ideas out into this large place, that he and they recognise that the
Jew had no exclusive possession of Messiah's blessings, and that
these blessings consisted in no external kingdom, but lay mainly and
primarily in His 'turning every one of you from your iniquities.' At
one time the Apostles stood upon a gross, low, carnal level, and in a
few weeks they were, at all events, feeling their way to, and to a
large extent had possession of, the most spiritual and lofty aspects
of Christ's mission. What did that?

Something had come in between which wrought more, in a short space,
than all the three years of Christ's teaching and companionship had
done for them. What was it? Why did they not continue in the mood
which two of them are reported to have been in, after the
Crucifixion, when they said--'It is all up! we trusted that this had
been He,' but the force of circumstances has shivered the confidence
into fragments, and there is no such hope left for us any longer.
What brought them out of that Slough of Despond?

I would put it to any fair-minded man whether the psychological facts
of this sudden maturing of these childish minds, and their sudden
change from slinking cowards into heroes who did not blanch before
the torture and the scaffold, are accountable, if you strike out the
Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost? It seems to me that, for
the sake of avoiding a miracle, the disbelievers in the Resurrection
accept an impossibility, and tie themselves to an intellectual
absurdity. And I for one would rather believe in a miracle than
believe in an uncaused change, in which the Apostles take exactly the
opposite course from that which they necessarily must have taken, if
there had not been the facts that the New Testament asserts that
there were, Christ's rising again from the dead, and Ascension.