they not to regard - reappearance as constituting
+ample proof that there had been no death?&nbsp; Most assuredly, unless
+Christ had had his head cut off, or had been seen to be burnt to ashes.&nbsp;
+Again, if unexceptionable medical testimony as to the completeness of
+the death had reached us, there would be no help for it; we should have
+to admit that something had happened which was at variance with all
+our experience of the course of nature; or again if his legs had been
+broken, or his feet pierced, we could say nothing; but what irreparable
+mischief is done to any vital function of the body by the mere act of
+crucifixion?&nbsp; The feet were not always, &lsquo;nor perhaps generally,&rsquo;
+pierced (so Dean Alford tells us, quoting from Justin Martyr), nor is
+there a particle of evidence to shew that any exception was made in
+the present instance.&nbsp; A man who is crucified dies from sheer exhaustion,
+so that it cannot be deemed improbable that he might swoon away, and
+that every outward appearance of death might precede death by several
+hours.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are we to suppose that a handful of ignorant soldiers should
+be above error, when we remember that men have been left for dead, been
+laid out for burial and buried by their best friends - nay, that they
+have over and over again been pronounced dead by skilled physicians,
+when the facilities for knowing the truth were far greater, and when
+a mistake was much less likely to occur, than at the hurried Crucifixion
+of Jesus Christ?&nbsp; The soldiers would apply no polished mirror to
+the lips, nor make use of any of those tests which, under the circumstances,
+would be absolutely necessary before life could be pronounced to be
+extinct; they would see that the body was lifeless, inanimate, to all
+outward appearance like the few other dead bodies which they had probably
+observed closely; with this they would rest contented.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is true, they probably believed Christ to be dead at the
+time they handed over the body to his friends, and if we had heard nothing
+more of the matter we might assume that they were right; but the reappearance
+of Christ alive changes the whole complexion of the story.&nbsp; It
+is not very likely that the Roman soldiers would have been mistaken
+in believing him to be dead, unless the hurry of the whole affair, and
+the order from Pilate, had disposed them to carelessness, and to getting
+the matter done as fast as possible; but it is much less likely that
+a dead man should come to life again than that a mistake should have
+been made about his having being dead.&nbsp; The latter is an event
+which probably happens every week in one part of the world or another;
+the former has never yet been known.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is not probable that a man officially executed should escape
+death; but that a <i>dead man</i> should escape from it is more improbable
+still; in addition to the enormous preponderance of probability on the
+side of Christ&rsquo;s never having died which arises from this consideration
+alone, we are told many facts which greatly lessen the improbability
+of his having escaped death, inasmuch as the Crucifixion was hurried,
+and the body was immediately delivered to friends without the known
+destruction of any organic function, and while still hanging upon the
+cross.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Joseph and Nicodemus (supposing that Nicodemus was indeed
+a party to the entombment) may be believed to have thought that Christ
+was dead when they received the body, but they could not refuse him
+their assistance when they found out their mistake, nor, again, could
+they forfeit their high position by allowing it to be known that they
+had restored the life of one who was so obnoxious to the authorities.&nbsp;
+They would be in a very difficult position, and would take the prudent
+course of backing out of the matter at the first moment that humanity
+would allow, of leaving the rest to chance, and of keeping their own
+counsel.&nbsp; It is noticeable that we never hear of them again; for
+there were no two people in the world better able to know whether the
+Resurrection was miraculous or not, and none who would be more deeply
+interested in favour of the miracle.&nbsp; They had been faithful when
+the Apostles themselves had failed, and if their faith had been so strong
+while everything pointed in the direction of the utter collapse of Christianity,
+what would it be, according to every natural impulse of self-approbation,
+when so transcendent a miracle as a resurrection had been worked almost
+upon their own premises, and upon one whose remains they had generously
+taken under their protection at a time when no others had ventured to
+shew them respect?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We should have fancied that Mary would have run to Joseph
+and Nicodemus, not to the Apostles; that Joseph and Nicodemus would
+then have sent for the Apostles, or that, to say the least of it, we
+should have heard of these two persons as having been prominent members
+of the Church at Jerusalem; but here again the experience of the ordinary
+course of nature fails us, and we do not find another word or hint concerning
+them.&nbsp; This may be the result of accident, but if so, it is a very
+unfortunate accident, and we have already had a great deal too much
+of unfortunate accidents, and of truths which <i>may</i> be truths,
+but which are uncommonly like exaggeration.&nbsp; Stories are like people,
+whom we judge of in no small degree by the dress they wear, the company
+they keep, and that subtle indefinable something which we call their
+expression.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nevertheless, there arise the questions how far the spear
+wound recorded by the writer of the fourth Gospel must be regarded,
+firstly, as an actual occurrence, and, secondly, as having been necessarily
+fatal, for unless these things are shewn to be indisputable we have
+seen that the balance of probability lies greatly in favour of Christ&rsquo;s
+having escaped with life.&nbsp; If, however, it can be proved that it
+is a matter of certainty both that the wound was actually inflicted,
+and that death must have inevitably followed, then the death of Christ
+is proved.&nbsp; The Resurrection becomes supernatural; the Ascension
+forthwith ceases to be marvellous; the Miraculous Conception, the Temptation
+in the Wilderness, all the other miracles of Christ and his Apostles,
+become believable at once upon so signal a failure of human experience;
+human experience ceases to be a guide at all, inasmuch as it is found
+to fail on the very point where it has been always considered to be
+most firmly established - the remorselessness of the grip of death.&nbsp;
+But before we can consent to part with the firm ground on which we tread,
+in the confidence of which we live, move, and have our being - the trust
+in the established experience of countless ages - we must prove the
+infliction of the wound and its necessarily fatal character beyond all
+possibility of mistake.&nbsp; We cannot be expected to reject a natural
+solution of an event however mysterious, and to adopt a supernatural
+in its place, so long as there is any element of doubt upon the supernatural
+side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The natural solution of the origin of belief in the Resurrection
+lies very ready to our hands; once admit that Christ was crucified hurriedly,
+that there is no proof of the destruction of any organic function of
+the body, that the body itself was immediately delivered to friends,
+and that thirty-six hours afterwards Christ was seen alive, and it is
+impossible to understand how any human being can doubt what he ought
+to think.&nbsp; We must own also that once let Joseph have kept his
+own counsel (and he had a great stake to lose if he did <i>not</i> keep
+it), once let the Apostles believe that Christ&rsquo;s restoration to
+life was miraculous (and under the circumstances they would be sure
+to think so), and their reason would be so unsettled that in a very
+short time all the recognised and all the apocryphal miracles of Christ
+would pass current with them without a shadow of difficulty.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It will be observed that throughout both this and the preceding chapter
+I have been dealing with those of our opponents who, while admitting
+the reappearances of our Lord, ascribe them to natural causes only.&nbsp;
+I consider this position to be only second in importance to the one
+taken by Strauss, and as perhaps in some respects capable of being supported
+with an even greater outward appearance of probability.&nbsp; I therefore
+resolved to combat it, and as a preliminary to this, have taken care
+that it shall be stated in the clearest and most definite manner possible.&nbsp;
+But it is plain that those who accept the fact that our Lord reappeared
+after the Crucifixion differ hardly less widely from Strauss than they
+do from ourselves; it will therefore be expedient to shew how they maintain
+their ground against so formidable an antagonist.&nbsp; Let it be remembered
+that Strauss and his followers admit that <i>the Death</i> of our Lord
+is proved, while those of our opponents who would deny this, nevertheless
+admit that we can establish <i>the reappearances</i>; it follows therefore
+that each of our most important propositions is admitted by one section
+or other of the enemy, and each section would probably be heartily glad
+to be able to deny what it admits.&nbsp; Can there be any doubt about
+the significance of this fact?&nbsp; Would not a little reflection be
+likely to suggest to the distracted host of our adversaries that each
+of its two halves is right, as <i>far as it goes</i>, but that agreement
+will only be possible between them when each party has learnt that it
+is in possession of only half the truth, and has come to admit both
+the <i>Death of our Lord and His Resurrection</i>?</p>
+<p>Returning, however, to the manner in which the section of our opponents
+with whom I am now dealing meet Strauss, they may be supposed to speak
+as follows:-</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Strauss believes that Christ died, and says <i>(New Life of
+Jesus</i>, Vol. I., p. 411) that &lsquo;the account of the Evangelists
+of the death of Jesus is clear, unanimous, and connected.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+If this means that the Evangelists would certainly know whether Christ
+died or not, we demur to it at once.&nbsp; Strauss would himself admit
+that not one of the writers who have recorded the facts connected with
+the Crucifixion was an eyewitness of that event, and he must also be
+aware that the very utmost which any of these writers can have <i>known</i>,
+was <i>that Christ was believed to have been. dead</i>.&nbsp; It is
+strange to see Strauss so suddenly struck with the clearness, unanimity,
+and connectedness of the Evangelists.&nbsp; In the very next sentence
+he goes on to say, &lsquo;Equally fragmentary, full of contradiction
+and obscurity, is all that they tell us of the opportunities of observing
+him which his adherents are supposed to have had after his resurrection.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Now, this seems very unfair, for, after all, the gospel writers are
+quite as unanimous in asserting the main fact that Christ reappeared,
+as they are in asserting that he died; they would seem to be just as
+&lsquo;clear, unanimous, and connected,&rsquo; about the former event
+as the latter (for the accounts of the Crucifixion vary not a little),
+and they must have had infinitely better means of knowing whether Christ
+reappeared than whether he had actually died.&nbsp; There is not the
+same scope for variation in the bare assertion that a man died, as there
+is in the narration of his sayings and doings upon the several occasions
+of his reappearance.&nbsp; Besides, in support of the reappearances,
+we have the evidence of Paul, who, though not an eye-witness, was well
+acquainted with those who were; whereas no man can make more out of
+the facts recorded concerning the death of Jesus, than that he was believed
+to be dead under circumstances in which mistake might easily arise,
+that there is no reason to think that any organic function of the body
+had been destroyed at the time that it was delivered over to friends,
+and that none of those who testified to Christ&rsquo;s death appear
+to have verified their statement by personal inspection of the body.&nbsp;
+On these points the Evangelists do indeed appear to be &lsquo;clear,
+unanimous, and connected.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Later on Strauss is even more unsatisfactory, for on the page
+which follows the one above quoted from, he writes: &lsquo;Besides which,
+it is quite evident that this (the natural) view of the resurrection
+of Jesus, apart from the difficulties in which it is involved, does
+not even solve the problem which is here under consideration: the origin,
+that is, of the Christian Church by faith in the miraculous resurrection
+of the Messiah.&nbsp; It is impossible that a being who had stolen half-dead
+out of a sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treatment,
+who required bandaging, strengthening, and indulgence, and who still,
+at last, yielded to his sufferings, could have given to the disciples
+the impression that he was a conqueror over death and the grave, the
+Prince of Life, an impression which lay at the bottom of their future
+ministry.&nbsp; Such a resuscitation could only have weakened the impression
+which he had made upon them in life and in death; at the most could
+only have given it an elegiac voice, but could by no possibility have
+changed their sorrow into enthusiasm, have elevated their reverence
+into worship.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, the fallacy in the above is obvious; it assumes that
+<i>Christ</i> was in such a state as to be compelled to creep about,
+weak and ill, &amp;c., and ultimately to die from the effects of his
+sufferings; whereas there is not a word of evidence in support of all
+this.&nbsp; He may have been weak and ill when he forbade Mary to touch
+him, on the first occasion of his being seen alive; but it would be
+hard to prove even this, and on no subsequent occasion does he shew
+any sign of weakness.&nbsp; The supposition that he died of the effects
+of his sufferings is quite gratuitous; one would like to know where
+Strauss got it from.&nbsp; He <i>may</i> have done so, or he may have
+been assassinated by some one commissioned by the Jewish Sanhedrim,
+or he may have felt that his work was done, and that any further interference
+upon his part would only mar it, and therefore resolved upon withdrawing
+himself from Palestine for ever, or Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a may have
+feared the revolution which he saw approaching - or twenty things besides
+might account for Christ&rsquo;s final disappearance.&nbsp; The only
