So pregnant is this same boasting passage--1 Cor. xv. 32, the labour it has thrown upon us, is not altogether at an end. By what it says of the resurrection, the memory has been led back, to what we have seen on the same subject, in one of Paul's Epistles to his Thessalonians: brought together, the two doctrines present a contrast too curious to be left unnoticed. Of the apparatus employed by him in his trade of _disciple-catcher_, his talk about the resurrection, was, it may well be imagined, a capital article. Being, according to his own motto, _all things to all men_, 1 Cor. ix. 22, whatever it happened to him to say on the subject, was dished up, of course, according to the taste of those he had to deal with. To some it was a _prediction_: for such, we have seen, was the form it assumed when the people to be wrought upon were the Thessalonians. To others, when occasion called, it was a statement concerning something _past_, or supposed to be past. On an occasion of this sort it was, that the name of Jesus, another article of that same apparatus, was of so much use to him. True it is, that to the doctrine of the _general_ resurrection in time future, he had, it must be remembered, no need of declaring himself beholden to Jesus: at least, if on this point, the Acts' history is to be believed: for, of the Pharisees,--the sect to which Paul belonged--of the Pharisees, as compared with the other sect the Sadducees, it was the distinctive tenet. But, of the then future, the then past, as exemplified in the _particular_ case of Jesus, could not but afford very impressive circumstantial evidence. Of this momentous occurrence, there were the real Apostles, ready to give their accounts,--conformable, it may be presumed, to those we see given, as from them, by the four Evangelists. These accounts, however, would not suit the purpose of the self-constituted Apostle: in the first place, because they came from the real Apostles, with whom, as we have so often seen, it was a declared principle with him not to have had anything to do: in the next place, because the Apostles were too scrupulous: they would not have furnished him with witnesses enough. His own inexhaustible fund--his own invention,--was therefore the fund, on this occasion, drawn upon: and, accordingly, instead of the number of witnesses,--say _a score_ or two at the utmost--he could have got from the Apostles,--it supplied him with _five hundred_: five hundred, _all at once_: to which, if pressed, he could have added any other number of percipient witnesses whatsoever, provided only that it was at _different_ times they had been such.