death, are victims of prejudice, in the strictest
meaning of the word; and are no more logical than the well-known and
proverbial reasoner who, when told that facts were against him, with
sublime confidence in his own infallibility, is reported to have
said, 'So much the worse for the facts.' Let us deal with evidence,
and not with theory, when we are talking about alleged facts of
history.

So then, let me remind you that, in this chapter from which my text
is taken, we have a record of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, older
than, and altogether independent of, the records contained in
the gospels, which are all subsequent in date to it; that this Epistle
to the Corinthians is one of the four undisputed Epistles of the
Apostle, which not the most advanced school of modern criticism has a
word to say against; that, therefore, this chapter, written, at the
latest, some seven and twenty years after the date of the
Crucifixion, carries us up very close to that event; that it shows
that the Resurrection was _universally_ believed all over the Church,
and therefore must have then been long believed; that it enables us
to trace the same belief as universal, and in undisputed possession
of the field among the churches, at the time of Paul's conversion,
which cannot be put down at much more than five or six years after
the Crucifixion, and that so we are standing in the presence of
absolutely contemporaneous testimony. This is not a case in which a
belief slowly and gradually grew up. Whether we accept the evidence
or not, we are bound to admit that it is strictly contemporaneous
testimony to the fact of Christ's Resurrection.

And the witnesses are reliable and competent, as well as
contemporaneous. The old belief that their testimony was imposture is
dead long ago; as, indeed, how could it live? It would be an anomaly,
far greater than the Resurrection, to believe that these people,
Mary, Peter, John, Paul, and all the rest of them, were conspirators
in a lie, and that the fairest system of morality and the noblest
consecration that the world has ever seen, grew up out of a fraud,
like flowers upon a dunghill. That theory will not hold water; and
even those who will not accept the testimony have long since
confessed that it will not. But the Apostle, in my context, seems to
think that that is the only tenable alternative to the other theory
that the witnesses were veracious, and I am disposed to believe that
he is right.