Now if you try to regard the manifestation of the risen Christ under the
second head, as an “object of sensation,” you must pronounce it
“unreal,” inasmuch as it would not “present similar sensations in
similar circumstances;” by which I mean that, with similar opportunities
of observation, different persons (believers, for example, and
unbelievers) would not have derived similar sensations from it. But your
conclusion would be false because you started from a false premise:
these manifestations cannot be classed “among objects of sensation.”
The movements of the risen Saviour appear to me to have been the
movements of God; His manifestations to the faith of the Apostles were
divine acts, passing direct from God to the souls of men. Since
therefore these manifestations belonged to the class of things which
“can only be apprehended as God, or in God, by faith,” I call them
“absolute realities”—as much more real than flesh and blood, as God
Himself is more real than the paper on which I am now writing.
Footnote 28:
Mark xvi. 7; Matthew xxviii. 7: “He goeth before you _into Galilee_.”
Footnote 29:
Luke xxiv. 6: “Remember how he spake unto you _while he was yet in
Galilee_.”
Footnote 30:
See _Definitions_ at the end of the book.
XXIII
THE SPIRITUAL RESURRECTION
MY DEAR ——,
I am not surprised to hear that you consider the theory above described
of Christ’s resurrection, “vague, shadowy, and unsatisfying.” But as in
the very same letter you say that you are quite convinced of the
unhistorical nature of the account of the resurrection of Christ’s
material body, I think you ought not to dismiss the subject without
giving more attention than you have given as yet to it. As a student of
history and as a young man bent on attaining such knowledge as can be
attained concerning the certainties or probabilities that have the most
important bearing on the life and conduct of myriads of your
fellow-creatures, you ought at least to ask yourself what better
explanation you have to offer of the marvellous phenomena of the
Christian Church and in particular of St. Paul’s part in spreading
Christianity.
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