+thing, however, which we can say with any certainty is that he disappeared,
+and that there is no reason to believe that he died of his wounds.&nbsp;
+All over and above this is guesswork.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Again, if Christ on reappearing had continued in daily intercourse
+with his disciples, it might have been impossible that they should not
+find out that he was in all respects like themselves.&nbsp; But he seems
+to have been careful to avoid seeing them much.&nbsp; Paul only mentions
+five reappearances, only one of which was to any considerable number
+of people.&nbsp; According also to the gospel writers, the reappearances
+were few; they were without preparation, and nothing seems to have been
+known of where he resided between each visit; this rarity and mysteriousness
+of the reappearances of Christ (whether dictated by fear of his enemies
+or by policy) would heighten their effect, and prevent the Apostles
+from knowing much more about their master than the simple fact that
+he was indisputably alive.&nbsp; They saw enough to assure them of this,
+but they did not see enough to prevent their being able to regard their
+master as a conqueror over death and the grave, even though it could
+be shewn (which certainly cannot be done) that he continued in infirm
+health, and ultimately died of his wounds.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If the Apostles had been highly educated English or German
+Professors, it might be hard to believe them capable of making any mistake;
+but they were nothing of the kind; they were ignorant Eastern peasants,
+living in the very thick of every conceivable kind of delusive influence.&nbsp;
+Strauss himself supposes their minds to have been so weak and unhinged
+that they became easy victims to hallucination.&nbsp; But if this was
+the case, they would be liable to other kinds of credulity, and it seems
+strange that one who would bring them down so low, should be here so
+suddenly jealous for their intelligence.&nbsp; There is no reason to
+suppose that Christ <i>was</i> weak and ill after the first day or two,
+any more than there is for believing that he died of his wounds.&nbsp;
+This being so, is it not more simple and natural to believe that the
+Apostles were really misled by a solid substratum of strange events
+- a substratum which seems to be supported by all the evidence which
+we can get - than that the whole story of the appearances of Christ
+after the Crucifixion should be due to baseless dreams and fancies?&nbsp;
+At any rate, if the Apostles could be misled by hallucination, much
+more might they be misled by a natural reappearance, which looked not
+unlike a supernatural one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The belief in the miraculous character of the Resurrection
+is the central point of the whole Christian system.&nbsp; Let this be
+once believed, and considering the times, which, it must always be remembered,
+were in respect of credulity widely different from our own, 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, and unfamiliarity with the ideas of
+accuracy and science, and considering also the unquestionable beauty
+and wisdom of much which is recorded as having been taught by Christ,
+and the really remarkable circumstances of the case - we say, once let
+the Resurrection be believed to be miraculous, and the rest is clear;
+there is no further mystery about the origin of the Christian religion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So the matter has now come to this pass, that we are to jeopardise
+our faith in all human experience, if we are unable to see our way clearly
+out of a few words about a spear wound, recorded as having been inflicted
+in a distant country nearly two thousand years ago, by a writer concerning
+whom we are entirely ignorant, and whose connection with any eye-witness
+of the events which he records is a matter of pure conjecture.&nbsp;
+We will see about this hereafter; all that is necessary now is to make
+sure that we do not jeopardise it, if we <i>do</i> see a way of escape,
+and this assuredly exists.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I will not pain either the reader or myself by a recapitulation of
+the arguments which have led our opponents as well as the Dean of Canterbury,
+and I may add, with due apology, myself, to conclude that nothing is
+known as to the severity or purpose of the spear wound.&nbsp; The case,
+therefore, of our adversaries will rest thus:- that there is not only
+no sufficient reason for believing that Christ died upon the cross,
+but that there are the strongest conceivable reasons for believing that
+He did not die; that the shortness of time during which He remained
+upon the cross, the immediate delivery of the body to friends, and,
+above all, the subsequent reappearance alive, are ample grounds for
+arriving at such a conclusion.&nbsp; They add further that it would
+seem a monstrous supposition to believe that a good and merciful God
+should have designed to redeem the world by the infliction of such awful
+misery upon His own Son, and yet determined to condemn every one who
+did not believe in this design, in spite of such a deficiency of evidence
+that disbelief would appear to be a moral obligation.&nbsp; No good
+God, they say, would have left a matter of such unutterable importance
+in a state of such miserable uncertainty, when the addition of a very
+small amount of testimony would have been sufficient to establish it.</p>
+<p>In the two following chapters I shall show the futility and irrelevancy
+of the above reasoning - if, indeed, that can be called reasoning which
+is from first to last essentially unreasonable.&nbsp; Plausible as,
+in parts, it may have appeared, I have little doubt that the reader
+will have already detected the greater number of the fallacies which
+underlie it.&nbsp; But before I can allow myself to enter upon the welcome
+task of refutation, a few more words from our opponents will yet be
+necessary.&nbsp; However strongly I disapprove of their views, I trust
+they will admit that I have throughout expressed them as one who thoroughly
+understands them.&nbsp; I am convinced that the course I have taken
+is the only one which can lead to their being brought into the way of
+truth, and I mean to persevere in it until I have explained the views
+which they take concerning our Lord&rsquo;s Ascension, with no less
+clearness than I shewed forth their opinions concerning the Resurrection.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In St. Matthew&rsquo;s Gospel,&rdquo; they will say, &ldquo;we
+find no trace whatever of any story concerning the Ascension.&nbsp;
+The writer had either never heard anything about the matter at all,
+or did not consider it of sufficient importance to deserve notice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dean Alford, indeed, maintains otherwise.&nbsp; In his notes
+on the words, &lsquo;And lo!&nbsp; I am with you always unto the end
+of the world,&rsquo; he says, &lsquo;These words imply and set forth
+the Ascension&rsquo;; it is true that he adds, &lsquo;the manner of
+which is not related by the Evangelist&rsquo;: but how do the words
+quoted, &lsquo;imply and set forth&rsquo; the Ascension?&nbsp; They
+imply a belief that Christ&rsquo;s spirit would be present with his
+disciples to the end of time; but how do they set forth the fact that
+his body was seen by a number of people to rise into the air and actually
+to mount up far into the region of the clouds?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The fact is simply this - and nobody can know it better than
+Dean Alford - that Matthew tells us nothing about the Ascension.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The last verses of Mark&rsquo;s Gospel are admitted by Dean
+Alford himself to be not genuine, but even in these the subject is dismissed
+in a single verse, and although it is stated that Christ was received
+into Heaven, there is not a single word to imply that any one was supposed
+to have seen him actually on his way thither.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The author of the fourth Gospel is also silent concerning
+the Ascension.&nbsp; There is not a word, nor hint, nor faintest trace
+of any knowledge of the fact, unless an allusion be detected in the
+words, &lsquo;What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascending where
+he was before?&rsquo; (John vi., 62) in reference to which passage Dean
+Alford, in his note on Luke xxiv., 52, writes as follows:- &lsquo;And
+might not we have concluded from the wording of John vi., 62, that our
+Lord must have intended an ascension <i>insight of some of those to
+whom he spoke</i>, and that the Evangelist <i>gives that hint, by recording
+those words without comment, that he had seen it</i>?&rsquo;&nbsp; That
+is to say, we are to conclude that the writer of the fourth Gospel actually
+<i>saw</i> the Ascension, because he tells us that Christ uttered the
+words, &lsquo;What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascending where
+he was before?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But who <i>was</i> the author of the fourth Gospel?&nbsp;
+And what reason is there for thinking that that work is genuine?&nbsp;
+Let us make another extract from Dean Alford.&nbsp; In his prolegomena,
+chapter v., section 6, on the genuineness of the fourth Gospel, he writes:-
+&lsquo;Neither Papias, who carefully sought out all that Apostles and
+Apostolic men had related regarding the life of Christ; nor Polycarp,
+who was himself a disciple of the Apostle John; nor Barnabas, nor Clement
+of Rome, in their epistles; nor, lastly, Ignatius (in his genuine writings),
+makes any mention of, or allusion to, this gospel.&nbsp; <i>So that
+in the most ancient circle of ecclesiastical testimony, it appears to
+be unknown. or not recognised</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; We may add that there
+is no trace of its existence before the latter half of the second century,
+and that the internal evidence against its genuineness appears to be
+more and more conclusive the more it is examined.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;St. Paul, when enumerating the last appearances of his master,
+in a passage where the absence of any allusion to the Ascension is almost
+conclusive as to his never having heard a word about it, is also silent.&nbsp;
+In no part of his genuine writings does he give any sign of his having
+been aware that any story was in existence as to the manner in which
+Christ was received into Heaven.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where, then, does the story come from, if neither Matthew,
+Mark, John, nor Paul appear to have heard of it?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It comes from a single verse in St. Luke&rsquo;s Gospel -
+written more than half a century after the supposed event, when few,
+or more probably none, of those who were supposed to have seen it were
+either living or within reach to contradict it.&nbsp; Luke writes (xxiv.,
+51), &lsquo;And it came to pass that while he blessed them, he was parted
+from them, and carried up into Heaven.&rsquo;&nbsp; This is the only
+account of the Ascension given in any part of the Gospels which can
+be considered genuine.&nbsp; It gives Bethany as the place of the miracle,
+whereas, if Dean Alford is right in saying that the words of Matthew
+&lsquo;set forth&rsquo; the Ascension, they set it forth as having taken
+place on a mountain in Galilee.&nbsp; But here, as elsewhere, all is
+haze and contradiction.&nbsp; Perhaps some Christian writers will maintain
+that it happened both at Bethany and in Galilee.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In his subsequent work, written some sixty or seventy years
+after the Ascension, St. Luke gives us that more detailed account which
+is commonly present to the imagination of all men (thanks to the Italian
+painters), when the Ascension is alluded to.&nbsp; The details, it would
+seem, came to his knowledge after he had written his Gospel, and many
+a long year after Matthew and Mark and Paul had written.&nbsp; How he
+came by the additional details we do not know.&nbsp; Nobody seems to
+care to know.&nbsp; He must have had them revealed to him, or been told
+them by some one, and that some one, whoever he was, doubtless knew
+what he was saying, and all Europe at one time believed the story, and
+this is sufficient proof that mistake was impossible.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is indisputable that from the very earliest ages of the
+Church there existed a belief that Christ was at the right hand of God;
+but no one who professes to have seen him on his way thither has left
+a single word of record.&nbsp; It is easy to believe that the facts
+may have been revealed in a night vision, or communicated in one or
+other of the many ways in which extraordinary circumstances <i>are</i>
+communicated, during the years of oral communication and enthusiasm
+which elapsed between the supposed Ascension of Christ and the writing
+of Luke&rsquo;s second work.&nbsp; It is not surprising that a firm
+belief in Christ&rsquo;s having survived death should have arisen in
+consequence of the actual circumstances connected with the Crucifixion
+and entombment.&nbsp; Was it then strange that this should develop itself
+into the belief that he was now in Heaven, sitting at the right hand
+of God the Father?&nbsp; And finally was it strange that a circumstantial
+account of the manner in which he left this earth should be eagerly
+accepted?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>[In an appendix at the end of the book I have given the extracts
+from the Gospels which are necessary for a full comprehension of the
+preceding chapters. - W. B. O.]</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IX - THE CHRIST-IDEAL</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I have completed a task painful to myself and the reader.&nbsp; Painful
+to myself inasmuch as I am humiliated upon remembering the power which
+arguments, so shallow and so easily to be refuted, once had upon me;
+painful to the reader, as everything must be painful which even appears
+to throw doubt upon the most sublime event that has happened in human
+history.&nbsp; How little does all that has been written above touch
+the real question at issue, yet, what self-discipline and mental training
+is required before we learn to distinguish the essential from the unessential.</p>
+<p>Before, however, we come to close quarters with our opponents concerning
+the views put forward in the preceding chapters, it will be well to
+consider two questions of the gravest and most interesting character,
+questions which will probably have already occurred to the reader with
+such force as to demand immediate answer.&nbsp; They are these.</p>
+<p>Firstly, what will be the consequences of admitting any considerable
+deviation from historical accuracy on the part of the sacred writers?</p>
+<p>Secondly, how can it be conceivable that God should have permitted
+inaccuracy or obscurity in the evidence concerning the Divine commission
