ion to be
satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred, especially if he was a man
of St Paul's intellectual stature, would have at once examined into the
facts otherwise known, connected with the subject of what he had seen.
St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved our Lord's resurrection--had
disbelieved it fiercely and passionately; we should have expected that
he would at once have sought for those who could best have told him the
details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did nothing of the kind. He
went for a year into Arabia, and when at last he returned to Jerusalem,
he rather held aloof from those who had been our Lord's companions, and
who had witnessed his ascension. He saw Peter, he saw James; 'of the
rest of the apostles saw he none.' To him evidently the proof of the
resurrection was the vision which he had himself seen. It was to that
which he always referred when called on for a defence of his faith.

Of evidence for the resurrection, in the common sense of the word, there
may be enough to show that something extraordinary occurred; but not
enough, unless we assume the fact to be true on far other grounds, to
produce any absolute and unhesitating conviction; and inasmuch as the
resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be
something far different from that suspended judgment in which history
alone would leave us.

Human testimony, we repeat, under the most favourable circumstances
imaginable, knows nothing of 'absolute certainty;' and if historical
facts are bound up with the creed, and if they are to be received with
the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must
rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the divine witness
in ourselves. On human evidence the miracles of St. Teresa and St.
Francis of Assisi are as well established as those of the New Testament.

M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account of the Gospel story
which, written as it is by a man of piety, intellect, and imagination,
is spreading rapidly through the educated world. Carrying out the
principles with which Protestants have swept modern history clear of
miracles to their natural conclusions, he dismisses all that is
miraculous from the life of our Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the
original Galilean youth who lived and taught, and died in Palestine
eighteen hundred years ago. We have no intention of reviewing M. Renan.
He will be read soon enough by many who would