234 THE ET. EEV. BISHOP J. E. C. WELLDON, D.D., ON 



of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and 

 the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. 



The Positivists profess, like the Christians, a belief in immor- 

 tality ; but the immortality of the Positivists is not such an immor- 

 tality as Christians have always conceived, i.e., the unending 

 survival of personality. It is no more than an immortality of 

 remembrance; and such an immortality, so far from being a 

 guarantee for the reward of the good, and the punishment of the 

 evil in the future life, lies and must lie open to the suspicion 

 that posterity may forget and ignore its benefactors, or may 

 never recognise who they had been, or, worst of all, may mis- 

 judge its enemies or its benefactors, as often happens in life, 

 and may even mistake its benefactors for its enemies. 



It is well that writers and speakers should deal honestly with 

 themselves and with the world. Words, as Bacon hinted long 

 ago, are only too likely to recoil upon the persons who use 

 them. Nothing is gained, and everything may be lost, if the 

 representatives of different modes of thought use the same 

 language, but use it in wholly different senses. 



It may be worih while to say a word upon the question of 

 evidence. For critics of the Bible and of the revelation which 

 the Bible enshrines do not seem always to treat the question of 

 evidence fairly. It is, of course, possible to declare, in the 

 spirit of Hume's famous canon, that miracles cannot occur or 

 cannot deserve to be believed, because it is more probable that 

 the evidence for a miracle should be false than that the miracle 

 itself should be true. But such a declaration, if it is made, is 

 tantamount to a denial of God ; for if there is a living God, there 

 can be no doubt that He can, if He will, alter or affect the course 

 of Nature, or, to speak more accurately, He can reveal the 

 course of Nature in a new light. The theory of Einstein, if it is 

 accepted, is a departure from the theory of Sir Isaac Newton 

 or a modification of his theory in relation to the natural 

 universe. For a miracle may be not contrary to Nature, but, 

 as Augustine defines it, contrary to Nature as man has hitherto 

 conceived Nature. But upon Hume's canon a miracle, if ex 

 hypothesi it should occur, could not be believed. No evidence 

 would be sufficient to prove it. If so, then the argument that the 

 evidence is insufficient to justify belief is hardly straightforward, 

 when no evidence possible or imaginable would be sufficient to 

 prove it. A good many years ago I asked a distinguished agnostic 

 professor in the University of Cambridge what amount of evi- 

 dence would satisfy him that such an event as our Lord's 

 Resurrection had taken place. He did not answer, and I do 

 not think he could answer, my Question. But two points 

 are easily established. One is that the evidence for the authen- 

 ticity of the books of the New Testament is far stronger than the 



