them, unless he had found there
the same faith. The fact of the matter is, there is not a place where
you can stick a pin in, between the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the
date of this letter, wide enough to admit of the rise of the faith in a
Resurrection. We are necessarily forced by the very fact of the
existence of the Church to the admission that the belief in the
Resurrection was contemporaneous with the alleged Resurrection itself.

And so we are shut up--in spite of the wriggling of people that do not
accept that great truth--we are shut up to the old alternative, as it
seems to me, that either Jesus Christ rose from the dead, or the noblest
lives that the world has ever seen, and the loftiest system of morality
that has ever been proclaimed, were built upon a lie. And we are called
to believe that at the bidding of a mere unsupported, bare, dogmatic
assertion that miracles are impossible. Believe it who will, I decline
to be coerced into believing a blank, staring psychological
contradiction and impossibility, in order to be saved the necessity of
admitting the existence of the supernatural. I would rather believe in
the supernatural than the ridiculous. And to me it is unspeakably
ridiculous to suppose that anything but the fact of the Resurrection
accounts for the existence of the Church, and for the faith of this
witness that we have before us.

And so, dear friends, we come back to this, the Christianity that flings
away the risen Christ is a mere mass of tatters with nothing in it to
cover a man's nakedness, an illusion with no vitality in it to quicken,
to comfort, to ennoble, to raise, to teach aspiration or hope or effort.
The human heart needs the 'Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen
again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh
intercession for us.' And this independent witness confirms the Gospel
story: 'Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits
of them that slept.'

IV. Lastly, let us hear what this witness has to say about the returning
Christ.

That is the characteristic doctrinal subject of the letter. We all know
that wonderful passage of unsurpassed tenderness and majesty, which has
soothed so many hearts and been like a gentle hand laid upon so many
aching spirits, about the returning Jesus 'coming in the clouds,' with
the dear ones that are asleep along with Him, and the reunion of them
that sleep and them that are alive and remain, in one i