+of His Son?</p>
+<p>If God so loved the World that He sent His only begotten Son into
+it to rescue those who believed in Him from destruction, how is it credible
+that He should not have so arranged matters as that all should find
+it easy to believe?&nbsp; If He wanted to save mankind and knew that
+the only way in which mankind could be saved was by believing certain
+facts, how can it be that the records of the facts should have been
+allowed to fall into confusion?</p>
+<p>To both these questions I trust that the following answers may appear
+conclusive.</p>
+<p>I.&nbsp; As regards the consequences which may be supposed to follow
+upon giving up any part of the sacred writings, no matter how seemingly
+unimportant, it is undoubtedly true that to many minds they have appeared
+too dangerous to be even contemplated.&nbsp; Thus through fear of some
+supposed unutterable consequences which would happen to the cause of
+truth if truth were spoken, people profess to believe in the genuineness
+of many passages in the Bible which are universally acknowledged by
+competent judges of every shade of theological opinion to be interpolations
+into the original text.&nbsp; To say nothing of the Old Testament, where
+many whole books are of disputed genuineness or authenticity, there
+are portions of the New which none will seriously defend; - for example,
+the last verses of St. Mark&rsquo;s Gospel, - containing, as they do,
+the sentence of damnation against all who do not believe - the second
+half of the third, and the whole of the fourth verse of the fifth chapter
+of St. John&rsquo;s Gospel, the story of the woman taken in adultery,
+and probably the whole of the last chapter of St. John&rsquo;s Gospel,
+not to mention the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles to Timothy,
+Titus, and to the Ephesians, the Epistles of Peter and James, the famous
+verses as to the three witnesses in the First Epistle of St. John, and
+perhaps also the book of Revelation.&nbsp; These are passages and works
+about which there is either no doubt at all as to their not being genuine,
+or over which there hangs so much uncertainty that no dependence can
+be placed upon them.</p>
+<p>But over and above these, there are not a few parts of each of the
+Gospels which, though of undisputed genuineness, cannot be accepted
+as historical; thus the account of the Resurrection given by St. Matthew,
+and parts of those by Luke and Mark, the cursing of the barren fig-tree,
+and the prophecies of His Resurrection ascribed to our Lord Himself,
+will not stand the tests of criticism which we are bound to apply to
+them if we are to exercise the right of private judgement; instead of
+handing ourselves over to a priesthood as the sole custodians and interpreters
+of the Bible.&nbsp; It has been said by some that the miracle of the
+penny found in the fish&rsquo;s mouth should be included in the above
+category, but it should be remembered that we have only the injunction
+of our Lord to St. Peter that he should catch the fish and the promise
+that he should find the penny in its mouth, but that we have no account
+of the sequel, it is therefore possible that in the event of St. Peter&rsquo;s
+faith having failed him he may have procured the money from some other
+source, and that thus the miracle, though undoubtedly intended, was
+never actually performed.&nbsp; How unnecessary therefore as well as
+presumptuous are the Rationalistic interpretations which have been put
+upon the event by certain German writers!</p>
+<p>Now there are few, if any, who would be so illiberal as to wish for
+the exclusion from the sacred volume of all those books or passages
+which, though neither genuine nor perhaps edifying, have remained in
+the Canon of Scripture for many centuries.&nbsp; Any serious attempt
+to reconstruct the Canon would raise a theological storm which would
+not subside in this century.&nbsp; The work could never be done perfectly,
+and even if it could, it would have to be done at the expense of tearing
+all Christendom in pieces.&nbsp; The passages do little or no harm where
+they are, and have received the sanction of time; let them therefore
+by all means remain in their present position.&nbsp; But the question
+is still forced upon us whether the consequences of openly admitting
+the certain spuriousness of many passages, and the questionable nature
+of others as regards morality, genuineness and authenticity, should
+be feared as being likely to prejudice the main doctrines of Christianity.</p>
+<p>The answer is very plain.&nbsp; He who has vouchsafed to us the Christian
+dispensation may be safely trusted to provide that no harm shall happen,
+either to it or to us, from an honest endeavour to attain the truth
+concerning it.&nbsp; What have we to do with consequences?&nbsp; These
+are in the hands of God.&nbsp; Our duty is to seek out the truth in
+prayer and humility, and when we believe that we have found it, to cleave
+to it through evil and good report;<i> to fail in this is to fail in
+faith</i>; to fail in faith is to be an infidel.&nbsp; Those who suppose
+that it is wiser to gloss over this or that, and who consider it &ldquo;injudicious&rdquo;
+to announce the whole truth in connection with Christianity, should
+have learnt by this time that no admission which can by any possibility
+be required of them can be so perilous to the cause of Christ as the
+appearance of shirking investigation.&nbsp; It has already been insisted
+upon that cowardice is at the root of the infidelity which we see around
+us; the want of faith in the power of truth which exists in certain
+pious but timid hearts has begotten utter unbelief in the minds of all
+superficial investigators into Christian evidences.&nbsp; Such persons
+see that the defenders have something in the background, something which
+they would cling to although they are secretly aware that they cannot
+justly claim it.&nbsp; This is enough for many, and hence more harm
+is done by fear than could ever have been done by boldness.&nbsp; Boldness
+goes out into the fight, and if in the wrong gets slain, childless.&nbsp;
+Fear stays at home and is prolific of a brood of falsehoods.</p>
+<p>It is immoral to regard consequences at all, where truth and justice
+are concerned; the being impregnated with this conviction to the inmost
+core of one&rsquo;s heart is an axiom of common honesty - one of the
+essential features which distinguish a good man from a bad one.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless, to make it plain that the consequences of outspoken truthfulness
+in connection with the scriptural writings would have no harmful effect
+whatever, but would, on the contrary, be of the utmost service as removing
+a stumbling-block from the way of many - let us for the moment suppose
+that very much more would have to be given up than can ever be demanded.</p>
+<p>Suppose we were driven to admit that nothing in the life of our Lord
+can be certainly depended upon beyond the facts that He was begotten
+by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary; that He worked many miracles upon
+earth, and delivered St. Matthew&rsquo;s version of the sermon on the
+mount and most of the parables as we now have them; finally, that He
+was crucified, dead, and buried, that He rose again from the dead upon
+the third day, and ascended unto Heaven.&nbsp; Granting for the sake
+of argument that we could rely on no other facts, what would follow?&nbsp;
+Nothing which could in any way impair the living power of Christianity.</p>
+<p>The essentials of Christianity, <i>i.e</i>., a belief in the Divinity
+of the Saviour and in His Resurrection and Ascension, have stood, and
+will stand, for ever against any attacks that can be made upon them,
+and these are probably the only facts in which belief has ever been
+absolutely necessary for salvation; the answer, therefore, to the question
+what ill consequences would arise from the open avowal of things which
+every student must know to be the fact concerning the biblical writings
+is that there would be none at all.&nbsp; The Christ-ideal which, after
+all, is the soul and spirit of Christianity would remain precisely where
+it was, while its recognition would be far more general, owing to the
+departure on the part of its apologists from certain lines of defence
+which are irreconcilable with the ideal itself.</p>
+<p>II.&nbsp; Returning to the objection how it could be possible that
+God should have left the records of our Lord&rsquo;s history in such
+a vague and fragmentary condition, if it were really of such intense
+importance for the world to understand it and believe in it, we find
+ourselves face to face with a question of far greater importance and
+difficulty.</p>
+<p>The old theory that God desired to test our faith, and that there
+would be no merit in believing if the evidence were such as to commend
+itself at once to our understanding, is one which need only be stated
+to be set aside.&nbsp; It is blasphemy against the goodness of God 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 to violate one of
+the very most precious of God&rsquo;s own gifts.&nbsp; There is an ingenious
+cruelty about such conduct which it is revolting even to imagine.&nbsp;
+Indeed, the whole theory reduces our Heavenly Father to a level of wisdom
+and goodness far below our own; and this is sufficient answer to it.</p>
+<p>But when, turning aside from the above, we try to adopt some other
+and more reasonable view, we naturally set ourselves to consider why
+the Almighty should have required belief in the Divinity of His Son
+from man.&nbsp; What is there in this belief on man&rsquo;s part which
+can be so grateful to God that He should make it a <i>sine qu&acirc;
+non</i> for man&rsquo;s salvation?&nbsp; As regards Himself, how can
+it matter to Him what man should think of Him?&nbsp; Nay, it must be
+for man&rsquo;s own good that the belief is demanded.</p>
+<p>And why?&nbsp; Surely we can see plainly that it is the beauty of
+the Christ-ideal which constitutes the working power of Christianity
+over the hearts and lives of men, leading them to that highest of all
+worships which consists in imitation.&nbsp; Now the sanction which is
+given to this ideal by belief in the Divinity of our Lord, raises it
+at once above all possibility of criticism.&nbsp; If it had not been
+so sanctioned it might have been considered open to improvement; one
+critic would have had this, and another that; comparison would have
+been made with ideals of purely human origin such as the Greek ideal,
+exemplified in the work of Phidias, and in later times with the medi&aelig;val
+Italian ideal, as deducible from the best fifteenth and early sixteenth
+Italian painting and sculpture, the Madonnas of Bellini and Raphael,
+or the St. George of Donatello; or again with the ideal derivable from
+the works of our own Shakespeare, and there are some even now among
+those who deny the Divinity of Christ who will profess that each one
+of these ideals is more universal, more fitted for the spiritual food
+of a man, and indeed actually higher, than that presented by the life
+and death of our Saviour.&nbsp; But once let the Divine origin of this
+last ideal be admitted, and there can be no further uncertainty; hence
+the absolute necessity for belief in Christ&rsquo;s Divinity as closing
+the most important of all questions, Whereunto should a man endeavour
+to liken both himself and his children?</p>
+<p>Seeing then that we have reasonable ground for thinking that belief
+in the Divinity of our Lord is mainly required of us in order to exalt
+our sense of the paramount importance of following and obeying the life
+and commands of Christ, it is natural also to suppose <i>that whatever
+may have happened to the records of that life</i> should have been ordained
+with a view to the enhancing of the preciousness of the ideal.</p>
+<p>Now, the fragmentary character, and the partial obscurity - I might
+have almost written, the incomparable <i>chiaroscuro</i> - of the Evangelistic
+writings have added to the value of our Lord&rsquo;s character as an
+ideal, not only in the case of Christians, but as bringing the Christ-ideal
+within the reach and comprehension of an infinitely greater number of
+minds than it could ever otherwise have appealed to.&nbsp; It is true
+that those who are insensible to spiritual influences, and whose materialistic
+instinct leads them to deny everything which is not as clearly demonstrable
+by external evidence as a fact in chemistry, geography, or mathematics,
+will fail to find the hardness, definition, tightness, and, let me add,
+littleness of outline, in which their souls delight; they will find
+rather the gloom and gleam of Rembrandt, or the golden twilight of the
+Venetians, the losing and the finding, and the infinite liberty of shadow;
+and this they hate, inasmuch as it taxes their imagination, which is
+no less deficient than their power of sympathy; they would have all
+found, as in one of those laboured pictures wherein each form is as
+an inflated bladder and, has its own uncompromising outline remorselessly
+insisted upon.</p>
+<p>Looking to the ideals of purely human creation which have come down
+to us from old times, do we find that the Theseus suffers because we
+are unable to realise to ourselves the precise features of the original?&nbsp;
+Or again do the works of John Bellini suffer because the hand of the
+painter was less dexterous than his intention pure?&nbsp; It is not
+what a man has actually put upon his canvas, but what he makes us feel
+that he felt, which makes the difference between good and bad in painting.&nbsp;
+Bellini&rsquo;s hand was cunning enough to make us feel what he intended,
+and did his utmost to realise; but he has not realised it, and the same
+hallowing effect which has been wrought upon the Theseus by decay (to
+the enlarging of its spiritual influence), has been wrought upon the
+work of Bellini by incapacity - the incapacity of the painter to utter
+perfectly the perfect thought which was within.&nbsp; The early Italian
+paintings have that stamp of individuality upon them which assures us
+that they are not only portraits, but as faithful portraits as the painter
+could make them, more than this we know not, but more is unnecessary.</p>
+<p>Do we not detect an analogy to this in the records of the Evangelists?&nbsp;
+Do we not see the child-like unself-seeking work of earnest and loving
+hearts, whose innocence and simplicity more than atone for their many
+shortcomings, their distorted renderings, and their omissions?&nbsp;
+We can see <i>through</i> these things as through a glass darkly, or
+as one looking upon some ineffable masterpiece of Venetian portraiture
+by the fading light of an autumnal evening, when the beauty of the picture
+is enhanced a hundredfold by the gloom and mystery of dusk.&nbsp; We
+may indeed see less of the actual lineaments themselves, but the echo
+is ever more spiritually tuneful than the sound, and the echo we find
+within us.&nbsp; Our imagination is in closer communion with our longings
+than the hand of any painter.</p>
+<p>Those who relish definition, and definition only, are indeed kept
