But since

at the hands of His countrymen. the rising again and reappearance of Christ after His death had been the prominent feature in St. Paul's teaching which had excited the opposition of his Jewish antagonists, he must be understood in this appeal to the judge upon the bench at least to include it among the events which had happened in the broad light of day, and in the view of a large body of witnesses. Now when we think of the treatment to which the evidence for this crowning miracle of God has been subjected in our own day, we may draw some lessons from this admission, by a contemporary opponent, of Christ's claims, and of the publicity and absence of attempt at concealment which attended the last days of His life on earth. And be it noticed, that in addressing his fellow Jews, it is always the fact of Christ's resurrection that the Apostle insists upon; not the à priori likelihood of a resurrection. With the Jews the latter method of approaching the subject would have had little weight. It was a quarrel between the Pharisees and Sadducees which interrupted the Apostle's address, and led to his imprisonment, and the incident of our text; but the difference between them was not speculative, but historical. The

written law of Moses is silent on the subject of a life beyond the grave; even when the sanction of future rewards seemed most necessary to his government, the great lawgiver never calls in its assistance. The orthodox Jew, in the time of Christ, did not find a difficulty in this circumstance, because he believed in an oral law, handed down through scribes and lawyers from the ancient time; and this oral law contained. the missing doctrine. The Pharisee believed in a resurrection of every human being. His opponent, the Sadducee, repudiated the oral law, and with it the doctrine which Paul was everywhere preaching. The issue between Pharisee and Sadducee was not one of feeling; it was not that one found immortality a truth necessary for his moral being, and the other did not. It was a dry question of orthodoxy; but those who have watched the progress of ecclesiastical history, or note the signs of the times, will not be surprised that even on a question like this the passions and prejudices of party ran very high indeed. It was to the speculative and metaphysical Greek in the Corinthian Church that the Apostle addressed the great argument of the fifteenth chapter of his first Epistle, and used the analogy of the germinating corn to show that

God can renew life in ways as miraculous as that of the bodily resurrection which he enforced. But in this same chapter, remember, he begins by establishing the fact, before he deals with the arguments for and against its reasonableness. "For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures." And he then proceeds to enumerate the different occasions on which the Saviour appeared to His disciples after His resurrection, The Apostle, observe, nowhere opens the question of whether Christ had really risen. His leading argument is as follows:-"How can you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? For if there is none, then Christ could not have risen. But Christ did rise. Therefore there is a resurrection." And in the passage immediately before us, it is only in appearance that St. Paul seems to propose the resurrection to Festus and Agrippa as an open question. The English version is, "Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead?" but the translation is one of those instances of inaccurate scholarship which we

may hope to see one day corrected in our Authorized Version. It should be thus, or to this effect: "If God raises the dead" (as He doesthat is to say, for it is a statement, not a hypothesis), "why is the fact pronounced by you to be incredible?"

The fact that Christ has risen from the dead. This, with St. Paul, is the assumption on which he builds up all his teaching on the subject. I think, my brethren, it is time that we should consider more carefully than we have been in the habit of doing what is involved in this. There are signs that modern religious thought stands in need of the invigorating influence of the facts on which Christian theology is constructed. The treatment of religious subjects by the more thoughtful of the orthodox party is in danger of degenerating into sentiment, for want of a reliance upon the significance of facts. When the backbone of historic truth is wanting, doctrine invariably tends to limpness, and infirmity of step. There are two causes which have produced this result. There is, first, the reaction. against the school of Paley and the evidencewriters. In the well-known work of Paley, the proof of the truth of Christianity, and its claims upon the implicit assent of mankind, were re

presented as resting upon the truth of its historical incidents; and the truth of those incidents was deduced from a balance of probabilities. "It was more probable than not, that men who gave up their lives in the cause of Christ were not impostors. The evidence of certain miraculous Bible incidents was at least as strong as that on which we unhesitatingly accept the historical facts of other times." Paley ignored, because it was no part of his object to take into account, the moral and spiritual evidence for Christianity-its suitability to the wants and desires of the soul of man. He was answering, or trying to answer, the school of Hume. It is not difficult to underrate Paley by overlooking the aim and the limits of his design. But it was inevitable that when any great spiritual awakening occurred in the body of the Church to which he belonged, his evidences would have little to do with it, and would weigh very little with those who felt its power, except so far as it pleases the adherent of a faith to find that evidences which do not weigh with himself yet aid another in arriving at the same conclusions. But the very occurrence of a revival, like the Evangelical movement of the beginning of this century, means the discovery of an evidence for