lities
which that history creates.

Many, to whom the view here proposed seems not only new, but unwelcome,
and even revolutionary, may reasonably prefer to suspend judgment for
reflection; but meanwhile some further considerations may be
entertained.

1. Aside from the unwillingness to abandon a long-cherished belief on
any subject whatever, which is both a natural, and, when not pushed to
an unreasonable length, a desirable brake on all inconsiderate change,
no practical interest is threatened by the adoption of the view here
suggested. Religious interest, so far as it is also intelligent, is
certainly not threatened. The evidences of Jesus' divine character and
mission resting, as for modern men it rests, not on remote wonders, but
on now acknowledged facts of an ethical and spiritual kind, is
altogether independent of our conclusion whether it was from actual or
only apparent death that Lazarus was raised. Since all the mighty works
wrought by Jesus, and this among them, were identical in type with those
wrought by the ancient prophets, with whom his countrymen classed him in
his lifetime, their evidential significance could be, even for the
eye-witnesses at that tomb, no greater for him than for an
Elisha,--signs of a divine mission attesting itself by works of mercy.

2. As works of mercy these raisings from the "dead," including that of
Lazarus, rank far higher in the view of them here proposed than in the
traditional view. This regards them as the recall of departed spirits
from what is hoped to be "a better world." Yet this, while it turns
sorrow for a time into joy, involves not only the recurrence of that
sorrow in all its keenness, but also a second tasting of the pains
preliminary to the death-gate, when the time comes to pass that gate
again. But in the other view, a raising from the death that is only
simulated is a merciful deliverance from a calamity greater than simple
death, if that be any calamity at all,--the fate of burial alive. In the
former view, therefore, the quality of mercy, distinctive of the mighty
works of Jesus, is imperfectly demonstrable. In the present view, as the
rescue of the living from death in one of its most horrible forms, it is
abundantly conspicuous.

3. The onlookers by the tomb of Lazarus doubtless regarded his awakening
as revival from actual death. Their opinion, however, does not bind our
judgment any more than it is bound by the opinion of other onlookers,
that Je