These things cannot rationally be accounted for unless there is a God, and if there is a God, as all courts of justice everywhere assume, and universal conscience declares, to refuse assent to the conclusion to which they necessarily lead,—the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,—cannot be the exercise of right reason. Least of all should lawyers, accustomed to weigh evidence, refuse to believe upon the testimony of others. As Gibson, the great chief justice of Pennsylvania, said: “Give Christianity a common law trial; submit the evidence _pro_ and _con_ to an impartial jury under the direction of a competent court, and the verdict will assuredly be in its favor.” We have not the witnesses before us; but it is every day’s practice to prove historical facts by any approved and general history, and such are our Gospels and Epistles; and they are confirmed by sacraments and institutions that continue to our times, and will continue to the end of the world. Nor does the sufficiency of the proofs depend upon any question of the _precise_ extent of the genuineness of the Gospels, or their _exact_ agreement. Men accustomed to weigh evidence know that it is enough if the substance of the issue is proved, and that a literal agreement is never to be expected in honest witnesses. In all the great facts of the Resurrection, the Gospels and the Epistles concur. This has been found satisfactory to such standard authors in the legal profession as Blackstone and Kent and Story, such masters of the rules of evidence as Starkie and Greenleaf, and such giants as Lord Brougham, John Marshall, Theophilus Parsons, Jeremiah Mason and Daniel Webster, and many others both of the dead and the living, and no historical event rests on a firmer basis. Some of its logical results will be suggested in the concluding chapter. [1] See _ante_, c. 17, p. 101, and Godet’s Defence, etc., 1881, p. 106. [2] As quoted by Godet, p. 49. [3] See _ante_, c. 17, p. 101. [4] Origen against Celsus, Book II., c. 42. [5] See editor’s note to Lange’s Life of Christ; McClintock and Strong, Vol. VIII., p. 1055; Abbott’s Dictionary of Religious Knowledge, p. 804; Barnes on John xx. 21; Scott on John xx. 19.