and
buried," because there is nothing in these statements difficult or
incredible, we reach the doctrine of His resurrection, "the third day
He rose from the dead," a doctrine next to that of the virgin birth in
natural difficulty of acceptance.

[Sidenote: Christ's Resurrection.]

[Sidenote: Surprise of Disciples.]

[Sidenote: The Fact Accounts for History.]

Faith in this seems to me to depend on how far we have accepted Christ's
Deity and His incarnation. If by the Holy Ghost we have been able "to
say that Jesus is the Lord;" if by that blessed energy we perceive His
Divine mastership; if by the same energy we feel that He has transformed
us into the image of His dear Son; raising us "from the death of sin
into the life of righteousness" it is not difficult to believe that
Jesus "the power of the Resurrection" rose from the dead. "The fact of
the Resurrection and belief in the fact is not explicable by any
antecedent conditions apart from its truth."[5] The disciples did not
expect what they saw. His death was for them so far as we can see,
without hope. They were not able yet to interpret His prophecy that He
would build again His temple, nor understand the spirituality of His
kingdom. These facts seem to me utterly to demolish the theory of a
vision called up by eager, yea, agonizing, expectation. The idea of the
Resurrection justifies His prophecies as to Himself and the fact
accounts, better than any theory which denies the fact, for the faith
and founding of the early Church as well as for the course of subsequent
history and of the believer's experience.

[Footnote 5: Westcott. The Revelation of the Risen Lord.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Slow Belief in Resurrection.]

It is much to see that belief became belief only with great difficulty.
The idea of the Resurrection was strange and alarming to the disciples.
"They were terrified and affrighted and supposed they beheld a spirit."
Slowly by tests of sense as well as by persuasions of teaching did the
disciples come to believe that the Christ of the Resurrection was the
same Christ who suffered on the cross.

[Sidenote: Not an Invention.]

[Sidenote: An Eye-witness Story.]

It seems impossible that the Resurrection could have been an invention
or that the account of it could be a work of the imagination. The last
is almost as great a miracle as the Resurrection itself. In detail, in
naturalness, even in the presence of d