In this connection, it is interesting to consider one sentence dropped by the sacred chronicler. He tells us, that when Herod heard of the works of Jesus, he said immediately, "It is John the Baptist--he is risen from the dead." Herod could not believe that that mighty personality was quenched, even for this life, by that one blow of the executioner's sword. Surely he had risen! There was a feverish dread that he would yet be confronted by the murdered man, whose face haunted his dreams. His courtiers, ready to take the monarch's cue, would be equally credulous. From one to another the surmise would pass--"John the Baptist is risen from the dead." Why, then, did that myth not spread, until it became universally accredited? Ah, there was no chance of such a thing, for the simple reason that there was the grave of John the Baptist to disprove it. If Herod had seriously believed it, or the disciples of John attempted to spread it, nothing would have been easier than to exhume the body from its sepulture, and produce the ghastly but indubitable refutation of the royal delusion. When the statement began to spread and gain credence that Christ had risen from the dead; when Peter and John stood up and affirmed that He was living at the right hand of God; if it had been a mere surmise, the fond delusion of loyal and faithful hearts, an hallucination of two or three hysterical women--would it not have been easy for the enemies of Christianity to go forthwith to the grave in the garden of Joseph, and produce the body of the Crucified, with the marks of the nails in hands and feet? Why did they not do it? If it be said that it could not be produced, because it had been taken away, let this further question be answered: Who had taken it away? Not his friends; for they would have taken the cerements and wrappings with which Joseph and Nicodemus had enswathed it. Not his enemies; for they would have been only too glad to produce it. What glee in the grim faces of Caiaphas and Annas, if at the meeting of the Sanhedrim, called to deal with the new heresy, there could have been given some irrefragable proof that the body of Jesus was still sepulchred, if not in Joseph's tomb, yet somewhere else, to which their emissaries had conveyed it!