Now it must be admitted that in this alone and by itself, if it was not true, there is nothing that can be discovered which is adequate to the production of results so remarkable. When it is asserted that the death of Jesus Christ is surpassed in excellence and sublimity by any other death, the one question that suggests itself is, If this be so, how is it that the results which followed that death were not more remarkable than or so remarkable as those which followed the death of Jesus? This is a simple fact that no criticism or scepticism can destroy, that the preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the first thirty years afterwards did produce results, as testified by these Epistles, which are simply unparalleled in the history of the world. If the death was not a real death, or the resurrection not a true resurrection, then the responsibility must rest upon us of discovering some other explanation sufficient to account for effects which are too palpable to be ignored, and can assuredly be accounted for on this supposition, but have not yet been adequately accounted for on any other. It is no part of my present design, and time would fail me, to enlarge upon all the points in which the history of the Gospels is confirmed by these Epistles. I am not now concerned to establish the credibility of the Gospels, but only the general credibility of the Gospel history; and therefore it may suffice to say that we find St. Paul and the Romans believing that Jesus Christ "was made of the seed of David according to the flesh,"[133] an admission which, coming from the pupil of Gamaliel, who must have had the requisite technical information, is very remarkable; but "separated as the Son of God with power," which is at least consistent with our Gospel narrative, that makes Him the Son of God, but born of a virgin, and especially characterised during His ministry by miraculous powers; that in each of these Epistles the custom of baptism is expressly mentioned or implied;[134] that if the origin of this rite is not directly to be referred to the institution of Christ, as recorded in the Gospels, we are altogether ignorant of its origin; that the practice of it was clearly universal, which is so far consistent with the belief that it was derived from the express command of Christ; that in the first Epistle to the Corinthians[135] the writer speaks of Jesus Christ taking bread the same night that He was _betrayed_, and blessing it, and speaks of it in terms almost identical with those of the Gospels, thus showing not only that the death of Christ, but that the main circumstances of His death were commonly known, and the record of them so far unvarying, and that consequently the supposition of any great or substantial divergence is precluded; that the portrait of Jesus which all recognised was, in all its principal and important features, identical with that which we recognise now; and that, therefore, as the existence of some Gospels