imony were preached from the first, and, if in preaching them,
the witnesses perverted the simple teaching of the Carpenter of
Nazareth, and ascribed to Him a character which He had not claimed,
and to His death a power of which He had not dreamed, they did so at
the very time when the impressions of His personality and teaching
were most recent and strong. It seems to me, apart altogether from
other considerations, that such a right-about-face movement on the
part of the early teachers of Christianity, is an absolute
impossibility, regard being had to the facts of the case, even if you
make much allowance for possible errors in the record.

But I would make another remark. If misapprehension came in, if these
men, in their unanimous declaration of Christ's death as the
Sacrifice for sin, were not fairly representing the conclusions
inevitable from the facts of Christ's life and death, and from His
own words, is it not an odd thing that the same misapprehension
affected them all? When people misconceive a teacher's doctrine, they
generally differ in the nature of their misconceptions, and split
into sections and parties. But here you have to account for the fact
that every man of them, with all their diversity of idiosyncrasy and
character, tumbled into the same pit of error, and that there was not
one of them left sane enough to protest. Does that seem to be a
likely thing?

And what about the worth of the teacher's teaching, that did not
guard its receivers from such absolute misapprehension as that? If
the whole Church unanimously mistook everything that Jesus Christ had
said to them, and unwarrantably made out of Him what they did, on
this hypothesis, I do not think that there is much left to honour or
admire in a teacher, whose teaching was so ambiguous, as that it led
all that received it into such an error as that into which, by the
supposition, they fell.

No, brethren; they were one, because their Gospel was the only
possible statement of the principles that underlay, and the
conclusions that flowed from, the plain facts of the life and the
teaching of Jesus Christ. I am not going to spend time in quoting His
own words. I can only refer to one or two of them very succinctly.
'Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.' 'As
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son
of Man be lifted up.' 'My flesh is the bread which I will give for
the life of the world.' 'The Son of