The Fair Haven

s felt by o

hose who hold the external evidences of Christianity to be insufficient. When, however, they meet with any of these unhappy persons they will find their influence for good paralysed; for unbelievers do not understand what is meant by appealing to their spiritual insight as a thing which can in any way affect the evidence for or against an alleged fact in history-or at any rate as forming evidence for a fact which they believe to be in itself improbable and unsupported by external proof. They have not got any spiritual insight in matters of this sort; nor, indeed, do they recognise what is meant by the words at all, unless they be interpreted as self-respect and regard for the feelings and usages of other people. What spiritual insight they have, they express by the ve

s the falsehood which has overlaid the best established fact in all history with so much sophistry, that even our own side has come to fear t

under no such fear. Strauss himself admits that our Lord died upon the Cross; he does not even attempt to dispute it, but writes as though he were well aware that there was no room for any difference of opinion about the matter. He has therefore been compelled to adopt the hallucination theory, with a result which we have already considered. Yet who can question that Strauss would have

tion of Strauss's theories with which this work opened, was triumphant and conclusive? Then what follows? That Christ died and rose again! The central fact of our faith is proved. It is proved ex

Ascension? Of the descent of the Holy Spirit? Who can feel difficulty about these things? Would not the miracle rather be that they should not have happened! May we not now let the wings of our so

in overmuch grief at the journey which is yet before him ere he shall have done all which may justly be required of him.

at it has been shewn that the reappearance

rce as fairness will allow. I shall be compelled to be very brief, but the unbeliever will not, I hope, feel that anything of importance to his side has been passed over. The believer, on the other hand, will be thankfu

t, is not enough and ought not to be enough to make men do so now. If we were to hear now of the reappearance of a man who had been believed to be dead, our first impulse would be to learn the when and where of the death, and the when and where of the first reappearance. What had been the nature of the death? What conclusive proof was there that the death had been actual and complete? What examination had been made of the body? An

ously risen from death to life; it is another to know their reasons for so thinking. Times have changed, and tests of truth are infinitely better understood, so that the reasonable of those days is reasonable to us no longer. Nor would it be enough that the answers given could be just strained into so much agreement with one another as to allow of a modus vivendi between them, and not to exclude the possibility of death, they must exclude all possibilit

they firmly believed that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead; their lives prove their faith; but we cannot forget that the fact itself of Christ's having been crucified and afterwards seen alive, would be enough, under the circumstances, to incline the men of that day to believe that he had died and had been miraculously restored to life, although we should ourselves be bound to make a far more searching inquiry before we could arrive at any such conclusion. A miracle was not and could not be to them, what it is and ought to be to ourselves-a matter to be regarded a priori with the very gravest suspicion. To them it was

that Jesus Christ was seen alive after being thought to have been dead, but this again is not an account of a resurrection. It is a statement of a fact, but it is not an account of the circumstances which attended that fact. In the story told by Matthew we have what com

Evangelists, none of whom professes to give us the smallest information as to the time and manner of Christ's Resurrection. T

ties, which when they become older and wiser they cannot conceive their having ever seriously accepted. As with men, so with ages; an unusual train of events brings about unusual results, whereon the childlike age turns instinctively to miracle for a solution of the difficulty. In the days of Christ men would ask for evidence of the Crucifixion and the reappearance; when these two points had been established they would have been satisfied-not unnaturally-that a great miracle had been pe

w, if their affections and their hopes of a glorious kingdom in a world beyond the grave were enlisted on the side of the miracle, it would go hard with the judgement of most men. How much more

sapping the foundations of all the moral and intellectual faculties. It is grossly immoral to violate one's inner sense of truth by assenting to things which, though they may appear to be supported by much, are still not supported by enough. The man who can knowingly submit to such a derogation from the rights of his self-respect, deserves the injury to his mental eye-sight which such a course will surely bring with it. But the mischief will unfortunately not be confined to himself; it will devolve upon all who are ill-fated enough to be in his power; he will be reckless of the harm he works them, provided he can keep its consequences from being immediately offensive to himself. No: if a good thing can be believed legitimately, let us believe it and b

sively to the unbelieving side. It is time that this spirit should be protested against not in word only but in deed. The fact is, that both we and our opponents are agreed that nothing should be believed unless it can be prove

our faith in the deeper mysteries of our religion, as in the nature of the Trinity and the sacramental graces, upon the certainty that other things which are within the grasp of our reason can be shewn to be beyond dispute. We know that Christ died and rose again; therefore we believe whatever He sees fit to tell us, and follow Him, or endeavour to follow Him, whereinsoever He commands us, but we are not required to take both the commands of the Mediator and His credentials upon faith. It is because certain things within our comprehension are capable of the most irrefragable proof, that certain others out of it may justly be required to be believed, and indeed cannot be disbelieved without contumacy

