sunlight, they were not false witnesses for God.

What, then, about their competency? Their simplicity, their
ignorance, their slowness to believe, their stupor of surprise when
the fact first dawned upon them, which they tell not with any idea of
manufacturing evidence in their own favour, but simply as a piece of
history, all tend to make us certain that there was no play of a
morbid imagination, no hysterical turning of a wish into a fact, on
the part of these men. The sort of things which they say that they
saw and experienced are such as to make any such supposition
altogether absurd. There are long conversations, appearances
appealing to more than one sense, appearances followed by
withdrawals, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening,
sometimes at a distance, as on the mountain, sometimes close by, as
in the chamber, to single souls and to multitudes. Fancy five hundred
people all at once smitten with the same mistake, imagining that they
saw what they did not see! Miracles may be difficult to believe, they
are not half so difficult to believe as absurdities. And this modern
explanation of the faith in the Resurrection I venture respectfully
to designate as absurd.

But there is one other point to which I would like to turn for a
moment; and that is that little clause in my text that 'He was
buried.' Why does Paul introduce that amongst his facts? Possibly in
order to affirm the reality of Christ's death; but I think for
another reason. If it be true that Jesus Christ was laid in that
sepulchre, a stone's throw outside the city gate, do you not see what
a difficulty that fact puts in the way of disbelief or denial of His
Resurrection? If the grave--and it was not a grave, remember, like
ours, but a cave, with a stone at the door of it, that anybody could
roll away for entrance--if the grave was there, why, in the name of
common-sense, did not the rulers put an end to the pestilent heresy
by saying, 'Let us go and see if the body is there'?

Modern deniers of the Resurrection may fairly be asked to front this
thought--If Jesus Christ's body was in the sepulchre, how was it
possible for belief in the Resurrection to have been originated, or
maintained? If His body was not in the grave, what had become of it?
If His friends stole it away then they were deceivers of the worst
type in preaching a resurrection; and we have already seen that that
hypothesis is ridiculous. If His enemies took it away, for