whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. Him hath God exalted with His right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins. And we are His witnesses of these things; and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey Him.' It was in this sense that, with great power, the Apostles gave witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, 'and great grace was upon them all;' and many wonders and signs were done by the Apostles.' Similarly the culminating point of St. Stephen's testimony was that he saw the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. So also the appearance of our Lord to St. Paul is the revelation to him of a living Christ-risen, not only in the sense of having been raised from the grave, but of being present, and exercising supernatural powers. In all cases, it is from actual present facts that the proclamation of the Resurrection starts— from the amazing fact of the descent of the Holy Ghost; from the evidence of the power exercised by the name of Christ over the bodies and souls of men ; or from actual manifestations of the risen Lord. In a word, it is not to a past, but to a present fact, that the testimony of the Apostles is born; its object is to interpret present realities, and to bring men into the enjoyment of new powers.

Now this is a consideration which appears to throw

light upon the nature of the evidence for the Resurrection on the one hand, and upon our present relation to that great truth on the other. It will be seen, in the first place, that the witness of the Apostles did not rest simply upon their assertions respecting what they alone had seen; it was not simply that they, and they only, had found the grave empty, and that our Lord had appeared to them, and had subsequently ascended to heaven. Had that been all they had to say, it might not have been difficult for the enemies of our Lord to have either described them as mere enthusiasts, or to have charged them with deception, as in the story, which St. Matthew tells us was set on foot, of the disciples having stolen away our Lord's body while the soldiers slept. The testimony of twelve unlearned and ignorant men, despised as the followers of a crucified master, would scarcely, if it had stood alone and unsupported, have found credence for so great a miracle. At all events, the Apostles did not proclaim this testimony as long as it stood alone. When they proclaim it, they are able to appeal to a present fact, to a number of successive facts, which verify it. They are suddenly endued with new spiritual powers; in the name of the Lord Jesus they work miracles on the bodies of men, and convert thousands to repentance and to a holy life; and it is with the support of these facts, and in order to explain them,

that they declare what they had seen and heard of our Lord after His resurrection. They thus offer a practical attestation of their message of the strongest possible kind. They proclaim to the Jews that Christ is living; and here, they say, is the proof of it, that the Holy Spirit is bestowed on us, that miracles are wrought in His name; that He actually gives power, both spiritual and bodily, to those who believe on Him. This it was, and not mere testimony to the past, which produced so great an effect in Jerusalem, and which so alarmed the Jewish rulers. The Apostles, in a word, spoke of a present reality; that reality was verified by present experience, and they thus established a most weighty claim to be believed on their explanation of it. If the name of Jesus, through faith in Him, had, as a matter of fact, made men whole in soul and body, then there was every reason to believe the witnesses who appealed to that name, and who stated facts which would explain the power it exerted.

This consideration, perhaps, will help to explain one point in the Evangelical narratives of the Resurrection which might otherwise seem a little surprising. I mean their comparative brevity, and the lack of the circumstantial character which marks some other portions of the sacred narrative. There can be no doubt that the Resurrection occupies the most prominent place in the preaching of the

Apostles, both at the outset and throughout the Epistles. The grand message of the Acts of the Apostles is that of a risen Christ, whether it be in the mouth of St. Peter or St. Paul. But, nevertheless, the circumstances of the Passion are narrated by the Evangelists with far more particularity than those of the Resurrection. The narratives of the Passion occupy a very considerable space, but those of the Resurrection occupy in St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke only one chapter, and in the two former but very brief ones. In St. John two chapters are devoted to the subject; but one of them is mainly the account of a special incident in our Lord's intercourse with His disciples after the Resurrection; and the account of the Resurrection itself is of the same brief character as that in the other Evangelists. This feature in the narratives has been made a ground of objection to the belief they proclaim, and it is urged that we ought to have been furnished with more detailed and circumstantial relations of an event of such supreme importance. But this objection springs from the supposition-a supposition unconsciously admitted too often by Christians themselves-that the actual rising from the grave, the mere fact of our Lord not having seen corruption, is the main fact to be substantiated. Sceptical writers, in dealing with the subject, fasten attention exclusively on this feature in it; they make it an

objection that no eye-witness had borne testimony to the resurrection itself-that no one actually saw our Saviour rise. They argue, in short, as if it were simply a past fact and an isolated one, with which we have to deal; and they complain that the Apostles and other disciples took no sufficient pains to afford satisfaction to the legitimate and necessary enquiries, which the report of so extraordinary an occurrence must occasion. must occasion. But the Evangelists, it will now be seen, approached the question from a very different point of view. The mere fact of our Saviour having left the grave was but a part, and comparatively a small part, in their view of the Resurrection. The essential part of the Resurrection was our Lord's re-appearance to His disciples in glorious form, and the fact that He was still living, as a Prince and Saviour to them. But of this great fact believers were assured, not only by the Apostles' report of His appearance to them, but by the daily evidences they had of His living power and grace. The fact of his having risen was in great measure substantiated to them by the most conspicuous records of early Christian life, and by their own experience. The events narrated in the Acts of the Apostles proved that the Lord was with His Church, and this fact was to them the most certain of all realities. The Evangelists did not write, therefore, to prove the Resurrection. They wrote under