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THE K I N G ' S B U S I NE S S
Nor is this all. Another equally un likely sequel of the death of Jesus is the unmistakable moral transformation ef fected oh the disciples. Timorous and tremulous before, something or other touched them into altogether new bold ness and self-possession. Dependent on His presence before, and helpless when He was ia,way. from them for an hour, they become all at once strong and calm; they stand before the fury of a Jewish mob and the threatenings of the Sanhedrin, unmoved and victorious. And these brave confessors and saintly heroes are the men who, a few weeks before, had been petulant,' self-willed, jealous, cowardly. What had lifted them suddenly so far above themselves?. Their Master’s death? That would more naturally have taken any heart or courage out of them, and left them ■indeed as sheep in the midst of wolves. Why, then, do they thus strangely blaze up into grandeur and heroism? Can any reasonable account be given of these paradoxes? Surely it is not too much to ask of people who profess to explain Christianity on naturalistic principles, that they shall make the process clear to us by which, Christ being dead and buried, His disciples Were kept together, learned to think more loftily of Him, and sprang at once to a new grandeur of character. Why did not they do as John’s disciples did, and disappear? Why was not the stream lost in the sand, when the headwaters were cut off? The disciples’ immediate belief in the Resurrection furnishes a reasonable, and the only reasonable, explanation of the facts. Such a belief could not have origi nated or maintained itself unless it had been true. Who, with half an eye for character, could study the deeds and the writings of the apostles, and not feel that, whatever else they were, they were profoundly honest; and as con vinced as of their own existence, that they had seen Christ “ alive after His
passion, by'many infallible proofs’’ ? If Paul and Peter and John were con spirators in a trick, then their lives and their words were the most astounding anomaly. Who, either, that had the faintest perception of the forces that sway opinion and frame systems, could believe that the fair fabric of Christian morality was built on the sand of a lie, and cemented by the slime of deceit bubbling up from the very pit of hell? Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Do hallucinations lay hold on five hundred people at once? poes a hal lucination last for a long country walk, and give rise to protracted conversa tion? Does hallucination explain the story of Christ eating and drinking be fore His disciples? The uncertain twi light of the garden might have begotten such an airy phantom in the brain of a single sobbing woman; but the appear ances to be explained are so numerous, so varied in character, embrace so many details, appeal to so many of the senses — to the ear and hand as well as to the eye-^—were spread over so long a period, and were simultaneously shared by so large a number, that no theory of such a sort can account foe them, unless by impugning the veracity of the records. And then we are back again on the old abandoned ground of deceit and im posture. A deep, indestructible instinct proph esies in every breast of a future. But all is vague and doubtful. The one proof of a life beyond the grave is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. There fore let us be glad with the gladness of men plucked from a dark abyss of doubt and planted on the rock of solid cer tainty; and let us rejoice with joy unspeakable, and laden with a proph etic weight of glory, as we ring out the ancient Easter morning’s greeting, “ The Lord is risen indeed!”
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