+away from Christianity by the present condition of the records, but
+even if the life of our Lord had been so definitely rendered as to find
+a place in their system, would it have greatly served their souls?&nbsp;
+And would it not repel hundreds and thousands of others, who find in
+the suggestiveness of the sketch a completeness of satisfaction, which
+no photographic reproduction could have given?&nbsp; The above may be
+difficult to understand, but let me earnestly implore the reader to
+endeavour to master its import.</p>
+<p>People misunderstand the aim and scope of religion.&nbsp; Religion
+is only intended to guide men in those matters upon which science is
+silent.&nbsp; God illumines us by science as with a mechanical draughtsman&rsquo;s
+plan; He illumines us in the Gospels as by the drawing of a great artist.&nbsp;
+We cannot build a &ldquo;Great Eastern&rdquo; from the drawings of the
+artist, but what poetical feeling, what true spiritual emotion was ever
+kindled by a mechanical drawing?&nbsp; How cold and dead were science
+unless supplemented by art and by religion!&nbsp; Not joined with them,
+for the merest touch of these things impairs scientific value - which
+depends essentially upon accuracy, and not upon any feeling for the
+beautiful and lovable.&nbsp; In like manner the merest touch of science
+chills the warmth of sentiment - the spiritual life.&nbsp; The mechanical
+drawing is spoiled by being made artistic, and the work of the artist
+by becoming mechanical.&nbsp; The aim of the one is to teach men how
+to construct, of the other how to feel.</p>
+<p>For the due conservation therefore of both the essential requisites
+of human well-being - science, and religion - it is requisite that they
+be kept asunder and reserved for separate use at different times.&nbsp;
+Religion is the mistress of the arts, and every art which does not serve
+religion truly is doomed to perish as a lying and unprofitable servant.&nbsp;
+Science is external to religion, being a separate dispensation, a distinct
+revelation to mankind, whereby we are put into full present possession
+of more and more of God&rsquo;s modes of dealing with material things,
+according as we become more fitted to receive them through the apprehension
+of those modes which have been already laid open to us.</p>
+<p>We ought not therefore to have expected scientific accuracy from
+the Gospel records - much less should we be required to believe that
+such accuracy exists.&nbsp; Does any great artist ever dream of aiming
+directly at imitation?&nbsp; He aims at representation - not at imitation.&nbsp;
+In order to attain true mastery here, he must spend years in learning
+how to see; and then no less time in learning how <i>not</i> to see.&nbsp;
+Finally, he learns how to translate.&nbsp; Take Turner for example.&nbsp;
+Who conveys so living an impression of the face of nature?&nbsp; Yet
+go up to his canvas and what does one find thereon?&nbsp; Imitation?&nbsp;
+Nay - blotches and daubs of paint; the combination of these daubs, each
+one in itself when taken alone absolutely untrue, forms an impression
+which is quite truthful.&nbsp; No combination of minute truths in a
+picture will give so faithful a representation of nature as a wisely
+arranged tissue of untruths.</p>
+<p>Absolute reproduction is impossible even to the photograph.&nbsp;
+The work of a great artist is far more truthful than any photograph;
+but not even the greatest artist can convey to our minds the whole truth
+of nature; no human hand nor pigments can expound all that lies hidden
+in &ldquo;Nature&rsquo;s infinite book of secrecy&rdquo;; the utmost
+that can be done is to convey an impression, and if the impression is
+to be conveyed truthfully, the means must often be of the most unforeseen
+character.&nbsp; The old Pre-Raphaelites aimed at absolute reproduction.&nbsp;
+They were succeeded by a race of men who saw all that their predecessors
+had seen, but also something higher.&nbsp; The Van Eycks and Memling
+paved the way for painters who found their highest representatives in
+Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt - the mightiest of them all.&nbsp; Giovanni
+Bellini, Carpaccio and Mantegna were succeeded by Titian, Giorgione,
+and Tintoretto; Perugino was succeeded by Raphael.&nbsp; It is everywhere
+the same story; a reverend but child-like worship of the letter, followed
+by a manful apprehension of the spirit, and, alas! in due time by an
+almost total disregard of the letter; then rant and cant and bombast,
+till the value of the letter is reasserted.&nbsp; In theology the early
+men are represented by the Evangelicals, the times of utter decadence
+by infidelity - the middle race of giants is yet to come, and will be
+found in those who, while seeing something far beyond either minute
+accuracy or minute inaccuracy, are yet fully alive both to the letter
+and to the spirit of the Gospels.</p>
+<p>Again, do not the seeming wrongs which the greatest ideals of purely
+human origin have suffered at the hands of time, add to their value
+instead of detracting from it?&nbsp; Is it not probable that if we were
+to see the glorious fragments from the Parthenon, the Theseus and the
+Ilyssus, or even the Venus of Milo, in their original and unmutilated
+condition, we should find that they appealed to us much less forcibly
+than they do at present?&nbsp; All ideals gain by vagueness and lose
+by definition, inasmuch as more scope is left for the imagination of
+the beholder, who can thus fill in the missing detail according to his
+own spiritual needs.&nbsp; This is how it comes that nothing which is
+recent, whether animate or inanimate, can serve as an ideal unless it
+is adorned by more than common mystery and uncertainty.&nbsp; A new
+Cathedral is necessarily very ugly.&nbsp; There is too much found and
+too little lost.&nbsp; Much less could an absolutely perfect Being be
+of the highest value as an ideal, as long as He could be clearly seen,
+for it is impossible that He could be known as perfect by imperfect
+men, and His very perfections must perforce appear as blemishes to any
+but perfect critics.&nbsp; To give therefore an impression of perfection,
+to create an absolutely unsurpassable ideal, it became essential that
+the actual image of the original should become blurred and lost, whereon
+the beholder now supplies from his own imagination that which is <i>to
+him</i> more perfect than the original, though objectively it must be
+infinitely less so.</p>
+<p>It is probably to this cause that the incredulity of the Apostles
+during our Lord&rsquo;s life-time must be assigned.&nbsp; The ideal
+was too near them, and too far above their comprehension; for it must
+be always remembered that the convincing power of miracles in the days
+of the Apostles must have been greatly weakened by the current belief
+in their being events of no very unusual occurrence, and in the existence
+both of good and evil spirits who could take possession of men and compel
+them to do their bidding.&nbsp; A resurrection from the dead or a restoration
+of sight to the blind, must have seemed even less portentous to them,
+than an unusually skilful treatment of disease by a physician is to
+us.&nbsp; We can therefore understand how it happened that the faith
+of the Apostles was so little to be depended upon even up to the Crucifixion,
+inasmuch as the convincing power of miracles had been already, so to
+speak, exhausted, a fact which may perhaps explain the early withdrawal
+of the power to work them; we cannot indeed believe that it could have
+been so far weakened as to make the Apostles disregard the prophecies
+of their Master that He should rise from the dead, if He had ever uttered
+them, and we have already seen reason to think that these prophecies
+are the <i>ex post facto</i> handiwork of time; but the incredulity
+of the disciples, when seen through the light now thrown upon it, loses
+that wholly inexplicable character which it would otherwise bear.</p>
+<p>But to return to the subject of the ideal presented by the life and
+death of our Lord.&nbsp; In the earliest days of the Church there can
+have been no want of the most complete and irrefragable evidence for
+the objective reality of the miracles, and especially of the Resurrection
+and Ascension.&nbsp; The character of Christ would also stand out revealed
+to all, with the most copious fulness of detail.&nbsp; The limits within
+which so sharply defined an ideal could be acceptable were narrow, but
+as the radius of Christian influence increased, so also would the vagueness
+and elasticity of the ideal; and as the elasticity of the ideal, so
+also the range of its influence.</p>
+<p>A beneficent and truly marvellous provision for the greater complexity
+of man&rsquo;s spiritual needs was thus provided by a gradual loss of
+detail and gain of breadth.&nbsp; Enough evidence was given in the first
+instance to secure authoritative sanction for the ideal.&nbsp; During
+the first thirty or forty years after the death of our Lord no one could
+be in want of evidence, and the guilt of unbelief is therefore brought
+prominently forward.&nbsp; Then came the loss of detail which was necessary
+in order to secure the universal acceptability of the ideal; but the
+same causes which blurred the distinctness of the features, involved
+the inevitable blurring of no small portions of the external evidences
+whereby the Divine origin of the ideal was established.&nbsp; The primary
+external evidence became less and less capable of compelling instantaneous
+assent, according as it was less wanted, owing to the greater mass of
+secondary evidence, and to the growth of appreciation of the internal
+evidences, a growth which would be fostered by the growing adaptability
+of the ideal.</p>
+<p>Some thirty or forty years, then, from the death of our Saviour the
+case would stand thus.&nbsp; The Christ-ideal would have become infinitely
+more vague, and hence infinitely more universal: but the causes which
+had thus added to its value would also have destroyed whatever primary
+evidence was superabundant, and the vagueness which had overspread the
+ideal would have extended itself in some measure over the evidences
+which had established its Divine origin.</p>
+<p>But there would of course be limits to the gain caused by decay.&nbsp;
+Time came when there would be danger of too much vagueness in the ideal,
+and too little distinctness in the evidences.&nbsp; It became necessary
+therefore to provide against this danger.</p>
+<p><i>Precisely at that epoch the Gospels made their appearance</i>.&nbsp;
+Not simultaneously, not in concert, and not in perfect harmony with
+each other, yet with the error distributed skilfully among them, as
+in a well-tuned instrument wherein each string is purposely something
+out of tune with every other.&nbsp; Their divergence of aim, and different
+authorship, secured the necessary breadth of effect when the accounts
+were viewed together; their universal recognition afforded the necessary
+permanency, and arrested further decay.&nbsp; If I may be pardoned for
+using another illustration, I would say that as the roundness of the
+stereoscopic image can only be attained by the combination of two distinct
+pictures, neither of them in perfect harmony with the other, so the
+highest possible conception of Christ, cannot otherwise be produced
+than through the discrepancies of the Gospels.</p>
+<p>From the moment of the appearing of the Gospels, and, I should add,
+of the Epistles of St. Paul, the external evidences of Christianity
+became secured from further change; as they were then, so are they now,
+they can neither be added to nor subtracted from; they have lain as
+it were sleeping, till the time should come to awaken them.&nbsp; And
+the time is surely now, for there has arisen a very numerous and increasing
+class of persons, whose habits of mind unfit them for appreciating the
+value of vagueness, but who have each one of them a soul which may be
+lost or saved, and on whose behalf the evidences for the authority whereby
+the Christ-ideal is sanctioned, should be restored to something like
+their former sharpness.&nbsp; Christianity contains provision for all
+needs upon their arising.&nbsp; The work of restoration is easy.&nbsp;
+It demands this much only - the recognition that time has made incrustations
+upon some parts of the evidences, and that 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.&nbsp; Only let this be done outside
+the pages of the Bible itself, and not to the disturbance of their present
+form and arrangement.</p>
+<p>The above explanation of the causes for the obscurity which rests
+upon much of our Lord&rsquo;s life and teaching, may give us ground
+for hoping that some of those who have failed to feel the force of the
+external evidences hitherto, may yet be saved, provided they have fully
+recognised the Christ-ideal and endeavoured to imitate it, although
+irrespectively of any belief in its historical character.</p>
+<p>It is reasonable to suppose that the duty of belief was so imperatively
+insisted upon, in order that the ideal might thus be exalted above controversy,
+and made more sacred in the eyes of men than it could have been if referable
+to a purely human source.&nbsp; May not, then, one who recognises the
+ideal as his <i>summum bonum</i> find grace although he knows not, or
+even cares not, how it should have come to be so?&nbsp; For even a sceptic
+who regarded the whole New Testament as a work of art, a poem, a pure
+fiction from beginning to end, and who revered it for its intrinsic
+beauty only, as though it were a picture or statue, even such a person
+might well find that it engendered in him an ideal of goodness and power
+and love and human sympathy, which could be derived from no other source.&nbsp;
+If, then, our blessed Lord so causes the sun of His righteousness to
+shine upon these men, shall we presume to say that He will not in another
+world restore them to that full communion with Himself which can only
+come from a belief in His Divinity?</p>
+<p>We can understand that it should have been impossible to proclaim
+this in the earliest ages of the Church, inasmuch as no weakening of
+the sanctions of the ideal could be tolerated, but are we bound to extend
+the operation of the many passages condemnatory of unbelief to a time
+so remote as our own, and to circumstances so widely different from
+those under which they were uttered?&nbsp; Do we so extend the command
+not to eat things strangled or blood, or the assertion of St. Paul that
+the unmarried state is higher than the married?&nbsp; May we not therefore
+hope that certain kinds of unbelief have become less hateful in the
+sight of God inasmuch as they are less dangerous to the universal acceptance
+of our Lord as the one model for the imitation of all men?&nbsp; For,
+after all, it is not belief in the facts which constitutes the essence
+of Christianity, but rather the being so impregnated with love at the
+contemplation of Christ that imitation becomes almost instinctive; this
+it is which draws the hearts of men to God the Father, far more than
+any intellectual belief that God sent our Lord into the world, ordaining
