gospels,
and in all probability within five-and-twenty years of the date of
the Crucifixion. And what do we find alleged by it as the state of
things at its date? That the belief in the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ was the subject of universal Christian teaching, and was
accepted by all the Christian communities. Its evidence to that fact
is undeniable; because there was in the early Christian Church a very
formidable and large body of bitter antagonists of Paul's, who would
have been only too glad to have convicted him, if they could, of any
misrepresentation of the usual notions, or divergence from the usual
type of teaching. So we may take it as undeniable that the
representation of this chapter is historically true; and that within
five-and-twenty years of the death of Jesus Christ every Christian
community and every Christian teacher believed in and proclaimed the
fact of the Resurrection.

But if that be so, we necessarily are carried a great deal nearer the
Cross than five-and-twenty years; and, in fact, there is not, between
the moment when Paul penned these words and the day of Pentecost, a
single chink in the history where you can insert such a tremendous
innovation as the full-fledged belief in a resurrection coming in as
something new.

I do not need to dwell at all upon this other thought, that, unless
the belief that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead originated at
the time of His death, there would never have been a Church at all.
Why was it that they did not tumble to pieces? Take the nave out of
the wheel and what becomes of the spokes? A dead Christ could never
have been the basis of a living Church. If He had not risen from the
dead, the story of His disciples would have been the same as that
which Gamaliel told the Sanhedrim was the story of all former
pseudo-Messiahs such as that man Theudas. 'He was slain, and as many
as followed him were dispersed and came to naught.' Of course! The
existence of the Church demands, as a pre-requisite, the initial
belief in the Resurrection. I think, then, that the
contemporaneousness of the evidence is sufficiently established.

What about its good faith? I suppose that nobody, nowadays, doubts
the veracity of these witnesses. Anybody that knows an honest man
when he sees him, anybody that has the least ear for the tone of
sincerity and the accent of conviction, must say that they may have
been fanatics, they may have been mistaken, but one thing is clear as