Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/243

Letter 20] the risen Saviour and the disciples are recorded in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which we know to have been written after the Gospel of St. Luke. You see how unsatisfactory all this is. The further back we go, and the nearer to the event, the more meagre and shadowy does the evidence become. It does not appear in a form ample and cogent until a period so late as to throw irresistible doubt upon its truth. How can we possibly answer the doubter's natural question, "If there was this unanswerable evidence of the material resurrection of Jesus, why was it suppressed for two generations?" Moreover, some of these later accounts, which relate the handling of the body of Jesus, or the presence of Jesus at the breaking of bread, might be literal misinterpretations of some traditions concerning visions of Christ accompanying the "handling of the body of the Lord Jesus" in the Lord's Supper. It is very significant that St. Peter—whose allusions in the Acts of the Apostles to his personal evidence concerning the Resurrection of Christ are of the briefest kind—is introduced by St. Luke as mentioning only one definite kind of manifestation of Jesus; and that is one in which the Apostles "did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead." (Acts x. 41). Lastly, there are traces of interpolations, or additions, at a very early date in the post-resurrection chapters of St. Luke, and probably of St. Matthew and St. John; and in dealing with the post-resurrection narrative of the life of Christ some of the earliest Fathers quote passages not found in our Gospels but agreeing somewhat with the suspected additions in the third and fourth Gospel. The sum of all is, so far as my own experience goes, that after a patient and prolonged study of the evidence, with every desire, and indeed I may say with an intense anxiety (at one period of my life), to justify myself in continuing to believe all that I once