and afterwards it is as witnesses that they are singled out by our Lord, “And ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judæa and Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”(165) In this distinctive light too they regard themselves. When a successor to Judas has to be appointed, St Peter says, “of these must one become a witness with us of his resurrection”(166) and Peter and all the Apostles say, before the Sanhedrin, “We are witnesses of these things.” Peter again, speaking to the brethren from Joppa calls the Apostles “witnesses chosen before of God.”(167) I find in the Twelve a special fitness for the particular work which it fell to them to perform. They brought to the attestation of the Resurrection the concurring evidence of eleven eyewitnesses, simple, truthloving, matter-of-fact men, of different types of mind. The unanimity of the eleven, both as to their testimony and as to their adoption of a particular course of conduct has been less dwelt on by Apologists than I should have expected. If one or two could have been gained over by the Scribes to dissent from the account of the rest, the moral force of the evidence would have been lost. The chances against the agreement of the entire body in an illusion or a misrepresentation are enormous. But an event so transcendent as to wipe out of the minds of the witnesses everything else—“all trivial, fond records” would efface small subjective differences by the overwhelming force of the objective impression; and the occurrence of such an event would account for that perfect agreement in action among men who had not uniformly agreed before, which is among the many striking phenomena which the book of the Acts of the Apostles discloses to our own view. The chosen witnesses have exactly the qualities which a judge would point out to a jury, as grounds for giving particular weight to their evidence on questions of fact coming within their view. I must say something more on this point.