THE RESURRECTION OF .TliSr ? TTTRIST 



157 



would be raised. This showed the immense importance of the fact 

 of Christ's Resurrection. 



If fifty or more years ago he had told that meeting that he had 

 that afternoon been conversing with someone in South Wales, he 

 would have been regarded as romancing, but now any stupid person 

 would make and another stupid person could use a telephone. He 

 remembered one connected with the making of the first telephone 

 telling him the thrill with which he heard for the first time the 

 human voice transmitted along the wire ; but when once the original 

 telephone worked all the rest was a mere matter of detail. So with 

 the Resurrection of Christ. If God once broke the power of death 

 by raising Him, He could easily raise millions, as the Apostle 

 Paul said to Agrippa, " Why should it be thought a thing incredible 

 with you if God should raise the dead?" The moment we bring 

 God into the difficulty, it disappears. 



As regards the present implications that Christ's Resurrection 

 were intended to have for us, he judged that it set all our hopes, 

 whether for ourselves or for humanity, upon a new basis, and 

 instanced two remarkable utterances of S. Paul when in prison 

 and under most depressing conditions. The first was in Philippians 

 iii. 11, where he wrote of the one goal before him, as being his attain- 

 ment of the Resurrection, that is from among the dead, no matter 

 by what means, even a martyr's death, that he reached it. The 

 other was in his last letter to Timothy (chap ii. 8), wherein he 

 exhorted him to " Remember Jesus Christ raised from the dead 

 according to my Gospel," an exhortation we would do well to give 

 heed to for ourselves. 



Mr. W. HosTE said :■ — ^I think the value of the paper we have 

 listened to consists not only in its positive advocacy, but in the light 

 it throws on the weakness of our opponents' arguments, and all 

 the more for the impartiality with which we have heard them stated 

 to-day. The theory that the women found the grave empty, only 

 because they went to the wrong one, might have had strength had 

 our Lord been buried in a cemetery instead of a garden, in which 

 John t«lls us there was "a new sepulchre.'' In this sepulchre 

 these very women had seen Him laid barely three days before. 

 Dean Rashdall must not expect us to follow Eim in rejecting well 

 attested evidence simply because unusual and, undreamt-of in our 

 philosophy, otherwise the negro chief was right in scouting the idea 

 of solid water. The testimony of Dr. Arnold is well-known and 

 eloquent. "I have been used for many years to study the history 

 of other times and to examine and weigh the evidence of those who 

 have written about them, and I know of no fact in the history 

 of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every 

 sort, to the understanding of a fair enquirer, than the great sign 

 which God has given us, that Christ died and rose again from 

 the dead." 



