ples. From every man who professes
respect for Christ's character, and for the morality which he and his
apostles taught, we demand a straightforward answer to the questions:
"When he declared himself the Son of God, the Judge of the living and
the dead, did he tell the truth, or did he lie? When he promised to
attest his divine commission by rising from the dead on the third day,
had he any such power, or did he only mean to play a juggling imposture?
Is Jesus the Christ the Son of the Living God, or a deceiver?" There is
no middle ground. He that is not with him is against him.

The case is just the same with regard to the witnesses of his miracles,
death, and resurrection. They either give a true relation of these
things, or they have manufactured a series of falsehoods. How can we
believe anything from persons so habituated to lying as the narrators of
the mighty works of Jesus must be, if those mighty works never were
performed? How can we accept their code of morals if we refuse to
believe them when they speak of matters of fact? Is it possible to
respect men as moral teachers, whom we have convicted of forging stories
of miracles that never occurred, and confederating together to impose a
lying superstition on the world? For this is plainly the very point and
center of the question about the truth of the Bible, and I am anxious
you should see it clearly. A fair statement of this question is half the
argument. The question then is simply this, Was Jesus really the Divine
Person he claimed to be, or was he a blasphemous impostor? When the
apostles unitedly and solemnly testified that they had seen him after he
was risen from the dead, that they ate and drank with him, that their
hands had handled his body, that they conversed with him for forty days,
and that they saw him go up to heaven, did they tell the truth or were
they a confederated band of liars? There is no reason for any other
supposition. They could not possibly be deceived themselves in the
matters they relate. They knew perfectly whether they were true or not.
We are not talking about matters of dogma, about which there might be
room for difference of opinion, but about matters of fact--about what
men say they saw, and heard, and felt--about which no man of common
sense could possibly be mistaken. "That which we have seen with our
eyes, which we have heard, which we have looked upon, and our hands have
handled of the Word of life * * * that which we hav