We turn instinctively to that, the testimony of the millions of believers who to-day know Jesus Christ. As believers we unite, not as affirming our faith in a historic Christ, not as drawn together by force of a tradition of what happened on the hills of Judæa eighteen hundred years ago. We are in the line of that great company, the noble army of martyrs, and those others following them who, in all lands and all conditions, have known Jesus Christ themselves. There are in heathen lands missionaries who have given up all that life presents as dear to any man-home and comfort and friends and prospects-to do what? To go to the far islands of the South Pacific, among savages, to bury themselves as Livingstone did in Central Africa, to stand single-handed at posts of peril in Armenia, to work on through all the turmoil of nations battling in China; unfaltering in their faith, ardent in their testimony, to what? To the presence with them of the living Christ. Prisoners in jail, sufferers on the hospital cot, toilers in all departments of God's great vineyard to-day, witnessing a good confession, bearing trial and loneliness and disappointment and loss of the favor of men, enduring bodily pain and the weight of advancing years, and greeting oncoming death with a kiss, because they know Jesus Christ as a present help in every time of need, their Comforter and Guide, their Saviour and Lord; whose final word of "Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord" shall be the crown above crowns in their triumph, and the peace deeper than peace in their hearts. Now it is this that forms the united testimony upon the strength of which the Church repeats that glorious affirmation of triumph, "The third day he rose from the dead." But any infidel is competent to gather for us historic testimony concerning the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Any historian can tell us how inconceivable it is that the Christian Church should have lived all these centuries with the glorious story of Christ and of struggle in his name-should have lived such a story, to have it then prove idle and untrue. The question is, What does the affirmation mean to the Church? The Church knows that Jesus Christ, being rich, for our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might be made rich. Therefore in the consciousness of the riches given to us of God in the new life brought down from God out of heaven to us sinners by Jesus Christ our Lord—a life planted in the death of our sinful hearts by divine grace, cultured and kept alive in our feebly-growing Christian experience, and constituting, despite our sins and our unbelief, our one hope, both for this world and the world to come-in the consciousness of this im planted and sustained life of Jesus Christ in our hearts, we say, "The third day he rose from the dead;" and we live because he lives. "What makes you think that you are a Christian?" said a member of the session to a young girl who had asked for reception into a Scotch church. The candidate looked up astonished, and simply answered, "Why, he saved my soul!" That was all; and that was enough. "He has saved my soul." If a man can say that of Jesus Christ, he can affirm all that the Church has said concerning his birth, his life, his death and his resurrection. It was all that he might save my soul. He has done it. Therefore I believe.1 1 See Note 7. |