ion of our Lord, in the words here, which regard
that one solitary Resurrection as the early ripe and early reaped
sheaf, the pledge and the prophecy of the whole ingathering.

Now there seem to me, in these words, to ring out mainly two
things--an expression of absolute certainty in the fact, and an
expression of unbounded triumph in the certainty of the fact.

And if we look at these two things, I think we shall get the main
thoughts that the Apostle would impress upon our minds.

I. The certainty of Christ's Resurrection.

'Now _is_ Christ risen,' says he, defying, as it were, doubt and
negation, and basing himself upon the firm assurance which he
possesses of that historical fact. 'Ah!' you say, 'seeing is
believing; and he had evidence such as we can never have.' Well! let
us see. Is it possible for us, nineteen centuries nearly after that
day, to catch some echo of this assured confidence, and in the face
of modern doubts and disbeliefs, to reiterate with as unfaltering
assurance as that with which they came from his glowing lips, the
great words of my text? Can we, logically and reasonably, as men who
are guided by evidence and not by feeling, stand up before the world,
and take for ours the ancient confession: 'I believe in Jesus Christ,
His only Son, our Lord, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was
crucified, dead, and buried. The third day He rose again from the
dead'? I think we can.

The way to prove a fact is by the evidence of witnesses. You cannot
argue that it would be very convenient, if such and such a thing
should be true; that great moral effects would follow if we believed
it was true, and so on. The way to do is to put people who have seen
it into the witness-box, and to make sure that their evidence is
worth accepting.

And at the beginning of my remarks I wish to protest, in a sentence,
against confusing the issues about this question of the Resurrection
of Jesus Christ in that fashion which is popular nowadays, when we
are told that miracle is impossible, and _therefore_ there has
been no Resurrection, or that death is the end of human existence,
and that _therefore_ there has been no Resurrection. That is not
the way to go about ascertaining the truth as to asserted facts. Let
us hear the evidence. The men who brush aside the testimony of the
New Testament writers, in obedience to a theory, either about the
impossibility of the supernatural, or about the fatal and final
issues of human