The Resurrection of Jesus Christ 103 of the sort. In that case, He would be an arch-impostor, and the whole Christian system rests on a fraud as its ulti- mate foundation. Is it possible to believe that such a sys- tem of religion as that of Jesus Christ, embodying such ex- alted principles and precepts of truth, purity and love, “orig- inated in a deliberately planned fraud” ? No one whose own heart is not cankered by fraud and trickery can believe Jesus to have been an impostor, and His religion to have been founded upon fraud. A leader of the rationalistic forces in England has recently tried to prove the theory that Jesus was only apparently dead by appealing to the fact that when the side of Jesus was pierced blood came forth and asks, “Can a dead man bleed?” To this the sufficient reply is that when a man dies of what is called in popular language, a broken heart, the blood escapes into the pericardium, and after stand- ing there for a short time it separates into serum (the water) and clot (the red corpuscles, blood), and thus if a man were dead, if his side were pierced by a spear, and the point of the spear entered the pericardium, “blood and water” would flow out just as the record states it did, and what is brought forth as a proof that Jesus was not really dead, is in reality a proof that He was, and an illustration of the minute ac- curacy of the story. I t could not have been made up in this way, if it were not actual fact. We have eliminated all other possible suppositions. We have but one left, namely, Jesus really was raised from the dead the third day as recorded in the four Gospels. The desperate straits to which those who attempt to deny it are driven are themselves proof of the fact. We have then several independent lines of argument pointing decisively and conclusively to the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Some of them taken separately prove the fact, but taken together they constitute an argument that makes doubt of the resurrection of Christ impossible to the candid mind. Of course, if one is determined not to
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker