The story of the Apostles is unique in History in another way. No one of them endeavoured to draw a following about himself, or to claim succession to the Master’s place. Little differences of view and little disagreements as to the course to be followed now and then there were; if, indeed, our records did not speak of such we should suspect that something was kept back. We have cases enough of causes passed on to a company of successors from the dying leaders’ hands, but in no instance, that I recollect, have these successors remained united as the Apostles did (p. 414). Monarchs have sometimes left empires in trust to their generals, whose quarrels have finally torn them to bits. Philosophers have left their systems or their discoveries to their favourite pupils, who, taking hold of them by different ends, have set up new philosophies of their own. Kingly dynasties and political parties have bequeathed causes claiming to be sanctioned by Divine right, or to embody immutable principles, and the inheritors have so fallen out over points of policy, that the broad principle, broken up into branching channels, has lost its momentum and disappeared in the sands. I pass on to the lessons which our History of the Resurrection conveys. The different narratives relate our Lord’s appearances, with differing circumstances of persons and place. Herein I find that loophole for disbelief which may be discovered in every miraculous manifestation of our Lord. If the fact of our Lord’s Resurrection had been so attested that no sane person could doubt of the fact; if He had appeared in public, and appalled Pilate on his judgment seat or Herod on his throne, then—strange as it may appear—by the very fact of the historical certainty being thus established, the moral significance of the Resurrection would be impaired, for the acceptance of it would be independent of that which I have so often said is essential to religious belief, the concurrence of the free human will. Although, as to the occasions and circumstances of the appearances, we find in the different accounts rather more than their customary diversity; yet in the _nature_ of the appearances the agreement is so singular, and the conception involved is so unexampled, that it is impossible for different writers to have lighted at the same time on the idea, and I can find no explanation for the phenomena, except by supposing that the picture was taken from life. The appearances themselves, as we should expect from their nature, leave on the mental retina an impression indelible and distinct; but the traditions about _when_ and _how_ they occurred, undergo variation as they pass from mouth to mouth.