rection, as given in the fourth Gospel: and assume for the sake of the argument that that account, if not from John's

d outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre. And he stooping down and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying, yet went he not in. Then cometh Simon Peter following him and went into the sepulchre and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin that was about His head not lying with the linen clothes but wrapped together in a place by itself. Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw and believed. For as yet they knew not the S

himself, but does not

parts, let us examine first what we are told as having come actually

oved: all she knew was that within thirty-six hours from the time of its having been laid in the tomb it had disappeared, but how much earlier it had been gone neither did she know, nor shall we. Peter and John went into the sepulchre and thoroughly examined it: they saw no

but it amounts to an empty to

e greatest of their prophets (men who had been dead for ages), and recognised by a voice from heaven as the Son of the Almighty, and had they also heard anything approaching to an announcement that he should himself rise from the dead-or had they not? They might have seen the raising of Lazarus and the rest of the miracles, but might not have anticipated that Christ himself would rise, for want of any announcement that this should be so; or, again, they might have heard a prophecy of his Resurrection from the lips of Christ, but disbelieved it for the want of any previous miracles which should convince them that the prophecy came from no ordinary person; so that their not having expected the Resurrection is explicabl

of Christ and the earliest of the four Gospels; thirty years of oral communication and spiritual enthusiasm, among an oriental people, and in an unscientific age; an age by which the idea of an interference with the modes of the universe from a point outside of itself, was taken as a matter of course; an age which believed in an anthropomorphic Deity who had ba

uld not withstand so great a temptation to let our wish become father to our thoughts. If we had been the especially favoured friends of one whom we believed to have died, but who yet was not to beholden by death, no matter how careful and judicially minded we might be by nature, we should be blind to everything except the fact that we had once been the chosen companions of an immortal. There lives no one who could withstand

many, many generations. Every circumstance which should induce us to bow to their authority surrounds them with a bulwark of defences which may make us well believe that they must be impregnable, and sacred from attack. Small wonder then that the many should still believe them. Nevertheless they do not believe them so fully, nor nearly so fully, as they think they do. For even the strongest imagination can travel but a very little way b

are they with the momentous character of what they have known, that their power of enlisting sympathy becomes immeasurably greater than that of men who have never believed themselves to have come into contact with the miraculous; their deep conviction carries others along with it, and so the belief is strengthened till adverse influences check it, or till it reaches a pitch of grotesque horror, as in the case of the later Jansenist miracles. There is nothing, therefore, extraordinary in the gradual development within thirty years of all the Christian miracles, if the Resurrection were once held to be well substantiated; and there is nothing wonderful, under the circumstances, in the reappearance of Christ alive after his Crucifixion having been assigned to miracl

w of human nature, in the fact of men not anticipating that Christ would rise, if they had already seen him raise others from the dead and work the miracles ascribed to him, and if they had also heard him prophesy that he should himself rise from the dead. In fact nothing can ex

en alive, nor can we wonder if the years which intervened between the morning of the Resurrection and the writing of the fourth Gospel, should have sufficed to make the writer believe that John had had an actual belief in the Resurrection, while in truth he had only wildly hoped it. This much is at any rate plain, that neither he nor Peter had as yet heard any clearly intelligible prophecy that their master should rise from the dead. Whatever subsequent interpretation may have been given to some of the sayings of Jesus Christ, no saying was yet known which would of itself have suggested any such inference. We

, they went into the tomb itself, and we may say for a certainty that they saw no angel, nor indeed anything at all, but the grave clothes (which were probably of white linen), lying in two separate places within it. Mary was a woman-a woman whose parallel we must look for among Spanish or Italian women of the lower orders at the present day; she had, we are elsewhere told, been at one time possessed with devils; she was in a state of tearful excitement, and looking through her tears from

on question of common people, and then leaves them. This is in itself incredible; but it is not incredible that if Mary looking into the tomb saw two white objects within, she should have drawn back affrighted, and that her imagination, thrown into a fever by her subsequent interview with Christ, should have rendered her utterly incapable of recollecting the true facts of the case; or, again, it is not incredible that she should have been believed to hav

of faith in a miracle, than of scepticism concerning its miraculous character. The Apostles would be in no impartial nor sceptical mood when they saw that Christ was alive. The miracle was too near themselves-too fascinating in its supposed consequences for themselves-to allow of their going into curious questions about the completeness of the death. The Master whom they had loved, and in whom they had hoped, ha

Magdalene had seen a vision of angels in the tomb in which Christ's body had been laid; and this, though a matter of small moment in compariso