Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/241

Rh XX

——,

You wish to draw my attention to the Resurrection of Christ. "That," you say, "is either miraculous or nothing. The arguments by which you appear to be driving miracles into non-existence—expelling them first from profane history, then from the Old Testament, then step by step from every part of the New—cannot make a stand at your convenience, so as to except the Resurrection. Yet even St. Paul makes the Resurrection of Jesus the basis of his own belief and Gospel. If, therefore, that final miracle falls to the ground, the Pauline Gospel falls with it: and to that downfall I fear your arguments all tend, although you yourself do not see it or wish it."

I entirely deny the quiet assumption of your first sentence; which, as it stands (but I am sure you cannot mean it), affirms that the Resurrection of Christ "is either miraculous or nothing." I assert, without fear of contradiction, that if the phenomena which convinced the earliest disciples and St. Paul of the reality of the Resurrection of Christ, were not miraculous but natural, they constitute the most wonderful event in the history of the world. But what you wish to say, I suspect, is this: "By the Resurrection of Christ I mean the Resurrection of the body; now if Christ's body was raised again, the act must have been miraculous." But how if the Resurrection was spiritual? St. Paul himself speaks of a "spiritual body," not a material body, as rising in the