It is worth noting that while our Christian advocates insist with all their might, such as it is, upon the resurrection of Jesus, they willingly pass over as lightly as possible, if they do not altogether ignore, a similar miracle guaranteed by the very same authority. In Matt, xxvii., 52, 53, it stands recorded among the marvels following the death of Jesus: “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of their graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” The reader of Shakespeare will remember the prodigies anterior to the death of Julius Cæsar when— “The sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.” This prodigal multiplicity and superfluity of resurrections seems to have been not a little embarrassing to modern Christian champions, though doubtless it did not in the least trouble the primitive non-scientific believers, to whom nothing was more natural than the unnatural, including the supernatural and the infranatural. An apologist of our days who _must_ affirm the one resurrection, seeing that his whole religion is based upon it, and who, though valiantly defying science, seeks to conciliate historical possibility, finds his task quite heavy enough in accounting for the facts that the risen Jesus “was seen of above five hundred brethren at once,” and yet that no record of his rising can be found beyond the limits of the New Testament. But the difficulties of the poor apologist are enormously increased if he must further contend that many bodies of the saints came out of their graves, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many, and still there is no external evidence. We are surely at the utmost limits of the possible in conceiving that Jesus could appear unto five hundred of the brethren at once (there is no hint elsewhere that he had so many permanent followers in his lifetime; in Acts i., 15, we find that there were about one hundred and twenty gathered after the ascension), without the priests and the Roman officials hearing of the apparition and investigating it. But if many others rose from their graves and appeared to many, it is absolutely impossible that anyone in Jerusalem could be ignorant of the miracle; equally impossible that Pilate and his officers did not investigate it, and equally impossible that finding it real he did not report it with the evidence to Rome, for the Empire was a thoroughly organised State, and the Romans were a thoroughly practical and business-like people. Once in the imperial archives, the record of the miracle would have spread everywhere; all subsequent historians would have related it, all subsequent writers referred to it. So it is no wonder that, recoiling from these manifold impossibilities, the Christian advocates prefer to dwell on the one resurrection as if it were unique, and avoid dwelling on the others that by the very same testimony immediately followed it.