e moral and spiritual beauty of the ideal revealed in His
life, and that afterward we had seen Him die in blood and shame; I
think it would have taken a good deal to convince us that evil had not
gained the day. Now suppose after this we had absolute proof--I will
not say how--that our Master was still alive, and that His spirit was
with us and helping us, would it not make a very great difference to
our outlook upon life and our confidence in God? We could not but feel
the littleness of the power that had tried to destroy Jesus, and we
should not be afraid of it any more. This is precisely what appears to
have happened in the experience of these Galileans. Defeat and failure
were somehow turned into victory and success; they had seen Jesus again.

+Theories of resurrection.+--But how are we to account for this
new-found confidence of theirs that they had really once more looked
upon the face of Jesus? The subject has been discussed so exhaustively
that no possible explanation of it has been left altogether untouched.
Such a unique event as the raising of a physical body from death is one
which the average western mind of the present day would reject as
incredible if we had never heard it before, consequently there exists a
widespread tendency among liberal Christians to try to account for
primitive Christian belief in the resurrection of our Lord in some
other way. Thus we have the hallucination theory, the apparition
theory, the swoon theory, and others of a similar character. I should
suppose that most thinkers who take the point of view of the New
Theology would hold one or other of these explanations or some
modification of them, but I confess I have never been able to do so.
It seems to me that no such explanation of the universally held
Christian conviction that the physical body of Jesus actually rose from
the tomb is sufficient to account for it. The passage already quoted
from 1 Cor. xv is alone enough to illustrate this statement. It is
clear that the earliest Christians were absolutely certain that the
body of Jesus after the resurrection was the body of Jesus as they had
known it before, although apparently it possessed some new and
mysterious attributes. In my judgment, also, insistence upon the
impossibility of a physical resurrection presumes an essential
distinction between matter and spirit which I cannot admit. The
philosophy underlying the New Theology as I understand it is monistic
ideali