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sepulchre, the entrance of which was closed with a large stone. But those who propound the above theory cannot help admitting that a sepulchre hewn in a rock was a most unlikely place for a man who had been crucified, to recover from a swoon which could be mistaken for death; but, even if this is conceded to be a possibility, they are met with the insuperable difficulty of a man in this wounded and exhausted condition being able to get out of a place, the doorway of which was closed by a large stone, and then succeeding in taking refuge in the house of a friend, and there hiding himself from the eyes of his inveterate foes.”

But Jesus disappears from history after the resurrection; hence he must have died soon afterwards, and he must have been kept in close concealment after he left the grave. Again, if his followers had access to him in his concealment, "It would have been impossible for them to have mistaken a wounded man's gradual recovery for a resurrection; or one dying from exhaustion, for the Messiah of Jewish expectation. On the other hand, if his followers never saw him, the idea that they should have believed that he was risen from the dead, and on the strength of that belief should have proceeded to reconstruct the church on the basis of his resurrection, and that they should have succeeded in accomplishing it, is far more incredible than the belief that all the miracles recorded in the Bible were actual occurrences."

Coming now to Renan's theory of visions; it must be said that those who propound this theory must not only account for the origin of this belief in Christ's resurrection, as a mere belief, but also for the erection of the church on the basis of this belief. There is probably not an instance on record in the world's history of a man who affirmed that he had seen and conversed with another after he was dead, "Not as spirit, but in bodily reality." The old pagans would have scoffed at such an idea. In the case of Christ, however, several persons must have believed that they saw the risen Jesus within a few days or weeks after his crucifixion; and what is more, conversed with him, separately and in companies. "There are three necessary conditions of hallucinations, "prepossessions, fixed idea, and expectancy." Now if we examine the disciples of Christ with reference to these three conditions, we get a result exactly opposite to that which the advocates of the vision theory require.

"1. Their prepossessions were all in favor of a Messiah visibly ruling and reigning, and most adverse to the idea of a crucified one. The very idea of a crucifixion dashed in

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EARLY BELIEF IN THE RESURRECTION UNIVERSAL.

pieces their dearest hopes. Their prepossessions therefore ran directly counter to what this theory requires that they should have been, to have produced the requisite mental hallucinations.

2. Such fixed ideas as they possessed, instead of producing a visionary set of instructions from their risen Master, to reconstruct the church on the basis of his spiritual messiahship, would have infallibly led them to visions in conformity with the old Jewish messianic conception. If a fixed idea ever produces visions in credulous minds, these visions will certainly be on the lines of their old ideas, and will not generate new ones.

3. Of expectancy of a resurrection, the followers of Jesus certainly had none. "It must also be remembered that all the while these visions were being seen, his dead body must have been at hand in the grave, in the custody of either his friends or his foes. There must have been not one vision, but several; the disciples must have seen these visions, not only singly and in solitude, but in bodies." Paul's testimony in the xv. chapter of 1-Cor. is conclusive on this point.

'The church was reconstructed on this belief shortly after the crucifixion. This was not a belief in common ghost stories; it was a belief which had an energy and power sufficient to reconstruct the church in the face of the greatest difficulties and perils. It was therefore no sentimental belief, entertained by individuals who did nothing in consequence of it, but one which sustained the weight of an institution which has endured for eighteen centuries of time, and has acted more powerfully on mankind than any other known to history. This belief went on spreading, until within less than seventy years it had firmly established itself in all the great cities of the Roman empire, and had shown itself capable of enduring the test of martyrdom." What has the whole mass of ghost stories, marvels and spiritualism done to reform the world? We have heard much in these modern days of spiritualism and its wonders; has there any great institution been erected on its basis, or is there any probability that there ever will? Are mankind, or any portion of them, the better or the wiser for its disclosures? To these questions there can be but one answer." Christianity, however has blessed and is blessing the world.

We might refer again to the remarkable accuracy of the New Testament writers, as shown in Chapter Fourth, as a proof of the truthfulness of these narratives. This, notwithstanding the great and rapid changes which came over the country,

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and the mixed condition of the whole civilization at this period. The closest scrutiny does not discover a single mistake in these writings with reference to the political condition of Palestine, generally, or to the Roman authorities, or to the Jewish rulers and customs, or to the condition of the Jewish people, or to the condition of the surrounding Greek and Roman world. We read the fierce denunciation of the pharisees and rulers which Christ gave, and we turn to Josephus' history and read their counterpart. He says,— Wars of the Jews vii. 8, 1,-The period had become so prolific in iniquity, of every description among the Jews that no work of evil was left unperpetrated, so universal was the contagion, both in public and in private, and such the emulation to surpass each other in acts of impiety towards God and of injustice towards their neighbors."""

