In the midst of these varying and uncertain voices, Christ spoke
his authoritative message. There was no wavering in his tone.
What the Oriental philosophers were guessing, he revealed; what the
Hebrew prophets had foreshadowed in their holy writings, he
unfolded in full light. The ancient Vedic hymns, the oracles of
Greece, the Egyptian _Book of the Dead_, anticipating by two
thousand years the Hebrew exodus--all these are naught compared
with the words of that inspired 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.




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