+that he should be crucified and rise from the dead.&nbsp; Christianity
+is addressed rather to the infinite spirit of man than to his finite
+intelligence, and the believing in Christ through love is more precious
+in the sight of God than any loving through belief.&nbsp; May we not
+hope, then, that those whose love is great may in the end find acceptance,
+though their belief is small?&nbsp; We dare not answer this positively;
+but we know that there are times of transition in the clearness of the
+Christian evidences as in all else, and the treatment of those whose
+lot is cast in such times will surely not escape the consideration of
+our Heavenly Father.</p>
+<p>But with reference to the many-sidedness of the Christ-ideal, as
+having been part of the design of God, and not attainable otherwise
+than as the creation of destruction - as coming out of the waste of
+time - it is clear that the perception of such a design could only be
+an offspring of modern thought; the conception of such an apparently
+self-frustrating scheme could only arise in minds which were familiar
+with the manner in which it is necessary &ldquo;to hound nature in her
+wanderings&rdquo; before her feints can be eluded, and her prevarications
+brought to book.&nbsp; A deep distrust of the over-obvious is wanted,
+before men can be brought to turn aside from objections which at the
+first blush appear to be very serious, and to take refuge in solutions
+which seem harder than the problems which they are intended to solve.&nbsp;
+What a shock must the discovery of the rotation of the earth have given
+to the moral sense of the age in which it was made.&nbsp; How it contradicted
+all human experience.&nbsp; How it must have outraged common sense.&nbsp;
+How it must have encouraged scepticism even about the most obvious truths
+of morality.&nbsp; No question could henceforth be considered settled;
+everything seemed to require reopening; for if man had once been deceived
+by Nature so entirely, if he had been so utterly led astray and deluded
+by the plausibility of her pretence that the earth was immovably fixed,
+what else, that seemed no less incontrovertible, might not prove no
+less false?</p>
+<p>It is probable that the opposition to Galileo on the part of the
+Roman church was as much due to some such feelings as these, as to theological
+objections; the discovery was felt to unsettle not only the foundations
+of the earth, but those of every branch of human knowledge and polity,
+and hence to be an outrage upon morality itself.&nbsp; A man has no
+right to be very much in advance of other people; he is as a sheep,
+which may lead the mob, but must not stray forward a quarter of a mile
+in front of it; if he does this, he must be rounded up again, no matter
+how right may have been his direction.&nbsp; He has no right to be right,
+unless he can get a certain following to keep him company; the shock
+to morality and the encouragement to lawlessness do more harm than his
+discovery can atone for.&nbsp; Let him hold himself back till he can
+get one or two more to come with him.&nbsp; In like manner, had reflections
+as to the advantage gained by the Christ ideal in consequence of the
+inaccuracies and inconsistencies of the Gospels - reflections which
+must now occur to any one - been put forward a hundred years ago, they
+would have met justly with the severest condemnation.&nbsp; But now,
+even those to whom they may not have occurred already will have little
+difficulty in admitting their force.</p>
+<p>But be this as it may, it is certain that the inability to understand
+how the sense of Christ in the souls of men could be strengthened by
+the loss of much knowledge of His character, and of the facts connected
+with His history, lies at the root of the error even of the Apostle
+St. Paul, who exclaims with his usual fervour, but with less than his
+usual wisdom, &ldquo;Has Christ been divided?&rdquo; (I. Cor. i., 13).&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Yea,&rdquo; we may make answer, &ldquo;He is divided and is yet
+divisible that all may share in Him.&rdquo;&nbsp; St. Paul himself had
+realised that it was the spiritual value of the Christ-ideal which was
+the purifier and refresher of our souls, inasmuch as he elsewhere declares
+that even though he had known Christ Himself after the flesh, he knew
+Him no more; the spiritual Christ, that is to say the spirit of Christ
+as recognisable by the spirits of men, was to him all in all.&nbsp;
+But he lived too near the days of our Lord for a full comprehension
+of the Christian scheme, and it is possible that had he known Christ
+after the flesh, his soul might have been less capable of recognising
+the spiritual essence, rather than more so.&nbsp; Have we here a faint
+glimmering of the motive of the Almighty in not having allowed the Gentile
+Apostle to see Christ after the flesh?&nbsp; We cannot say.&nbsp; But
+we may say this much with certainty, that had he been living now, St.
+Paul would have rejoiced at the many-sidedness of Christ, which he appears
+to have hardly recognised in his own life-time.</p>
+<p>The apparently contradictory portraits of our Lord which we find
+in the Gospels - so long a stumbling-block to unbelievers - are now
+seen to be the very means which enable men of all ranks, and all shades
+of opinion, to accept Christ as their ideal; they are like the sea,
+which from having seemed the most impassable of all objects, turns out
+to be the greatest highway of communication.&nbsp; To the artisan, for
+instance, who may have long been out of work, or who may have suffered
+from the greed and selfishness of his employers, or again, to the farm
+labourer who has been discharged perhaps at the approach of winter,
+the parable of &ldquo;the Labourers in the Vineyard&rdquo; offers itself
+as a divinely sanctioned picture of the dealings of God with man; few
+but those who have mixed much with the less educated classes, can have
+any idea of the priceless comfort which this parable affords daily to
+those whose lot it has been to remain unemployed when their more fortunate
+brethren have been in full work.&nbsp; How many of the poor, again,
+are drawn to Christianity by the parable of Dives and Lazarus.&nbsp;
+How many a humble-minded Christian while reflecting upon the hardness
+of his lot, and tempted to cast a longing eye upon the luxuries which
+are at the command of his richer neighbours, is restrained from seriously
+coveting them, by remembering the awful fate of Dives, and the happy
+future which was in store for Lazarus.&nbsp; &ldquo;Dives,&rdquo; they
+exclaim, &ldquo;in his life-time possessed good things and in like manner
+Lazarus evil things, but now the one is comforted in the bosom of Abraham,
+and the other tormented in a lake of fire.&rdquo;&nbsp; They remember,
+also, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
+than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of Heaven.</p>
+<p>It has been said by some that the poor are thus encouraged to gloat
+over the future misery of the rich, and that many of the sayings ascribed
+to our Lord have an unhealthy influence over their minds.&nbsp; I remember
+to have thought so once myself, but I have seen reason to change my
+mind.&nbsp; Hope is given by these sayings to many whose lives would
+be otherwise very nearly hopeless, and though I fully grant that the
+parable of Dives and Lazarus can only afford comfort to the very poor,
+yet it is most certain that it <i>does</i> afford comfort to this numerous
+class, and helps to keep them contented with many things which they
+would not otherwise endure.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, though the poor are first provided for, the rich
+are not left without their full share of consolation.&nbsp; Joseph of
+Arimath&aelig;a was rich, and modern criticism forbids us to believe
+that the parable of Dives and Lazarus was ever actually spoken by our
+Lord - at any rate not in its present form.&nbsp; Neither are the children
+of the rich forgotten; the son who repents at length of a course of
+extravagant or riotous living is encouraged to return to virtue, and
+to seek reconciliation with his father, by reflecting upon the parable
+of the Prodigal Son, wherein he will find an everlasting model for the
+conduct of all earthly fathers.&nbsp; I will say nothing of the parable
+of the Unjust Steward, for it is one of which the interpretation is
+most uncertain; nevertheless I am sure that it affords comfort to a
+very large number of persons.</p>
+<p>Christ came not to the whole, but to those that were sick; he came
+not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.&nbsp; Even our
+fallen sisters are remembered in the story of the woman taken in adultery,
+which reminds them that they can only be condemned justly by those who
+are without sin.&nbsp; It is to the poor, the weak, the ignorant and
+the infirm that Christianity appeals most strongly, and to whose needs
+it is most especially adapted - but these form by far the greater portion
+of mankind.&nbsp; &ldquo;Blessed are they that mourn!&rdquo;&nbsp; Whose
+sorrow is not assuaged by the mere sound of these words?&nbsp; Who again
+is not reassured by being reminded that our Heavenly Father feeds the
+sparrows and clothes the lilies of the field, and that if we will only
+seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness we need take no heed for
+the morrow what we shall eat, and what we shall drink, nor wherewithal
+we shall be clothed.&nbsp; God will provide these things for us if we
+are true Christians, whether we take heed concerning them or not.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I have been young and now am old,&rdquo; saith the Psalmist,
+&ldquo;yet never saw I the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging their
+bread.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How infinitely nobler and more soul-satisfying is the ideal of the
+Christian saint with wasted limbs, and clothed in the garb of poverty
+- his upturned eyes piercing the very heavens in the ecstasy of a divine
+despair - than any of the fleshly ideals of gross human conception such
+as have already been alluded to.&nbsp; If a man does not feel this instinctively
+for himself, let him test it thus - whom does his heart of hearts tell
+him that his son will be most like God in resembling?&nbsp; The Theseus?&nbsp;
+The Discobolus? or the St. Peters and St. Pauls of Guido and Domenichino?&nbsp;
+Who can hesitate for a moment as to which ideal presents the higher
+development of human nature?&nbsp; And this I take it should suffice;
+the natural instinct which draws us to the Christ-ideal in preference
+to all others as soon as it has been once presented to us, is a sufficient
+guarantee of its being the one most tending to the general well-being
+of the world.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER X - CONCLUSION</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It only remains to return to the seventh and eighth chapters, and
+to pass in review the reasons which will lead us to reject the conclusions
+therein expressed by our opponents.</p>
+<p>These conclusions have no real bearing upon the question at issue.&nbsp;
+Our opponents can make out a strong case, so long as they confine themselves
+to maintaining that exaggeration has to a certain extent impaired the
+historic value of some of the Gospel records of the Resurrection.&nbsp;
+They have made out this much, but have they made out more?&nbsp; They
+have mistaken the question - which is this - &ldquo;Did Jesus Christ
+die and rise from the dead?&rdquo;&nbsp; And in the place of it they
+have raised another, namely, &ldquo;Has there been any inaccuracy in
+the records of the time and manner of His reappearing?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Our error has been that instead of demurring to the relevancy of
+the issue raised by our opponents, we have accepted it.&nbsp; We have
+thus placed ourselves in a false position, and have encouraged our opponents
+by doing so.&nbsp; We have undertaken to fight them upon ground of their
+own choosing.&nbsp; We have been discomfited; but instead of owning
+to our defeat, and beginning the battle anew from a fresh base of operations,
+we have declared that we have not been defeated; hence those lamentable
+and suicidal attempts at disingenuous reasoning which we have seen reason
+to condemn so strongly in the works of Dean Alford and others.&nbsp;
+How deplorable, how unchristian they are!</p>
+<p>The moment that we take a truer ground, the conditions of the strife
+change.&nbsp; The same spirit of candid criticism which led us to reject
+the account of Matthew <i>in toto</i>, will make it easy for us to admit
+that those of Mark, Luke, and John, may not be so accurate as we could
+have wished, and yet to feel that our cause has sustained no injury.&nbsp;
+There are probably very few who would pin their faith to the fact that
+Julius C&aelig;sar fell exactly at the feet of Pompey&rsquo;s statue,
+or that he uttered the words &ldquo;Et tu, Brute.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet there
+are still fewer who would dispute the fact that Julius Caesar was assassinated
+by conspirators of whom Brutus and Cassius were among the leaders.&nbsp;
+As long as we can be sure that our Lord <i>died and rose from the dead</i>,
+we may leave it to our opponents to contend about the details of the
+manner in which each event took place.</p>
+<p>We had thought that these details were known, and so thinking, we
+had a certain consolation in realising to ourselves the precise manner
+in which every incident occurred; yet on reflection we must feel that
+the desire to realise is of the essence of idolatry, which, not content
+with knowing that there is a God, will be satisfied with nothing if
+it has not an effigy of His face and figure.&nbsp; If it has not this
+it falls straight-way to the denial of God&rsquo;s existence, being
+unable to conceive how a Being should exist and yet be incapable of
+representation.&nbsp; We are as those who would fall down and worship
+the idol; our opponents, as those who upon the destruction of the idol
+would say that there was no God.</p>
+<p>We have met sceptics hitherto by adhering to the opinions as to the
+necessity of accuracy which prevailed among our forefathers, and instead
+of saying, &ldquo;You are right - we do <i>not</i> know all that we
+thought we did - nevertheless we know enough - we know the fact, though
+the manner of the fact be hidden,&rdquo; we have preferred to say, &ldquo;You
+are mistaken, our severe outline, our hard-and-fast lines are all perfectly
+accurate, there is not a detail of our theories which we are not prepared
+to stand by.&rdquo;&nbsp; On this comes recrimination and mutual anger,
+and the strife grows hotter and hotter.</p>
+<p>Let us now rather say to the unbeliever, &ldquo;We do not deny the
+truth of much which you assert.&nbsp; We give up Matthew&rsquo;s account
+of the Resurrection; we may perhaps accept parts of those of Mark and
+Luke and John, but it is impossible to say which parts, unless those
+in which all three agree with one another; and this being so, it becomes
