instance in the course
of years, prove this, and you prove that men may do and dare, deny
and suffer, not only without motives, but in direct opposition to
their duty, interest, desire, prejudice, and passion. The
disciples could not have pretended the resurrection from
sensitiveness to the probable charge that they had been miserably
deceived; for they did not understand their Master to predict any
such event, nor had they the slightest expectation of it. They
could not have pretended it for the sake of establishing and
giving authority to the good precepts and doctrines Jesus taught;
because such a course would have been in the plainest antagonism
to all those principles themselves, and because, too, they must
have known both the utter wickedness and the desperate hazards and
forlornness of such an attempt to give a fictitious sanction to
moral truths. In such an enterprise there was before them not the
faintest probability of even the slightest success. Every selfish
motive would tend to deter them; for poverty, hatred, disgrace,
stripes, imprisonment, contempt, and death stared in their faces
from the first step that way. Dishonesty, deliberate fraud, then,
in this matter, was not merely untrue, but was impossible. The
conclusion from the whole view is, therefore, the conviction that
the evidence of the witnesses for the resurrection of Jesus is
worthy of credence.

There are three considerations, further, worthy of notice in
estimating the strength of the historic argument for the
resurrection. First, the conduct of the Savior himself in relation
to the subject. The charge of unbalanced enthusiasm is
inconsistent with the whole character and life of Jesus; but
suppose on this point he was an enthusiast, and really believed
that three days after his death he would rise again. In that case,
would not his mind have dwelt upon the wonderful anticipated
phenomenon? Would not his whole soul have been wrapped up in it,
and his speech have been almost incessantly about it? Yet he spoke
of it only three or four times, and then with obscurity. Again:
suppose he was an impostor. An impostor would hardly have risked
his reputation voluntarily on what he knew could never take place.
Had he done so, his only reliance must have been upon the
credulous enthusiasm of his followers. He would then have made it
the chief topic, would have striven strenuously to make it a
living and intense hope, an immovable, all controlling faith