, and that there was nothing in it
extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by the
appearance had been too strong for such an explanation
to be satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred,
especially if he was a man of St. Paul's intellectual
stature, would have at once examined into the facts
otherwise known, connected with the subject of what
he had seen. St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved
our Lord's resurrection, had disbelieved it fiercely and
passionately; we should have expected that he would at
once have sought for those who could best have told
him the details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did
nothing of the kind. He went for a year into Arabia,
and when at last he returned to Jerusalem, he rather
held aloof from those who had been our Lord's
companions, and who had witnessed his ascension.
He saw Peter, he saw James; "of the rest of the
apostles saw he none." To him evidently the proof of
the resurrection was the vision which he had himself
seen. It was to that which he always referred when
called on for a defence of his faith.

Of evidence for the resurrection in the common
sense of the word there may be enough to show that
something extraordinary occurred; but not enough,
unless we assume the fact to be true on far other
grounds, to produce any absolute and unhesitating
conviction; and inasmuch as the resurrection is the
keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be something
far different from that suspended judgment in which
history alone would leave us.

Human testimony, we repeat, under the most
favourable circumstances imaginable, knows nothing of
"absolute certainty;" and if historical facts are bound
up with the creed, and if they are to be received with
the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they
rest, and must rest, either on the divine truth of
Scripture, or on the divine witness in ourselves. On human
evidence, the miracles of St. Teresa and St. Francis of
Assisi are as well established as those of the New
Testament.

M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account
of the Gospel story which, written as it is by a man of
piety, intellect, and imagination, is spreading rapidly
through the educated world. Carrying out the principles
with which Protestants have swept modern
history clear of miracles to their natural conclusions,
he dismisses all that is miraculous from the life of our
Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the original Galilean
youth who live