spired Teacher who spoke in Palestine.

In addition, Christ was himself the vital evidence of the
resurrection which he taught. Against the assaults of doubt his
unique teachings are buttressed forevermore by his own return from
the land of silence. In a short week after his words to Martha at
Bethany he had become, through his own rare experience, the
resurrection and the life. Not the dead Buddha, nor the departed
Zoroaster, nor the vanished Pythagoras ever came back through the
opened door of the sepulcher, wearing the grave clothes of those
who sleep. Human fancy had never dreamed of such a rapturous
denouement for faiths other than Christianity. The resurrection of
the Lord is the crowning narrative with which the Gospels close.
It is a risen Christ who repairs the wastage of human decay and
death. A voice above all those from Ind or Persia or the Nile
speaks henceforth in Judaea and the world concerning immortality.
The superlative Easter argument is the risen Christ himself.

I

A ROMAN QUEST

"If one might only have a guide to the truth."--_Seneca_.

On Scopus, the high mountain north of Jerusalem, the Roman camp was
pitched, that last autumn in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. A
few years further on, if the warriors of the Emperor Tiberius could
then have foreseen the future, Titus was to quarter his famous
legions on that vantage point; and from its elevation he was to
hurl himself as a resistless battering ram against the Holy City.
But, on this autumn day, when these chronicles begin, no blare of
trumpets was summoning the Roman soldiery to arms; only the feet of
the camp sentinels, as they walked their appointed rounds, broke
the quiet of the sunlit afternoon.

That lithesome, cultivated, serious-minded young knight, Quintus
Cornelius Benignus, is standing on the height which overlooks the
great metropolis. He is the son of Marcus Cornelius Magnus, that
Roman noble who is the intimate associate of the reigning Caesar,
and who has been a luxurious resident on the Palatine Hill since
his distinguished proconsulship in Africa.

* * * * *

NOTE.--It is not from any time-marked Hebrew roll that this story
of Quintus is now taken. He was of Roman blood, and his record is,
rather, to be found in the Latin literature of his time. Well it
is when some new leaf is discovered among the musty folios,
reciting the saintly character and the triumphs of those who lived