OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST. 



225 



he saw, and believed." What did he believe? Was it what 

 the women had said, " They have taken away the Lord out of 

 the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid Him ? " 

 No, they did not believe that ; for this reason, if people had 

 taken the Lord away they would have taken Him with the 

 wrapping, for it would not have been possible for them to have 

 taken Him out of the wrappings in the sepulchre. There would 

 not have been room. Besides there was a 100 lb. weight of spice, 

 and it would have been all sticking together. Then there was a 

 smaller coil for the face to keep the jaw from falling. The 

 two coils were in situ, but the body gone ! Peter and John had 

 gone through a good deal of experience, but they had never 

 seen such a thing as that. 80 that we have two extraordinary 

 facts ; first, that no one saw Christ rise, and secondly, that the 

 Lord's burial garments remained empty but in situ. That was 

 the phenomenon which these two men saw and which caused 

 them to believe something which they had never taken in before, 

 for as yet they knew not the Scripture of the Old Testament, 

 and so dull were they that they had forgotten what the Lord 

 had promised. So they just went home with this phenomenon 

 on their minds : — " He has gone through some great change ; 

 He has vanished from the coil in which His body was 

 wrapped." 



Many people must have speculated as to what had happened. 

 One thing was plain ; there were the empty wrappings. Con- 

 sequently the Eoman soldiers could not have taken the Lord 

 out of the sepulchre. Their story was a lame one, but it was 

 passed about as an excuse, as there was nothing else to say. 

 Prof. Gardner of Oxford has brought out a book called 

 Exploratio Evangelica, in which he says the greatest crux in 

 history is this, " What happened to the body of Christ ? " That 

 is a very remarkable confession from a man who is a free 

 handler of the scripture. 



Now we have another very remarkable phenomenon ; all 

 the four Gospels give instances of the doubts of the Lord's 

 followers. They were in a sceptical frame of mind ; they were 

 not prepared straight off to accept the dictum of anybody, and it 

 took that whole day to remove the doubts of some ; others still 

 doubted up in Galilee. The Apostle Thomas doubted for a week. 

 He wanted demonstration, and he got it. It is very noteworthy 

 that the four Gospels all candidly tell us of these doubts. All 

 uncertainty, however, vanished before the Day of Pentecost. 

 By that time Christ's followers were all one heart and soul, 

 and they then got the final demonstration. 



