You
have not seen. You have never beheld with your bodily eyes, or
touched with your bodily hand, as St. Thomas did, the Lord Jesus
Christ. And yet you may be more blessed now, this day, than St.
Thomas was then. We are too apt to fancy, that, to have seen the
Lord with our eyes, to have walked with him, and talked with him, as
the apostles did, was the greatest honour and blessing which could
happen to man. We fancy, perhaps, at times, that if the Lord Jesus
were to come visibly among us now, we should want nothing more to
make us good: that we could not help listening to him, obeying him,
loving him.

But the Scriptures prove to us that it was not so. The Scribes and
Pharisees saw him and talked with him; yet they hated him. Judas
Iscariot, yet he betrayed him. Pilate, yet he condemned him. The
word preached profited them nothing, not being mixed with faith in
those who heard him. Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, came and
preached himself to them; declared to them who he was, proved who he
was by his mighty works of love and mercy, and by fulfilling all the
prophecies of Scripture which spoke of him; and yet they did not
believe him, they hated him, they crucified him; because they had no
faith.

You see, therefore, that something more than seeing him with our
bodily eyes is wanted to make us believe in the Lord Jesus Christ;
something more than seeing him with our bodily eyes is wanted to
make us blessed. St. Thomas saw him; St. Thomas was allowed, by the
boundless condescension and mercy of the Lord Jesus, to put his hand
into his side. And yet the Lord does not say to him,--See how
blessed thou art; see how honoured thou art, by being allowed to
touch me. No; our Lord rather rebukes him for requiring such a
proof.

There are those who will not believe without seeing; who say, I must
have proof. What I hear in church is too much for me to believe
without many more reasons than are given for it all. Many people,
for instance, stumble at the stumbling-block of the cross, and
cannot bring themselves to believe that God would condescend to
suffer and to die for men. Others cannot make up their minds about
the resurrection. It seems to them a strange and impossible thing
that Jesus' body should have risen from the grave and ascended to
heaven, and that our bodies should rise also. That was the great
puzzle to the Greeks, who thought themselves very learned and
cunning, and were great arguers and