+wiser to regard all the accounts as early and precious memorials of
+the certainty felt by the Apostles that Christ died and rose again,
+but as having little historic value with regard to the time and manner
+of the Resurrection.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Once take this ground, and instead of demurring to the truth of many
+of the assertions of our opponents, demur to their relevancy, and the
+unbeliever will find the ground cut away from under his feet independently
+of the fact that the reasonableness of the concession, and the discovery
+that we are not fighting merely to maintain a position, will incline
+him to calmness and to the reconsideration of his own opinions - which
+will in itself be a great gain - he will soon perceive that we are really
+standing upon firm ground, from which no enemy can dislodge us.&nbsp;
+The discovery that we know less of the time and manner of our Lord&rsquo;s
+death and Resurrection than we thought we did, does not invalidate a
+single one of the irresistible arguments whereby we can establish the
+fact of His having died and risen again.&nbsp; The reader will now perhaps
+begin to perceive that the sad division between Christians and unbelievers
+has been one of those common cases in which both are right and both
+wrong; Christians being right in their chief assertion, and wrong in
+standing out for the accuracy of their details, while unbelievers are
+right in denying that our details are accurate, but wrong in drawing
+the inference that because certain facts have been inaccurately recorded,
+therefore certain others never happened at all.&nbsp; Both the errors
+are natural; it is high time, however, that upon both sides they should
+be recognised and avoided.</p>
+<p>But as regards the demolition of the structure raised in the seventh
+and eighth chapters of this book, whereinsoever, that is to say, it
+seems to menace the more vital part of our faith, the ease with which
+this will effected may perhaps lead the reader to think that I have
+not fulfilled the promise made in the outset, and have failed to put
+the best possible case for our opponents.&nbsp; This supposition would
+be unjust; I have done the very best for them that I could.&nbsp; For
+it is plain that they can only take one of two positions, namely, <i>either</i>
+that Christ really died upon the Cross but was never seen alive again
+afterwards at all, and that the stories of His having been so seen are
+purely mythical, <i>or</i>, if they admit that He was seen alive after
+His Crucifixion, they must deny the completeness of the death; in other
+words, if they are to escape miracle, they must either deny the reappearances
+or the death.</p>
+<p>Now in the commencement of this work I dealt with those who deny
+that our Lord rose from the dead, and as the exponent of those who take
+this view I selected Strauss, who is undoubtedly the ablest writer they
+have.&nbsp; Whether I shewed sufficient reason for thinking that his
+theory was unsound must remain for the decision of the reader, but I
+certainly believe that I succeeded in doing so.&nbsp; Perhaps the ablest
+of all the writers who have treated the facts given us in the Gospels
+from the Rationalistic point of view, is the author of an anonymous
+work called <i>The Jesus of History</i> (Williams and Norgate, 1866);
+but this writer (and it is a characteristic feature of the Rationalistic
+school to become vague precisely at this very point) leaves us entirely
+in doubt as to whether he accepts the reappearances of Christ or not,
+and his treatment of the facts connected both with the Crucifixion and
+Resurrection is less definite than that of any other part of the life
+of our Lord.&nbsp; He does not seem to see his own way clearly, and
+appears to consider that it must for ever remain a matter of doubt whether
+the Death of Christ or His reappearance is to be rejected.</p>
+<p>It is evident that it was most desirable to examine <i>both</i> sets
+of arguments, <i>i.e</i>., those against the Resurrection, and those
+against the completeness of the Death; I have therefore mainly drawn
+the opinions of those who deny the Death from the same pamphlet as that
+from which I drew the criticisms on Dean Alford&rsquo;s notes.&nbsp;
+I know of no other English work, indeed, in which whatever can be said
+against us upon this all-important head has been put forward, and was
+therefore compelled to draw from this source, or to invent the arguments
+for our opponents, which would have subjected me to the accusation of
+stating them in such way as should best suit my own purpose.&nbsp; The
+reader, however, must now feel that since there can be no 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 did actually shew Himself subsequently
+alive; and this amounts to a demonstration of the miraculous character
+of the Resurrection.&nbsp; If, then, this one miracle be established,
+I think it unnecessary to defend the others, because I cannot think
+that any will attack them.</p>
+<p>But, as has been seen already, Strauss admits that our Lord died
+upon the Cross, and denies the reality of the reappearances.&nbsp; It
+is not probable that Strauss would have taken refuge in the hallucination
+theory if he had felt that there was the remotest chance of successfully
+denying our Lord&rsquo;s death; for the difficulties of his present
+position are overwhelming, as was fully pointed out in the second, third,
+and fourth chapters of this work.&nbsp; I regret, however, to say that
+I can nowhere find any detailed account of the reasons which have led
+him to feel so positively about our Lord&rsquo;s Death.&nbsp; Such reasons
+must undoubtedly be at his command, or he would indisputably have referred
+the Resurrection to natural causes.&nbsp; Is it possible that he has
+thought it better to keep them to himself, as proving the Death of our
+Lord <i>too</i> convincingly?&nbsp; If so, the course which he has adopted
+is a cruel one.</p>
+<p>We must endeavour, however, to dispense with Strauss&rsquo;s assistance,
+and will proceed to inquire what it is that those who deny the Death
+of our Lord, call upon us to reject.</p>
+<p>I regret to pass so quickly over one great field of evidence which
+in justice to myself I must allude to, though I cannot dwell upon it,
+for in the outset I declared that I would confine myself to the historical
+evidence, and to this only.&nbsp; I refer to spiritual insight; to the
+testimony borne by the souls of living persons, who from personal experience
+<i>know</i> that their Redeemer liveth, and that though worms destroy
+this body, yet in their flesh shall they see God.&nbsp; How many thousands
+are there in the world at this moment, who have known Christ as a personal
+friend and comforter, and who can testify to the work which He has wrought
+upon them!&nbsp; I cannot pass over such testimony as this in silence.&nbsp;
+I must assign it a foremost place in reviewing the reasons for holding
+that our hope is not in vain, but I may not dwell upon it, inasmuch
+as it would carry no weight with those for whom this work is designed,
+I mean with those to whom this precious experience of Christ has not
+yet been vouchsafed.&nbsp; Such persons require the external evidence
+to be made clear to demonstration before they will trust themselves
+to listen to the voices of hope or fear, and it is of no use appealing
+to the knowledge and hopes of others without making it clear upon what
+that knowledge and those hopes are grounded.&nbsp; Nevertheless, I may
+be allowed to point out that those who deny the Death and Resurrection
+of our Lord, call upon us to believe that an immense multitude of most
+truthful and estimable people are no less deceivers of their own selves
+and others, than Mohammedans, Jews and Buddhists are.&nbsp; How many
+do we not each of us know to whom Christ is the spiritual meat and drink
+of their whole lives.&nbsp; Yet our opponents call upon us to ignore
+all this, and to refer the emotions and elation of soul, which the love
+of Christ kindles in his true followers, to an inheritance of delusion
+and blunder.&nbsp; Truly a melancholy outlook.</p>
+<p>Again, let a man travel over England, North, South, East, and West,
+and in his whole journey he shall hardly find a single spot from which
+he cannot see one or several churches.&nbsp; There is hardly a hamlet
+which is not also a centre for the celebration of our Redemption by
+the Death and Resurrection of Christ.&nbsp; Not one of these churches,
+say the Rationalists, not one of the clergymen who minister therein,
+not one single village school in all England, but must be regarded as
+a fountain of error, if not of deliberate falsehood.&nbsp; Look where
+they may, they cannot escape from the signs of a vital belief in the
+Resurrection.&nbsp; All these signs, they will tell us, are signs of
+superstition only; it is superstition which they celebrate and would
+confirm; they are founded upon fanaticism, or at the best upon sheer
+delusion; they poison the fountain heads of moral and intellectual well-being,
+by teaching men to set human experience on the one side, and to refer
+their conduct to the supposed will of a personal anthropomorphic God
+who was actually once a baby - who was born of one of his own creatures
+- and who is now locally and corporeally in Heaven, &ldquo;of reasonable
+soul and <i>human flesh</i> subsisting.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thus do our opponents taunt us, but when we think not only of the
+present day, but of the nearly two thousand years during which Christianity
+has flourished, not in England only, but over all Europe, that is to
+say, over the quarter of the globe which is most civilised, and whose
+civilisation is in itself proof both of capacity to judge and of having
+judged rightly - what an awful admission do unbelievers require us to
+make, when they bid us think that all these ages and countries have
+gone astray to the imagining of a vain thing.&nbsp; All the self-sacrifice
+of the holiest men for sixty generations, all the wars that have been
+waged for the sake of Christ and His truth, all the money spent upon
+churches, clergy, monasteries and religious education, all the blood
+of martyrs, all the celibacy of priests and nuns, all the self-denying
+lives of those who are now ministers of the Gospel - according to the
+Rationalist, no part of all this devotion to the cause of Christ has
+had any justifiable base on actual fact.&nbsp; The bare contemplation
+of such a stupendous misapplication of self-sacrifice and energy, should
+be enough to prevent any one from ever smiling again to whose mind such
+a deplorable view was present: we wonder that our opponents do not shrink
+back appalled from the contemplation of a picture which they must regard
+as containing so much of sin, impudence and folly; yet it is to the
+contemplation of such a picture, and to a belief in its truthfulness
+to nature, that they would invite us; they cannot even see a clergyman
+without saying to themselves, &ldquo;There goes one whose trade is the
+promotion of error; whose whole life is devoted to the upholding of
+the untrue.&rdquo;&nbsp; To them the sight of people flocking to a church
+must be as painful as it would be to us to see a congregation of Jews
+or Mohammedans: they ought to have no happiness in life so long as they
+believe that the vast majority of their fellow-countrymen are so lamentably
+deluded; yet they would call on us to join them, and half despise us
+upon our refusing to do so.</p>
+<p>But upon this view also I may not dwell; it would have been easy
+and I think not unprofitable, had my aim been different, to have drawn
+an ampler picture of the heart-rending amount of falsehood, stupidity,
+cruelty and folly which must be referable to a belief in Christianity,
+if, as our opponents maintain, there is no solid ground for believing
+it; but my present purpose is to prove that there <i>is</i> such ground,
+and having said enough to shew that I do not ignore the fields of evidence
+which lie beyond the purpose of my work, I will return to the Crucifixion
+and Resurrection.</p>
+<p>What, then, let me ask of freethinkers, <i>became of Christ eventually</i>?&nbsp;
+Several answers may be made to this question, <i>but there is none but
+the one given in Scripture which will set it at rest</i>.&nbsp; Thus
+it has been said that Christ survived the Cross, lingered for a few
+weeks, and in the end succumbed to the injuries which He had sustained.&nbsp;
+On this there arises the question, did the Apostles know of His death?&nbsp;
+And if so, were they likely to mistake the reappearance of a dying man,
+so shattered and weak as He must have been, for the glory of an immortal
+being?&nbsp; We know that people can idealise a great deal, but they
+cannot idealise as much as this.&nbsp; The Apostles cannot have known
+of any death of Christ except His Death upon the Cross, and it is not
+credible that if He had died from the effects of the Crucifixion the
+Apostles should not have been aware of it.&nbsp; No one will pretend
+that they were, so it is needless to discuss this theory further.</p>
+<p>It has also been said that our Lord, having seen the effect of His
+reappearance on the Apostles, considered that further converse with
+them would only weaken it; and that He may have therefore thought it
+wiser to withdraw Himself finally from them, and to leave His teaching
+in their hands, with the certainty that it would never henceforth be
+lost sight of; but this view is inconsistent with the character which
+even our adversaries themselves assign to our Saviour.&nbsp; The idea
+is one which might occur to a theorist sitting in his study, and enlightened
+by a knowledge of events, but it would not suggest itself to a leader
+in the heat of action.</p>
+<p>Another supposition has been that our Lord on recovering consciousness
+after He had been left alone in the tomb, or perhaps even before Joseph
+had gone, may have been unable to realise to Himself the nature of the
+events that had befallen Him, and may have actually believed that He
+had been dead, and been miraculously restored to life; that He may yet
+have felt a natural fear of again falling into the hands of His enemies;
+and partly from this cause, and partly through awe at the miracle that
+He supposed had been worked upon Him, have only shewn Himself to His
+disciples hurriedly, in secret, and on rare occasions, spending the
+greater part of His time in some one or other of the secret places of
+resort, in which He had been wont to live apart from the Apostles before
+the Crucifixion.</p>
+<p>I have known it urged that our Lord never said or even thought that
+He had risen from the dead, but shewed Himself alive secretly and fearfully,
+and bade His disciples follow Him to Galilee, where He might, and perhaps
+did, appear more openly, though still rarely and with caution; that
+the rarity and mystery of the reappearances would add to the impression
+of a miraculous resurrection which had instantly presented itself to
+the minds of the Apostles on seeing Christ alive; that this impression
+alone would prevent them from heeding facts which must have been obvious
