reaped from belief in the Crucified on this score. We are at a loss to discover in any one point what secondary motive can, with any show of probability, be attributed to the first believers, as predisposing them to their belief, if the motive was not a simple and sincere conviction of its truth. And yet if so, the difficulty becomes still greater in _assuming_ that what they believed was not the truth, but a flagrant lie. For it must ever be remembered that it _is_ an assumption after all. It is certainly not less difficult to _prove_ in the face of all the evidence that Christ did not rise, than it is to _prove_ upon that evidence that He did. If the result of the whole argument in the one case is a _presumption_, it most assuredly is not less so in the other. Once more, it cannot for one moment be asserted that the Epistle to the Romans originated in any way the faith which it assumes. It is absurd to suppose that an unknown man merely on the credit of his reputation could have substantially modified the belief of a particular Church by simply inditing a letter to it. The state of things assumed at Rome, and the faith depicted in the Epistle to the Romans, are only intelligible on the supposition that they are true. It is obvious that the body of the writer's faith was substantially identical with that of those to whom he was writing. Both were attached to a particular person whom they believed to be the Son of God, who had been crucified, dead, and buried, had risen again, and was then sitting at the right hand of God as an intercessor.[130] And more than that, both believed that this person was the giver of a new Spirit which influenced both, and animated all believers, and made them all one, and was not only the evidence to them of the actual truth and resurrection of Christ, but was also the pledge that they themselves were accepted in a new relation to God by Christ.[131] This gift of the new Spirit was the invisible bond between them and Christ, between them and one another, between them and the Macedonian Christians, between them and the brethren of Corinth, between them and St. Paul himself.