Lord and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” “The Spirit and the bride say come, and let him that is athirst come, and whosoever will let him take of the waters of life freely.” Yes, _freely_. There is no obstruction. All are without excuse. CREDIBILITY OF THE EVIDENCE OF THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. Our senses are the means by which we were made competent witnesses. They are the bed-rock of evidence. We know facts and truths, both comprehensible and incomprehensible, by the same means. We are as competent to testify of that which we do not comprehend as we are to testify of the most ordinary fact. As competent to bear testimony to the fact of a sweeping tornado as to the fact of a gentle breeze. As competent to bear testimony to the fact that water freezes and becomes hard as to testify to the truth of its being a fluid. As competent to testify to a fact that we never before experienced as to one that we have. Without this competency no man could be justly held responsible for slander or perjury. We gain knowledge by means of our senses, and all lying and perjury is outside of our senses, having no connection with them. We can, in truth, testify to that which we have seen, heard, tasted, smelt or felt, and to such only. That which somebody else thus witnessed may be testified by him, but not by me, unless I, too, was connected with it by means of my senses. Wise men may be deceived in some things, but fools can not be deceived in others. Things addressing themselves to our senses are things about which we can not be so deceived as to truthfully deny that they ever occurred. I know a live man when I see him by the same means I know a dead man. Being competent to bear witness to a new fact, to one heretofore unexperienced, I would have been competent to bear witness to the death, burial and resurrection of the Christ, in case I had lived in his day, and had been as familiar with him as his witnesses. By which I mean to say, they were competent witnesses; every way qualified to know assuredly whether the Savior rose from the dead. _They could not be deceived_ about the matter. They were not. If they were honest men they told the truth, for they say, We saw, and heard, and our hands have handled. Then the entire Christian religion, with its immortal blessings, stands or falls upon the honesty of the Savior’s witnesses. Martyrdom has been universally conceded to be an evidence of sincerity; there may be a few exceptions to this general rule, but even they are not parallel cases. There is a story of a man who endured with great fortitude all the tortures of the rack, denying the fact with which he was charged. When he was asked afterwards how he could hold out against all the tortures, he said: I painted a gallows on the toe of my shoe, and when the rack stretched me, I looked on the gallows, and bore the pain to save my life. This man denied a plain fact under torture, but he did it to save his life.