THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST. 



147 



so anxious to do all honour to ihe dead Body of their Lord. The 

 words to Mary of Bethany m bt. John xn. 7 suggest that He 

 Himself anticipated, and at least did not discourage in prospect 

 this reverent and affectionate attention. " Let her," He said, 



keep the ointment against the day of my embalming. " I do 

 not think that we can, even at this distance of time, without loss, 

 be completely indifferent to what became of His Body. 



I have indeed no wish to insist on acceptance of the fact of the 

 Empty Tomb as a condition precedent to any genuine faith in the 

 Eesurrection. But I do plead with those, who while rejecting 

 the Easter Message yet accept the Easter Faith, to remember that 

 their faith itself assures them that something happened after the 

 Death of Jesus, which is none the less super-normal, none the 

 less differentiates Him from all other men that its results are 

 manifested in the spiritual rather than in the material sphere : 

 and that, therefore, the a priori objection to the Easter Message, 

 which has hitherto dominated all their criticism of the Gospel 

 narratives, the objection, I mean, that it requires us to believe 

 in an event which is absolutely unique in human experience, no 

 longer holds. Something unprecedented certainly took place in 

 the spiritual sphere, and it is at least conceivable that that event 

 in the spiritual sphere had a counterpart in the material. 



I do not, of course, mean to suggest that a present spiritual 

 experience can guarantee the occurrence of any specific fact in 

 the past. Nor should we on the strength of it be any less careful 

 to allow for the fallibility of human testimony, especially when it 

 comes from simple people who find themselves in unfamiliar cir- 

 cumstances. But at least the assumption that their experience 

 must fit into a normal mould disappears. We are no longer com- 

 pelled to treat the narratives as the free creation of pious imagina- 

 tions trying to justify to others a conviction which rests for the 

 narrator on quite other grounds. It is strange how differently the 

 Gospel stories read when we lay aside for the time the role of a 

 barrister, whose one object is to discredit an adverse witness, and 

 come to them sympathetically, believing that they have something 

 to teach us, which may be as yet " undreamt of in our philo- 

 sophy." We can, indeed, hardly arrive at a fair estimate of the 

 actual strength of the evidence as long as we approach it with 

 presuppositions which would make it impossible for us to accept 

 it, even if it were true. 



Let us come, then, once more to an examination of the New 

 Testament evidence. It is well on all grounds to begin with the 

 Epistles of St. Paul. His correspondence, we must remember, 

 was incidental and unsystematic. He was writing in each^ case 

 to correspondents already grounded in the Christian Tradition, 

 and acquainted with at least the outline of the Gospel story. 

 He does not go back on ground already traversed in their pre- 



