THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST. 



153 



another as they find themselves in the presence of One Who had 

 come back to them from the dead. Is that subtle interplay of 

 doubt and joy and awful reverence consummate art or is it a 

 simple transcript of actual experience ? 



Take another point. We are familiar enough in these days with 

 communications that purport to come to us from " within the 

 veil." One main objection in the way of taking them seriously 

 springs from the character of their contents. They are so trivial, 

 and so obviously coloured by the medium through which they are 

 transmitted. It is easy to account for them by telepathy, or as 

 an uprush from the sub-conscious of earlier impressions. Test 

 the reported words of the Eisen Lord from this point of view. 

 Write them out one by one and study them as a whole. See if 

 these two points do not stand out with luminous clearness. First, 

 that as a whole they ring true. They bear the stamp, and think 

 what that implies, of genuine utterances of the same Lord who 

 speaks to us m the rest of the Gospels. We find no difficulty in 

 accepting them as they stand (except to a certain extent in the 

 Appendix of St. Mark) as a faithful embodiment of His teaching. 

 And next, they cannot be merely the revival of impressions already 

 received in the course of the previous Ministry. They deal with 

 the new situation created by the Death and the Eesurrection. 

 They have a new content, a changed emphasis. They embrace 

 a wdder horizon. The words as they stand are a strong support 

 to our belief that the disciples came into real contact with their 

 Lord after He had risen from the dead. They are a substantial 

 guarantee of the truthfulness of the narratives in which they are 

 embedded. 



We come lastly to the most difficult element in these narra- 

 tives, the physical implications. We are apt to suppose that we 

 know more about matter than we do about mind. We are pre- 

 pared, if reason is shown, to believe that real communications 

 passed from the Eisen Lord into the minds of His disciples. We 

 may even accept the account of an appearance to the eye in the 

 old familiar form. But are we not justified in saying that it is 

 a physical impossibility that He can have submitted His risen 

 body to the evidence of touch, or broken bread before them, let 

 alone actually partaken of food before He once more vanished 

 from their sight ? 



And yet what right have we to dogmatize about physical impos- 

 sibilities? If in every other respect the evidence fully justifies 

 the demands of the highest reason, are we not bound to suspend 

 our judgment before we throv/ over its authority here ? The whole 

 situation, I repeat, is admittedly unique. It cannot be safe to 

 rule out any of the recorded phenomena simply on the ground that 

 they run counter to our pre-conceptions. No doubt the evidence 

 on this side of the narratives is nothing like so strong as the 



