And this brings us to the second important point in the original attitude of Christianity, and the manner in which it moved the moral world. This point is the historical foundation on which the moral appeal stood; and this historical foundation was the miraculous life, death, and resurrection of the Founder of the ethical religion. It concerns us not to inquire here, whether Christ was a real person, or, as certain Germans with their ingenious whimsicality will have it, a mere myth; as little need we ask whether the miracles were really suspensions of the laws of nature, or were mere acts of remarkable power somewhat exaggerated by the wondering narrators; much less can it be necessary for the present argument to weigh the evidence for the great crowning miracle of the resurrection. Concerning these matters, every man must either judge for himself or take the authority of nearly two thousand years of effective Christian teaching as a sufficient guarantee. But what we have to do with here is simply this: that these facts were believed, that the Apostles stood upon these facts, and that the ethical efficiency of Christianity was rooted in these facts. Take the facts away, or the assured belief in the facts, and the existence of such an ethico-religious society as the Christian Church becomes, under the circumstances, impossible. Consider what an effect the personality of Socrates had in establishing what we with no great license of language may call the Socratic Church in Athens. The various schools of philosophy, first in Athens and then in Rome, were sects of that Church. Had Socrates not lived and died {200} with visible power and effect before men, the existence of these schools, fathered by this great teacher, would have been impossible. A person is the necessary nucleus round which all social organisms form themselves. But the personality of Socrates was a much less important element in the formation of the Socratic schools than that of Christ was in the formation of the Christian Church. Socrates was only a teacher--one who, like other teachers, might in time create disciples as wise, perhaps wiser than, himself; Christ was a redeemer, whose function as such could be performed by no vicar, and transmitted to no successor: the one was a help and a guide, the other a foundation of faith and a fountain of life. Socrates taught his disciples to become independent of him, and rely on their own perfected reason; from Christ His disciples always derive nourishment, as the branches from the vine. And if the relation of Christ to His disciples, conceived only as a living Saviour walking on the earth, was so much closer than that of Socrates to his disciples, how much more intimate does the relation become, when He who lived and died to redeem humanity from sin rose from the dead as a living guarantee that all who walked in His ways, should follow up their redemption from sin by a speedy victory over that yet stronger enemy.