+to any whose minds were not already unhinged by the knowledge that Christ
+was alive, and by the belief that He had been dead; and that they would
+be blinded by awe, 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
+for not having been dictated by policy; finally that the report of Christ&rsquo;s
+having been seen alive reached the Chief Priests (or perhaps Joseph
+of Arimath&aelig;a), and that they determined at all hazards to nip
+the coming mischief in the bud; that they therefore watched their opportunity,
+and got rid of so probable a cause of disturbance by the knife of the
+assassin, or induced Him to depart by threats, which He did not venture
+to resist.</p>
+<p>But if our Lord was secretly assassinated how could it have happened
+that the body should never have been found, and produced, when the Apostles
+began declaring publicly that Christ had risen?&nbsp; What could be
+easier than to bring it forward and settle the whole matter?&nbsp; It
+cannot be doubted that the body must have been looked for when the Apostles
+began publishing their story; we saw reason for believing this when
+we considered the account of the Resurrection given by St. Matthew.&nbsp;
+<i>Now those that hide can find</i>; and if the enemies of Christ had
+got rid of Him by foul play, they would know very well where to lay
+their hands upon that which would be the death blow to Christianity.&nbsp;
+If then Christ did not go away of His own accord, as feeling that His
+teaching would be better preserved by His absence, and if He did not
+die from wounds received upon the Cross, and if He was not assassinated
+secretly, what remains as the most reasonable view to be taken concerning
+His disappearance?&nbsp; Surely the one that <i>was</i> taken; the view
+which commended itself to those who were best able to judge - namely,
+<i>that He had ascended bodily into Heaven and was sitting at the right
+hand of God the Father.</i></p>
+<p>Where else could He be?</p>
+<p>For that He disappeared, and disappeared finally, within six weeks
+of the Crucifixion must be considered certain; there is no one who will
+be bold enough even to hazard a conjecture that the appearance of Christ
+alluded to by St. Paul, as having been vouchsafed to him some years
+later, was that of the living Christ, who had chosen upon this one occasion
+to depart from the seclusion and secrecy which he had maintained hitherto.&nbsp;
+But if Christ was still living on earth, how was it possible that no
+human being should have the smallest clue to His whereabouts?&nbsp;
+If He was dead how is it that no one should have produced the body?&nbsp;
+Such a mysterious and total disappearance, even in the face of great
+jeopardy, has never yet been known, and can only be satisfactorily explained
+by adopting the belief which has prevailed for nearly the last two thousand
+years, and which will prevail more and more triumphantly so long as
+the world shall last - the belief that Christ was restored to the glory
+which He had shared with the Father, as soon as ever He had given sufficient
+proofs of His being alive to ensure the devotion of His followers.</p>
+<p>Before we can reject the supernatural solution of a mystery otherwise
+inexplicable, we should have some natural explanation which will meet
+the requirements of the case.&nbsp; A confession of ignorance is not
+enough here.&nbsp; <i>We</i> are <i>not</i> ignorant; we <i>know</i>
+that Christ died, inasmuch as we have the testimony of all the four
+Evangelists to this effect, the testimony of the Apostle Paul, and through
+him that of all the other Apostles; we have also the certainty that
+the centurion in charge of the soldiers at the Crucifixion would not
+have committed so grave a breach of discipline as the delivery of the
+body to Joseph and Nicodemus, unless he had felt quite sure that life
+was extinct; and finally we have the testimony of the Church for sixty
+generations, and that of myriads now living, whose experience assures
+them that Christ died and rose from the dead; in addition to this tremendous
+body of evidence we have also the story of the spear wound recorded
+in a Gospel which even our opponents believe to be from a Johannean
+source in its later chapters; and though, as has been already stated,
+this wound cannot be insisted upon as in itself sufficient to prove
+our Lord&rsquo;s death, yet it must assuredly be allowed its due weight
+in reviewing the evidence.&nbsp; The unbeliever cannot surely have considered
+how shallow are all the arguments which he can produce, in comparison
+with those that make against him.&nbsp; He cannot say that I have not
+done him justice, and I feel confident that when he reconsiders the
+matter in that spirit of humility without which he cannot hope to be
+guided to a true conclusion, he will feel sure that Strauss is right
+in believing that the death of our Lord cannot be seriously called in
+question.</p>
+<p>But this being so, the reappearances, which we have seen to be established
+by the collapse of the hallucination theory, must be referred to supernatural
+or miraculous agency; that is to say, our Lord died and rose again on
+the third day, according to the Scriptures.&nbsp; Whereon His disappearance
+some six weeks later must be looked upon very differently from that
+of any ordinary person.&nbsp; If our Lord could have been shewn to have
+been a mere man, who had escaped death only by a hair&rsquo;s breadth,
+but still escaped it, perhaps some one of the theories for His disappearance,
+or some combination of 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 and rose from the dead, there is no theory which will
+stand, except the one which it has been reserved for our own lawless
+and self-seeking times to question.&nbsp; Through the light of the Resurrection
+the Ascension is clearly seen.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>My task is now completed.&nbsp; In an age when Rationalism has become
+recognised as the only basis upon which faith can rest securely, I have
+established the Christian faith upon a Rationalistic basis.</p>
+<p>I have made no concession to Rationalism which did not place all
+the vital parts of Christianity in a far stronger position than they
+were in before, yet I have. conceded everything which a sincere Rationalist
+is likely to desire.&nbsp; I have cleared the ground for reconciliation.&nbsp;
+It only remains for the two contending parties to come forward and occupy
+it in peace jointly.&nbsp; May it be mine to see the day when all traces
+of disagreement have been long obliterated!</p>
+<p>To the unbeliever I can say, &ldquo;Never yet in any work upon the
+Christian side have your difficulties been so fully and fairly stated;
+never yet has orthodox disingenuousness been so unsparingly exposed.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+To the Christian I can say with no less justice, &ldquo;Never yet have
+the true reasons for the discrepancies in the Gospels been so put forward
+as to enable us to look these discrepancies boldly in the face, and
+to thank God for having graciously allowed them to exist.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I do not say this in any spirit of self-glorification.&nbsp; We are
+children of the hour, and creatures of our surroundings.&nbsp; As it
+has been given unto us, so will it be required at our hands, and we
+are at best unprofitable servants.&nbsp; Nevertheless I cannot refrain
+from expressing my gratitude at having been born in an age when Christianity
+and Rationalism are not only ceasing to appear antagonistic to one another,
+<i>but have each become essential to the very existence of the other</i>.&nbsp;
+May the reader feel this no less strongly than I do, and may he also
+feel that I have supplied the missing element which could alone cause
+them to combine.&nbsp; If he asks me what element I allude to, I answer
+Candour.&nbsp; This is the pilot that has taken us safely into the Fair
+Haven of universal brotherhood in Christ.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>APPENDIX</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I - THE BURIAL</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(John xix. 38-42)</p>
+<p>And after this Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a, being a disciple of Jesus,
+but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take
+away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave.&nbsp; He came therefore,
+and took the body of Jesus.&nbsp; And there came also Nicodemus, which
+at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh
+and aloes, about an hundred pound weight.&nbsp; Then took they the body
+of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner
+of the Jews is to bury.&nbsp; Now in the place where he was crucified
+there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never
+man yet laid.&nbsp; There laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jews&rsquo;
+preparation day; for the sepulchre was nigh at hand.</p>
+<p>(Luke xxiii. 50-56)</p>
+<p>And, behold, there was a man named Joseph, a counsellor; and he was
+a good man, and a just: (the same had not consented to the counsel and
+deed of them;) he was of Arimath&aelig;a, a city of the Jews: who also
+himself waited for the kingdom of God.&nbsp; This man went unto Pilate,
+and begged the body of Jesus.&nbsp; And he took it down, and wrapped
+it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein
+never man before was laid.&nbsp; And that day was the preparation, and
+the sabbath drew on.&nbsp; And the women also, which came with him from
+Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body
+was laid.&nbsp; And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments;
+and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment.</p>
+<p>(Mark xv. 42-47)</p>
+<p>And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation, that
+is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimath&aelig;a, an honourable
+counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went
+in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.&nbsp; And Pilate
+marvelled if he were already dead: and calling unto him the centurion,
+he asked him whether he had been any while dead.&nbsp; And when he knew
+it of the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph.&nbsp; And he bought
+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 rolled a stone
+unto the door of the sepulchre.&nbsp; And Mary Magdalene and Mary the
+mother of Joseph beheld where he was laid.</p>
+<p>(Matthew xxvii. 57-61)</p>
+<p>When the even was come, there came a rich man of Arimath&aelig;a,
+named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus&rsquo; disciple.&nbsp; He went
+to Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus.&nbsp; Then Pilate commanded
+the body to be delivered.&nbsp; And when Joseph had taken the body,
+he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth.&nbsp; And laid it in his own new
+tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone
+to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.&nbsp; And there was Mary
+Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>II - THE GUARD SET UPON THE TOMB <i>(Peculiar to Matthew)</i></p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(Matthew xxvii. 62-66)</p>
+<p>Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation, the chief
+priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate.&nbsp; Saying, Sir,
+we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three
+days I will rise again.&nbsp; Command therefore that the sepulchre be
+made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and
+steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead:
+so the last error shall be worse than the first.&nbsp; Pilate said unto
+them, Ye have a watch: go your way, make it as sure as ye can.&nbsp;
+So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting
+a watch.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>III - VISIT OF MARY MAGDALENE, AND OTHERS, TO THE TOMB</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(John xx. 1-13)</p>
+<p>The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was
+yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the
+sepulchre.&nbsp; Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to
+the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have
+taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they
+have laid him.&nbsp; Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple,
+and came to the sepulchre.&nbsp; So they ran both together: and the
+other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.&nbsp;
+And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet
+went he not in.&nbsp; Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went
+into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie.&nbsp; And the napkin,
+that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped
+together in a place by itself.&nbsp; Then went in also that other disciple,
+which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.&nbsp; For
+as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the
+dead.&nbsp; Then the disciples went away again unto their own home.&nbsp;
+But Mary stood without 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, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus
+had lain.&nbsp; And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou?&nbsp;
+She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know
+not where they have laid him.</p>
+<p>(Luke xxiv. 1-12)</p>
+<p>Now upon the first day of the week very early in the morning, they
+came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared,
+and certain others with them.&nbsp; And they found the stone rolled
+away from the sepulchre.&nbsp; And they entered in, and found not the
+body of the Lord Jesus.&nbsp; And it came to pass, as they were much
+perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:
+and as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they
+said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?&nbsp; He is not
+here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in
+Galilee, saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of
+sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.&nbsp; And
+they remembered his words, and returned from the sepulchre, and told
+all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.&nbsp; It was
+Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other
+women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.&nbsp;
+And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them
+not.&nbsp; Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping
+down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed,
+wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.</p>
+<p>(Mark xvi. 1-8)</p>
+<p>And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother
+of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come
+and anoint him.&nbsp; And very early in the morning the first day of
+the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.&nbsp;
+And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from
+the door of the sepulchre?&nbsp; And when they looked, they saw that
