and it is absurd to think of it as being shared by a multitude like
the Early Church. Nations have said, 'Our King is not dead--he is
gone away and he will come back.' Loving disciples have said, 'Our
Teacher lives in solitude and will return to us.' But this is no
parallel to these. This is not a fond imagination giving an apparent
substance to its own creation, but sense recognising first the fact,
'He _is_ dead,' and then, in opposition to expectation, and when hope
had sickened to despair, recognising the astounding fact, 'He liveth
that was dead'; and to suppose that that should have been the rooted
conviction of hundreds of men who were not idiots, finds no parallel
in the history of human illusions, and no analogy in such legends as
those to which I have referred.

It was not a myth, for a myth does not grow in ten years. And there
was no motive to frame one, if Christ was dead and all was over. It
was not a deceit, for the character of the men, and the character of
the associated morality, and the obvious absence of all self-
interest, and the persecutions and sorrows which they endured, make
it inconceivable that the fairest building that ever hath been reared
in the world, and which is cemented by men's blood, should be built
upon the mud and slime of a conscious deceit!

And all this we are asked to put aside at the bidding of a glaring
begging of the whole question, and an outrageous assertion which no
man that believes in a God at all can logically maintain, viz. that
no testimony can reach to the miraculous, or that miracles are
impossible.

No testimony reach to the miraculous! Well, put it into a concrete
form. Can testimony not reach to this: 'I know, because I saw, that a