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THE K I N G ' S B U S I NE S S
characters of our dear ones who have gone away from us. Most men have to die before their true .worth is dis cerned. But no process of that sort will suffice to account for the change and heightening of the disciples’ thoughts about their dead Lord. It was not merely that, when they remembered, they said, “ Did not our hearts burn within us by the way while He talked with us?’!—^but that His death wrought exactly the opposite effect from what it might have been expected to do. It ought to have ended their hope that He was the Messiah, and we know that within forty-eight hours it was begin ning to do so, as we learn from the •plaintive words of disappointed and fad ing hope: “ We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel.” If, so early, the cold convic tion was stealing over their hearts that v their dearest expectation was proved by His death to have been a dream, what could have prevented its entire domin ion over them, as the days grew into months and years? But somehow or other that process was arrested, and the opposite one set in.. The death that should have shattered Messianic dreams confirmed them. The death that should have cast a deeper shadow of incom prehensibleness •over His strange and lofty claims poured a new light upon them, which made them all plain and clear. The very parts of His teaching which His death would have made those who loved Him wish to forget, became the center of His followers’ faith. His cross became His throne. Whilst He lived with them they knew not what He said in His deepest words, but, by a strange paradox, His death convinced them that He was the Son of God, and that that which they had seen with their eyes, and their hands had handled, was the Eternal Life. The cross alone could never have done that. Something else there must have been, if the men were sane, to account for this paradox.
and as to the joy of that resurrection. The'first point to be considered is, that the conduct of Christ’s disciples after His death was exactly the opposite of what might have been expected. They held together. The natural thing for them to do would have been to dis band; for their one bond was gone; and if they had acted according to the or dinary laws of human nonduct, they would have said to themselves, “ Let us go back to our fishing-boats and our tax-gathering, and seek safety in sepa ration, and nurse our sorrow apart.” .A few lingering days might have been given to weep together at His grave, and to assuage the first bitterness of grief and disappointment; but when these were over, nothing could have prevent ed Christianity and the Church from being buried in the same sepulchre as Jesus. As certainly as the stopping up of the founi.tin would empty the river’s bed, so surely would Christ’s death have scattered His disciples. And that strange fact, that it did not scatter them, needs-to be looked well into and fairly accounted for in some plausible manner. The end of John’s school gives a parallel which brings the singu larity of the fact into stronger relief; and looking at - these two groups as they stand before us in these two texts, the question is irresistibly suggested, Why did not the one fall away into its separate elements, as the other did? The keystone of the arch was in both cases withdrawn—why did the one structure topple into ruin while the other stood firm? Not only did the disciples of Christ keep united, but their conceptions of Jesus underwent a remarkable change after His death. We might have ex pected, indeed, that, when memory be gan to work, and the disturbing in fluence of daily association was with drawn, the same idealising process would have begun on their image of Him, which reveals and ennobles the
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