Again, in his Antiquities, xx. 3, 8, "Such was the impudence and boldness that had seized on the high priests that they had the impudence to send their servants into the threshing floors to take away those tithes that were due the priests, insomuch that it so fell out that the poorer sort of priests died for want."

We find abundant testimony to a wide spread expectation of the coming of a deliverer, not only among the Jews but among the surrounding nations, which corresponds to the narrative of the New Testament writers. Josephus testifies to this expectation among the Jews; Tacitus affirms that it was general in the Roman empire. Seutonius gays,-" Oct." 94; "Vesp." 4, "For a long time there had been a rumor in circulation throughout the Orient that one rising out of Judea was destined to sway the world."

Again, when we examine Paul's and Luke's allusions to the names of the Roman officials in the various provinces of the empire, in the light of the Roman historians, we find every one of them correct, notwithstanding the fact that there was a very great variety of title, and that it was constantly changing in the different places.

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Dr. G. F. Maclear has well said in his Historical Allusions of the New Testament Scriptures" pages 60, 61. "In all literature there is no other instance of the existence of a number of separate and independent documents bound up in a single volume, relating to a historical period, which had its records, its archives, and its monuments, and purporting to give an account of contemporaneous events, that can be shown to teem with such minute and truthful incidental allusions to facts, at first sight of the most insigni

182 THE N. T. AND THE BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES COMPARED.

ficant import, but which on examination are found to have momentous bearing on those events. Every quotation from Josephus, Tacitus, or Suetonius, every fresh archæological exploration in Palestine, Asia Minor, or Greece, only serves to illustrate the minute accuracy with which their titles are given to Roman procurators, and pro-consuls, Greek Politarchs and Asiatic ædiles, and to demonstrate the fidelity with which dual systems of government, of military forces, of capital punishment, of language, and of religious life are described as blended together and coexisting side by side, at the only period when that coexistence was possible, among the strangest of all strange people, the Jewish nation, whether living in its own land or scattered throughout the Roman empire."

Again, the greatness, the purity and the success of Christianity, all bear witness to the truth of the records which contain its principles; such a system does not come from fraud or falsehood.

When we compare the writings of the New Testament with the Buddhist scriptures, we find a great difference. Buddha lived nearly six hundred years B.C. His teachings were not collected and written till a century and a half after his death. The miscellaneous stories about his birth cannot be traced back of the Christian era; the oldest writings concerning him were not written till after the Christian era. There is written in the later Buddhist books much that resembles Christ, but that was not written till hundreds of years after Christ, and it was unquestionably borrowed from Christianity, which entered India in the apostolic age, or soon after. Buddhism, as we saw in a previous chapter, is a diligent borrower and engrafter from every other religion with which it comes in contact. The miracles recorded as performed by the Buddha are entirely different in kind, from those performed by Christ. Christ's miracles always had a purpose; Buddha's miracles were merely arbitrary exercises of power. The character of the contents of the two scriptures, and their results upon their followers are in still more striking contrast. Moncure D. Conway, who before going to India had read Arnold's "Light of Asia," and expected to find a system which would rival if not excel Christianity, wrote back from the centre on India, in perfect disgust saying, that these systems were "A vast jungle of rotting religions." See page 110.

Those nations where the other religions have held sway stood still, or deteriorated for thousands of years. It is only

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those who hold to the truth of the books of the Bible and practice its doctrines, which are happy, progressive and prosperous. A few years since at the meeting of the British Scientific Association, a company of 617 scientific men passed a declaration that "It is a perversion of science to cast doubt upon the scriptures." About one hundred years ago, a company of eminent men, opposed to Christianity were met, as was their wont, in Paris to attack the Bible. Diderot said to them, "I defy any of you to compose a historical tale so ingenuous, and at the same time so sublime, so touching and so fitted to produce such a deep and lasting impression for centuries to come as the gospel relation of Christ's sufferings and death.

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The external and internal evidence for the truthfulness of the books of the New Testament, when taken together, is overwhelming; we must consider them to be worthy of our credence.