, to the pious believer; but it is plainly
possible. It is intrinsically more easily conceivable than the
accredited miracle. It is impossible positively to refute it: the
available data do not exist. Upon the whole, then, we conclude
that the time is coming when the basis of faith in immortality, in
order to stand the tests of independent scrutiny, must be
historically as well as logically shifted from a blind dependence
on the miraculous resurrection of Christ to a wise reliance on
insight into the supernatural capacity and destiny of man, on the
deductions of moral reason and the prophecies of religious trust.

Finally, we pause a moment, in closing this discussion, to weigh
the practical value of the resurrection of Christ as acknowledged
in the experience of the present time. How does that event,
admitted as a fact, rest in the average personal experience of
Christians now? We shall provoke no intelligent contradiction when
we say that it certainly does not often rest on laborious research
and rigorous testing of evidence. We surely risk nothing in saying
that with the multitude of believers it rests on a docile
reception of tradition, an unquestioning conformity to the
established doctrine. And that reception and conformity in the
present instance depend, we shall find by going a step further
back, upon a deep a priori faith in God and immortality. When Paul
reasons that, if the dead are not to rise, Christ is not risen,
but that the dead are to rise, and therefore Christ is risen, his
argument reposes on a spontaneous practical method of moral
assumption, not on a judicial process of logical proof. So is it
with Christians now. The intense moral conviction that God is
good, and that there is another life, and that it would be
supremely worthy of God to send a messenger to teach that doctrine
and to rise from the dead in proof of it, it is this earnest
previous faith that gives plausibility, vitality, and power to the
preserved tradition of the actual event. If we trace the case home
to the last resort, as it really lies in the experience developed
in us by Christianity, we shall find that a deep faith in God is
the basis of our belief, first in general immortality, and
secondly in the special resurrection of Christ as related thereto.
But, by a confusion, or a want, of thought, the former is
mistakenly supposed to rest directly and solely on the latter. The
doctrinal inferences built up around the resurrection