Our Lord would not Himself establish a visible Church. I have amply set out, p. 236, the difficulties that would have ensued if He had so done; but it was essential that the Apostles should receive some indication—though only so much as was essential to the lines upon which they were to build; and this being a matter of human cognisance was to be given by Christ in His human guise. A phantom, or a voice from Heaven, would have seemed an agency of a different order from the intervention of the Son of Man. Here I will stop for a moment, to consider these narratives of the Resurrection under a purely literary point of view. These accounts present us with the same general aspect of the risen Lord, and they remain true to the primary conception in unnoticeable points of detail such as no one would have introduced out of purposed imitation. Inasmuch as we cannot suppose that the same wondrous creation of fancy presented itself to different writers at the same time, we are driven to suppose, either that the accounts relate actual facts, as Christians generally believe; or else that they were imagined by one person who disseminated the story. But who this writer can have been is not only a mystery but a mystery embodying almost a miracle, for here we have a genius compared with whom—in point of dealing naturally with the supernatural—Shakespeare is thrown into the shade; and further this genius, we must suppose, never invented or wrote anything else in that particular line in which he so wondrously surpassed the rest of mankind. The Orientals delighted in tales. Did they suffer the greatest imaginative genius of the world to live and die unknown? There was nothing in Literature to furnish a hint for the portraiture of the risen Lord; the idea of the Resurrection body must have been due to one man’s imagination and have been presented with extraordinary literary skill at a time when imaginative narration was wholly unknown. The writers of the age in which the Gospels appeared could set down events and record colloquies, and depict living personalities with truth and force; but they were no more capable of conceiving a character, of making him act, and putting into his mouth words which should seem to be his own; or of imagining a new supernatural phenomenon, and keeping their account always true to itself; than they were of conceiving the vibrations of an elastic medium. That this phenomenon also, exactly met the requirements of a most singular condition of things adds greatly to the wonder, but in another way.