My dear ——, My last letter broke off rather abruptly with a promise to do my best to set forth hereafter the Resurrection of Christ as it may be regarded from a natural point of view. Looking at the facts in this light, we have in the first place to set before ourselves the short life of One of whom we must merely say that He was unique in the goodness and grandeur of His character, and that He died with the unfulfilled purpose of redeeming mankind from sin, deserted for the moment by the few disciples who had adhered to Him almost to the last. He died, for the time, the most pitiable, the most despair-inspiring death that the world has ever witnessed, asking in His last moments why He had been “forsaken” by God. But His death—pardon me if I deviate for one moment from material to celestial facts, provided that I never deviate into miracles—was really the triumph over death, and His Spirit had in reality (we speak in a metaphor) broken open the bars of the grave and ascended to the throne of the Father carrying with Himself the promise of the ultimate redemption of mankind. This was now to be revealed to the world as the culminating vision in that continuous Revelation through the Imagination by which the minds of men had been led to look beyond this life to a life that knows no end. Speaking terrestrially, we must say that the influence of Jesus, love, faith, remorse, Here, by the way, we must note the remarkable prominence given in all the Gospels to the part played by women in receiving the first manifestations of Christ’s Resurrection. Writers who were careful to avoid giving occasion for unbelief might naturally have desired to give less prominence to the testimony of highly imaginative and impressionable witnesses; and indeed St. Paul, in his brief list of the appearances of Jesus (possibly because writing as an Apostle who had seen Christ, he desired to confine himself almost entirely to manifestations witnessed by Apostles), makes no mention of the appearances to women: their prominence, therefore, in all the Gospels, “Why did not the adversaries of Christ confront His followers by producing the body from the tomb, thus disproving the story that His body had risen from the dead?” The tomb was probably empty. That is probable for two reasons, first because the earliest traditions agree that the women going to the tomb found the stone How long the visionary period lasted we cannot tell. It is almost certain that there were many more visions than the five recorded by St. Paul (1 Cor. xv. 6, 7). At least one of St. Paul’s five visions, that to St. James, is not mentioned in any of our extant Gospels; on the other hand St. Paul omits some of those peculiar to the third or fourth Gospels, as well as the manifestations to the women. Perhaps the visions were so many, and all so like each other, that the Church found it difficult to select which to record; and each Evangelist chose those which appeared to him fittest, either because they were the earliest, or because the witnesses were numerous, or because they were apostolic, or because they contained the most striking proof of a veritable resurrection. We may therefore easily accept the statement that the period of visions lasted for forty days or even for a much longer Concerning Christ’s manifestation to St. Paul I have said enough in my last letter—if anything needed to be said—to shew that it must have been of the nature of a vision, and (in a sense) “subjective.” But it differs from the rest in that it was made to an enemy while the other manifestations were made to devoted disciples. Love, remorse, faith, affection, stimulated the Apostles to cry, “He cannot have died,” and prepared their souls to see the image of Jesus risen; but where, it may be asked, was the spiritual preparation in the heart of St. Paul to receive such a vision? You may trace it in the words which St. Paul heard from Jesus: “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” They shew that the future Apostle had been struggling, and struggling hard, against the compunctions of conscience. Being a lover of truth from his childhood, he was prepared to give up all for its sake; but recent events had made him ask whether he was not fighting against the truth instead of for the truth. He had been persecuting the Christians; but their faith and patience had made him doubt whether they might not be right and he wrong. When the first martyr Stephen looked up to heaven and there saw Jesus seated at the right hand of God, then or soon afterwards, the question must have arisen in the mind of the persecutor, “What if the follower of the Nazarene was speaking truth? What if the crucified Jesus whom I am now persecuting was really exalted to God’s throne?” Such was the struggle through which Saul’s mind was passing when the Spirit of Jesus, acting indirectly through the constancy and faith of His persecuted disciples, having first insensibly permeated and undermined the barriers of Pharisaic training and education, now swept all obstacles before it in an instantaneous deluge of conviction that this But I think I hear you saying, “All this sounds well; but he has repeatedly described these visions of the risen Saviour as subjective: how then can he call them real? What is real?” Let me refer you to the paper of Definitions which I enclosed in a previous letter. 1. Absolute reality cannot be comprehended by men, and can only be apprehended as God, or in God, by Faith. 2. Among objects of sensation, those are (relatively) real which present similar sensations in similar circumstances. Now if you try to regard the manifestation of the risen Christ under the second head, as an “object of sensation,” you must pronounce it “unreal,” inasmuch as it would not “present similar sensations in similar circumstances;” by which I mean that, with similar opportunities of observation, different persons (believers, for example, and unbelievers) would not have derived similar sensations from it. But your conclusion would be false because you started from a false premise: these manifestations cannot be classed “among objects of sensation.” The movements of the risen Saviour appear to me to have been the movements of God; His manifestations to the faith of the Apostles were divine acts, passing direct from God to the souls of men. Since therefore these manifestations belonged to the class of things which “can only be apprehended as God, or in God, by faith,” I call them “absolute realities”—as much more real than flesh and blood, as God Himself is more real than the paper on which I am now writing. |