I am not saying whether these facts were enough to have convinced them, nor even whether the alleged miracles were true. All that I am concerned with is that, so far as we know, neither Gamaliel nor any of his tribe had ever made the slightest attempt to inquire into them, but had, without examination, complacently treated them as lies. All that body of evidence had been absolutely ignored. And now he is, with his 'ifs,' posing as very calm and dispassionate. So to-day it is fashionable to doubt, to hang up most of the Christian truths in the category of uncertainties. (_a_) When that is the fashion, we need to be on our guard. (_b_) If you doubt, have you ever taken the pains to examine? (_c_) If you doubt, you are bound to go further, and either reach belief or rejection. Doubt is not the permanent condition for a man. The central truth of Christianity is either to be received or rejected. II. Here is disbelief masquerading as suspension of judgment. Gamaliel talked as if he did not know, or had not decided in his own mind, whether the disciples' claims for their Master were just or not. But the attitude of impartiality and hesitation was the cover of rooted unbelief. He speaks as if the alternative was that either this 'counsel and work' was 'of man' or 'of God.' But he would have been nearer the truth if he had stated the antithesis--God or devil; a glorious truth or a hell-born lie. If Christ's work was not a revelation from above, it was certainly an emanation from beneath. We sometimes hear disbelief, in our own days, talking in much the same fashion. Have we never listened to teachers who first of all prove to their own satisfaction that Jesus is a myth, that all the gospel story is unreliable, and all the gospel message a dream, and then turn round and overflow in praise of Him and in admiration of it? Browning's professor in _Christmas Day_ first of all reduces 'the pearl of price' to dust and ashes, and then 'Bids us, when we least expect it, Take back our faith--if it be not just whole, Yet a pearl indeed, as his tests affect it.' And that is very much the tone of not a few very superior persons to-day. But let us have one thing or the other--a Christ who was what He claimed to be, the Incarnate Word of God, who died for our sins and rose again for our justification; or a Galilean peasant who was either a visionary or an impostor, like Judas of Galilee and Theudas. III. Here is success turned into a criterion of truth. It is such, no doubt, in the long run, but not till then, and so till the end it is utterly false to argue that a thing is true because multitudes think it to be so. The very opposite is more nearly true. It in usually minorities who have been right. Gamaliel laid down an immoral principle, which is only too popular to-day, in relation to religion and to much else. IV. Here is a selfish neutrality pretending to be judicial calmness.