Let us take, then, what I am about to say as facts which have been hitherto undisputed. There have been, and there are, unbelievers in plenty of the Christian truth and Church, but no one has, I believe, hitherto been found to deny that Christ was put to death by Pontius Pilate at the instigation of the Chief Priest and the Sanhedrim. Let us take this as a fact, and put ourselves in thought at the great Sabbath during which His Body rested in the tomb. It is the Body of one executed with the greatest ignominy, between two thieves, by a most cruel death, under the authority of the Roman governor, upon the charge that He claimed a kingship which interfered with that of the emperor, at the instigation of those who rejected His claim to be their Messias, the Son of God. His Body, even when dead, ceases not to be under the jurisdiction of the Roman governor, who commits its custody to His chief enemies, those whose instigation has brought about His death. Their seal is set upon His tomb, and their guards watch it. Taking these bare facts, as acknowledged by friend and foe, can any situation of more complete impotence be conceived by human imagination than this? He has come, and taught, and worked miracles, and been rejected by His own. He has been put to death in the name and by the power of the world's lord, who bears the crown of majesty and wields the authority of worship. The guards of His enemies sit beside His tomb. Such was the fact on the great Sabbath, the high day of the Jewish Pasch. What can be conceived more improbable at that moment, and under these circumstances, than the fact which we have now to record as following in its evolution during so many ages? The sovereign in whose name and by whose power that Body had been put to death held undisputed in his hands the supremacy of Spiritual as well as Civil Power through the great world of Gentilism, represented by the Roman empire. From that Body was to spring, beginning with the morrow, the distinction and independence of the Spiritual over against the Civil Power, which was to dissolve this twofold supremacy throughout the whole range of that empire. And this was to be accomplished by a series of actions arising out of the sole proclamation of envoys taken from the people which had rejected Him—a proclamation derived from the commission which He should give in the Body raised again to life. The distinction, indeed, of the two Powers, so far from being new, has been coeval with the human race itself, as we have seen; but it has been broken down by human sin in all nations but one, and that one, created for its maintenance, made, through all its history, prophetical for its fulfilment when the time of that fulfilment came, has rejected its Bearer; and yet out of its bosom, on the morrow, is to go forth that word of power which in the end shall change the condition of human society, and create it after another order.