+the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.&nbsp; And entering
+into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side,
+clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.&nbsp; And
+he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which
+was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they
+laid him.&nbsp; But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he
+goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto
+you.&nbsp; And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for
+they trembled and were amazed: neither said they anything to any man;
+for they were afraid.</p>
+<p>(Matthew xxviii. 1-8)</p>
+<p>In the end of the sabbath, as it began to draw toward the first day
+of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.&nbsp;
+And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord
+descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door,
+and sat upon it.&nbsp; His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment
+white as snow, and for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became
+as dead men.&nbsp; And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear
+not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.&nbsp; He
+is not here: for he is risen, as he said.&nbsp; Come, see the place
+where the Lord lay.&nbsp; And go quickly, 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.&nbsp; And they departed
+quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring
+his disciples word.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>IV - APPEARANCE OF CHRIST TO MARY MAGDALENE AND OTHERS</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(John xx. 14-18)</p>
+<p>And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus
+standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.&nbsp; Jesus saith unto her,
+Woman, why weepest thou?&nbsp; Whom seekest thou?&nbsp; She, supposing
+him to be 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.&nbsp;
+Jesus saith unto her, Mary.&nbsp; She turned herself, and saith unto
+him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.&nbsp; Jesus saith unto her, Touch
+me not; 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 to
+my God, and your God.&nbsp; Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples
+that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto
+her.</p>
+<p>(Mark xvi. 9-11)</p>
+<p>Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared
+first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.&nbsp;
+And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and
+wept.&nbsp; And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had
+been seen of her, believed not.</p>
+<p>(Matthew xxvii. 9-10)</p>
+<p>And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying,
+All hail.&nbsp; And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped
+him.&nbsp; Then said Jesus unto them, Be not afraid: go tell my brethren
+that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>V - THE BRIBING OF THE GUARD <i>(Peculiar to Matthew)</i></p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(Matthew xxviii. 11-15)</p>
+<p>Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into the
+city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.&nbsp;
+And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel,
+they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, Say ye, His disciples
+came by night, and stole him away while we slept.&nbsp; And if this
+come to the governor&rsquo;s ears, we will persuade him, and secure
+you.&nbsp; So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and
+this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>VI - APPEARANCE TO CLEOPAS (AND JAMES?)</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(Luke xxiv. 13-35)</p>
+<p>And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus,
+which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.&nbsp; And they talked
+together of all these things which had happened.&nbsp; And it came to
+pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself
+drew near, and went with them.&nbsp; But their eyes were holden that
+they should not know him.&nbsp; And he said unto them, What manner of
+communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and
+are sad?&nbsp; And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering
+said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known
+the things which are come to pass there in these days?&nbsp; And he
+said unto them, What things?&nbsp; And they said unto him, Concerning
+Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before
+God and all the people: And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered
+him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him.&nbsp; But we trusted
+that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all
+this, to-day is the third day since these things were done.&nbsp; Yea,
+and certain women also of our company made us astonished, which were
+early at the sepulchre; and when they found not his body, they came,
+saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said that
+he was alive, and certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre,
+and found it even so as the women had said: but him they saw not.&nbsp;
+Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that
+the prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ to have suffered these things,
+and to enter into his glory?&nbsp; And beginning at Moses and all the
+prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning
+himself.&nbsp; And they drew nigh unto the village, whither they went:
+and he made as though he would have gone further.&nbsp; But they constrained
+him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is
+far spent.&nbsp; And he went in to tarry with them.&nbsp; And it came
+to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it,
+and brake, and gave to them.&nbsp; And their eyes were opened, and they
+knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.&nbsp; And they said one
+to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us
+by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?&nbsp; And they
+rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven
+gathered together, and them that were with them, saying, The Lord is
+risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon.&nbsp; And they told what things
+were done in the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread.</p>
+<p>(Mark xvi. 12-13)</p>
+<p>After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they
+walked, and went into the country.&nbsp; And they went and told it unto
+the residue: neither believed they them.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>VII - APPEARANCE TO THE APOSTLES (<i>Twice in John</i>)</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(John xx. 19-29)</p>
+<p>Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when
+the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the
+Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace
+be unto you.&nbsp; And when he had so said, he shewed them his hands
+and his side.&nbsp; Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the
+Lord.&nbsp; Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my
+Father hath sent me, even, so send I you.&nbsp; And when he had said
+this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy
+Ghost.&nbsp; Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them;
+and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.&nbsp; But Thomas,
+one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.&nbsp;
+The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord.&nbsp;
+But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of
+the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust
+my hand into his side, I will not believe.&nbsp; And after eight days
+again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus,
+the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto
+you.&nbsp; Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold
+my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and
+be not faithless, but believing.&nbsp; And Thomas answered and said
+unto him, My Lord and my God.&nbsp; Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because
+thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not
+seen, and yet have believed.</p>
+<p>[I have not quoted the twenty-first chapter of St. John&rsquo;s Gospel
+on account of its exceedingly doubtful genuineness. - W. B. O.]</p>
+<p>(Luke xxiv. 36-49)</p>
+<p>And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them,
+and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.&nbsp; But they were terrified
+and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.&nbsp; And
+he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in
+your hearts?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands
+and his feet.&nbsp; And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered,
+he said unto them, Have ye here any meat?&nbsp; And they gave him a
+piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb.&nbsp; And he took it,
+and did eat before them.&nbsp; 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, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the
+prophets, and in the psalms concerning me.&nbsp; Then opened he their
+understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.&nbsp; And
+said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer,
+and to rise from the dead the third day: And that repentance and remission
+of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning
+at Jerusalem.&nbsp; And ye are witnesses of these things.&nbsp; And,
+behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the
+city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high.</p>
+<p>(Mark xvi. 14-18)</p>
+<p>Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided
+them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed
+not them which had seen him after he was risen.&nbsp; And he saith unto
+them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.&nbsp;
+He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth
+not shall be damned.&nbsp; And these signs shall follow them that believe;
+In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;
+They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it
+shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall
+recover.</p>
+<p>(Matthew xviii. 16-20)</p>
+<p>Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain
+where Jesus had appointed them.&nbsp; And when they saw him, they worshipped
+him: but some doubted.&nbsp; And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying,
+All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth, go ye therefore,
+and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and
+of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things
+whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even
+unto the end of the world.&nbsp; Amen.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>VIII - THE ASCENSION</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(Luke xxiv. 50-53)</p>
+<p>And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands,
+and blessed them.&nbsp; And it came to pass, while he blessed them,
+he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.&nbsp; And they
+worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.&nbsp; And
+were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.&nbsp; Amen.</p>
+<p>(Mark xvi. 19-20)</p>
+<p>So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into
+heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.&nbsp; And they went forth,
+and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming
+the word with signs following.&nbsp; Amen.</p>
+<p>(Acts i. 1-12)</p>
+<p>The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus
+began 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 the
+apostles whom he had chosen.&nbsp; To whom also he shewed himself alive
+after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty
+days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God: and,
+being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should
+not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which,
+saith he, ye have heard of me.&nbsp; For John truly baptized with water,
+but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.&nbsp;
+When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord,
+wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?&nbsp; And
+he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons,
+which the Father hath put in his own power.&nbsp; But ye shall receive
+power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses
+unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Jud&aelig;a, and in Samaria, and
+unto the uttermost part of the earth.&nbsp; And when he had spoken these
+things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him
+out of their sight, And while they looked stedfastly toward heaven as
+he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; Which also
+said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?&nbsp; This
+same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in
+like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.&nbsp; Then returned
+they unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem
+a sabbath day&rsquo;s journey.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>IX - ST. PAUL&rsquo;S ACCOUNT OF OUR LORD&rsquo;S REAPPEARANCES</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>(I. Corinthians xv. 3-8)</p>
+<p>For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received,
+how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that
+he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the
+scriptures: and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve; after
+that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the
+greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.&nbsp;
+After that, he was seen of James: then of all the apostles.&nbsp; And
+last of all he was seen of me also as of one born out of due time.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Footnotes:</p>
+<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a>&nbsp; It should
+be borne in mind that this passage was written five or six years ago,
+before the commencement of the Franco-Prussian war, What would my brother
+have said had he been able to comprehend the events of 1870 and 1871?
+- W. B. O.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2">{2}</a>&nbsp; This pamphlet
+was by Butler himself.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3">{3}</a>&nbsp; See Biog.
+Britann.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote4"></a><a href="#citation4">{4}</a>&nbsp; Middleton&rsquo;s
+Reflections answered by Benson.&nbsp; Hist. Christ, vol. iii., p. 50.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote5"></a><a href="#citation5">{5}</a>&nbsp; Lardner,
+part I., vol. ii., p. 135 et seq.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote6"></a><a href="#citation6">{6}</a>&nbsp; Ibid.,
+part I., vol. ii., p. 742.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE FAIR HAVEN ***</p>
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