text, though I know, better than any of you can tell me, how sure my
treatment of them is to enfeeble rather than enforce them, because I,
for my poor part, feel that there are few things which we, all of us,
people and ministers, need more than to catch some of the infection
of this courageous confidence, and to be fired with some spark of
Paul's enthusiasm for, and glorying in, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I ask you, then, to consider three things: (1) what Paul thought was
the Gospel? (2) what Paul thought the Gospel was? and (3) what he
felt about the Gospel?

I. What Paul thought was the Gospel?

He has given to us in his own rapid way a summary statement,
abbreviated to the very bone, and reduced to the barest elements, of
what he meant by the Gospel. What was the irreducible minimum? The
facts of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as you will find
written in the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the
Corinthians. So, then, to begin with, the Gospel is not a statement
of principles, but a record of facts, things that have happened in
this world of ours. But the least part of a fact is the visible part
of it, and it is of no significance unless it has explanation, and so
Paul goes on to bind up with the facts an explanation of them. The
mere fact that Jesus, a young Nazarene, was executed is no more a
gospel than the other one, that two brigands were crucified beside
Him. But the fact that could be seen, plus the explanation which
underlies and interprets it, turns the chronicle into a gospel, and
the explanation begins with the name of the Sufferer; for if you want
to understand His death you must understand who it was that died. His
death is a thought pathetic in all aspects, and very precious in