a bright apparition on the dusty roads of life, and had gone never to return. All the hopes He had encouraged seemed falsified and empty. Of all the happy throngs whom He had gathered to His side, no single man found capable of leadership, with a spirit or a genius to continue His work, nor was there the least sign of any rallying force in the movement which He had begun. He was one of those whose names are "writ in water," one more of that sad company who win affection by their very failure, which perhaps they would not have won by conspicuous success. At His grave Regret might sit, morning hopes denied, visions unfulfilled, purposes unaccomplished. His very death was such as to destroy all faith in human progress. Once more iniquity had triumphed over righteousness, and wickedness had trampled on the pure and good. Long years would pass before another dared attempt the task in which He failed; for such a story was deterrent to enthusiasm, such a death affirmed the folly of expecting too much from average human nature. These were the thoughts of the friends of Jesus on this fateful night. It was for them a night of despair and grief that knew no remedy. Among the enemies of Jesus more sombre thoughts prevailed, in which victorious malice was predominant. Never again would they hear that voice whose calm authority rebuked their sins. Hanan slept satisfied with his success: Pilate had already turned his mind away from a series of events which he remembered with disgust. Already Jesus was forgotten, and the world which He had sought to force into a loftier groove still kept its ancient course of fraud and folly, wrong and crime, and so would continue to the end, when the human race itself would cease through mere weariness of life and disgust at its futility. And so it might have been if the life of Jesus had really ended at the Cross. But in the silence of that awful night Divine forces were at work in the Tomb where Jesus slept. The Night had closed upon the world indeed; but there was a Morning close at hand. And with that morning there would come for Christ and for the world "another era, when it shall be light, and man will awaken from his lofty dreams and find-his dreams still there, and that nothing is gone save his sleep." CHAPTER XXX THE RESURRECTION AND AFTER BEFORE the Resurrection of Jesus can be at all discussed we must be assured that He was really dead. A popular theory of the earlier rationalism was that Christ swooned upon the Cross; that the simulation of death was so complete that it deceived everybody; and that in this state of swoon or trance He was laid in the Tomb, where after three days He revived and woke. The theory has long since been discarded because its inherent difficulties are insuperable. It is incredible that the Roman soldiers, accustomed to public executions, should have acknowledged for dead One who was not dead; that Joseph of Arimathea, in his sacred task of anointing the wounded Body, should have had no suspicion that the death was not real; that the priests should not have assured themselves that He whom they laid in the guarded sepulchre was quite beyond their malice; that in fact all these persons, including Pilate himself, should have connived at a mock burial, or have acquiesced in it through ignorance. The soldiers were certainly astonished that Jesus had expired so soon, but they made the fact of death doubly sure by the lancethrust which penetrated the lung and the pericardium. The priests were suspicious that the Body might be stolen, and they were uneasy at the rumour that Christ had said that He would rise again; but they never doubted that He |