Death![200.1] From the moment that the resurrection stood amongst the disciples as an accepted fact, the Founder of the religion was not merely a wonder-working man, a prophet and the greatest of all the prophets, but He was an altogether exceptional and miraculous Person, either {201} God in some mysterious way combined into an incorporate unity with man, or at least a Person that, compared with the common type and expression of humanity, might pass for God. The influence which the belief in the actual existence of such a human, and yet in so many regards superhuman, character as the Founder of their faith, must have exercised on the early preachers of the gospel, cannot easily be over-estimated. Plato and Plotinus often talk of the raptures with which the human soul would be thrilled if not only, as now, the shadows and types of the Beautiful, but the very absolute Beautiful itself, the αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν, stood revealed to mortal sight. But granting for the moment that the manifestation of such a vague abstraction is possible, it is quite certain that, when manifested, it could not possibly act upon men with anything like the power of a human Christ actually risen from the dead. Man, with all his range of imagination, is at bottom as much concrete as any creature, and as little capable of being moved by mere abstractions. Jesus Christ, and Him crucified; Christ risen from the dead; believe in Him--this was the short summation of that preaching of the gospel which regenerated the then world, lying as it did in all sorts of wickedness. See how emphatically the resurrection is alluded to as the main anchor in all the early preachings of the Apostles (Acts ii. 32; iii. 15; iv. 2; v. 30, etc.) And as to St. Paul, he declares again and again that if Christ be not risen, the faith of Christians is vain, and those to whom the world was indebted for its moral regeneration were justly to be accounted amongst the most miserable of men; a method of speaking which plainly implies that, in the Apostle’s {202} estimation, the firm fact of a risen Saviour was the only real assurance that Christians had of a life beyond the grave. So true is the utterance of a distinguished modern divine that “the resurrection was the central point of the apostolic teaching, nay more, the central point of history, primarily of religious history, of which it is the soul. The resurrection is the one central link between the seen and the unseen.”[202.1] Let this, therefore, stand firm as the main principle of any just exposition of the machinery by which the ethics of the gospel achieved the conquest of the world. The Church--“the peculiar people zealous for good works,” of whom St. Peter speaks--was formed out of the world not by the clear cogency of logical arguments, but by the vivid belief in miraculous facts.