t go on to their
natural issue? How came it that these people, with their Master taken
away from the midst of them, and the bond of union between them
removed, and all their hopes crushed did not say: 'We have made a
mistake, let us go back to Gennesareth and take to our fishing again,
and try and forget our bright illusions'? That is what John the
Baptist's followers did when he died. Why did not Christ's do the
same? Because Christ rose again and re-knit them together. When the
Shepherd was smitten, the flock would have been scattered, and never
drawn together any more, unless there had been just such a thing as
the Resurrection asserts there was, to reunite the dispersed and to
encourage the depressed. And so I say, Christianity with a _dead_
Christ, and a Church gathered round a grave from which the stone has
_not_ been rolled away, is more unbelievable than the miracle, for it
is an absurdity.

Then there is another thing that I would say in a word. Let me put an
illustration to explain what I mean. Suppose, after the execution of
King Charles I., in some corner of the country a Pretender had sprung
up and said, 'I am the King!' the way to end that would have been for
the Puritan leaders to have taken people to St. George's Chapel, and
said, 'Look! there is the coffin, there is the body, is that the
king, or is it not?' Jesus Christ was said to have risen again,
within a week of the time of His death. The rulers of the nation had
the grave, the watch, the stone, the seal. They could have put an end
to the pestilent nonsense in two minutes, if it had been nonsense, by
the simple process of saying, 'Go and look at the tomb, and you will
see Him there.' But this question has never been answered, and never
will be--What became of that sacred corpse if Jesus Christ did not
rise again from the dead? The clumsy lie that the rulers told, that
the disciples had stolen away the body, was only their acknowledgment
that the grave was empty. If the grave were empty, either His
servants were impostors, which we have seen it is incredible that
they were, or the Christ was risen again.

And so, dear brethren, for many other reasons besides this handful
that I have ventured to gather and put before you, and in spite of
the prejudices of modern theories, I lift up here once more, with
unfaltering certitude, the glad message which I beseech you to
accept: 'Christ is risen, the first fruits of them that slept.'

II. So much, then,