emember
that during the last months of their master's life he was in a state of
tense, high-wrought expectation, which communicated itself to them.
Something wonderful was just about to happen. There was to be a sudden
and amazing manifestation of divine power, by which the kingdom of God
was to triumph and thenceforth to reign. But the way to this
consummation might lead through the valley of the shadow of death. In
the soul of Jesus a sublime hope and a dark presage alternated and
mingled. It is not to be supposed that he held a definite and unchanging
conception. Cloud-shadows and sunbursts played by turns across him, with
the intensity natural to a soul of vast emotions. Constant through it
all was the fixed purpose to be true to his mission, and with victorious
recurrence came his confidence in the divine issue. His sympathetic
disciples were vaguely, profoundly stirred by this elemental struggle and
victory. They too became intensely expectant of some great catastrophe
and triumph. After the first shock of the Master's death, all this
emotion surged up in them afresh, with their love heightened as death
always heightens love, with the fresh and vivid memories of their leader
sweeping them on in the current of his purpose and hope and faith. His
words were true,--he must, he will, conquer and reign. If he has gone to
the underworld, he will live again. "Will,"--nay, is he not here with us
now? Is he not more real to our thought and love than ever before? And
first in one mind, then in another, the conviction flashes into bodily
image. Mary has seen the Master! Peter has seen him! And for a little
time--for "forty days"--the electric air seems often to body forth that
luminous shape. The story, as it grew with years, took on one detail
after another, became definite and coherent, was accepted as the charter
and foundation of the little society.

To rightly understand the faith of the disciples in the risen Christ, we
must look below the stories of sense-appearance in which that faith
clothed itself. What they essentially felt--what distinguished their
faith from a mere opinion or dogma--was not a mere expectation, "The dead
_will_ rise;" not a mere fact of history, "Some one _did_ rise;" it was
the conviction and consciousness, "Our friend _is living_." It was an
experience--including and transcending memory and hope--of present love,
present communion, present life.

Sight and speech lent their