1. What is the value of the evidence of the senses ?
(1) The best answer is to consider what must have been the impression left upon the mind of the Jew when for the first time he saw Jesus of Nazareth, with His attendant followers, passing through the streets of Jerusalem. To answer this we must try to place ourselves in his position. Let us, for example, suppose that we were to see passing through one of our streets an excited crowd of men, women and children of the middle and lower classes. Let us imagine ourselves listening to the discordant acclamations of a multitude, many of whom we might perhaps know to be ignorant, and some to have led immoral lives. Let us dismiss from our fancy all those picturesque surroundings of eastern build- ings, of palms and of flowing coloured garments, with which the magic of Christian art has invested such a scene. These repre- sentations of the past, so far as they are real, have for us of the present day a certain charm — ^^just because of their strange and foreign aspect — which they could not have had for those whose lives were spent among such scenes. Let us eliminate from our conception of such an incident the majestic harmonies in which Christian musicians have rendered the Hosannas of the crowd. In other words, let us suppose ourselves looking at and listening to something unhallowed by those associations which of necessity give fascination to the far-off past, and let us consider ourselves face to face with the bare, unadorned, unsensational realities of the present. Let us go a step further. Let us imagine the central figure in such a scene to be one not distinguishable by his dress or, it may be, by any special form or comeliness from those about him — one whose place of birth and station in life and opportunities for education are known to us, and are not in our opinion such as to warrant us in looking for any special refine-
ST. JOHN XX. 29 2>11
ment of manner or display of learning on his part. And, lastly, let us suppose that all we have ourselves heard of his teaching has led us to regard that teaching as, to say the least of it, an innovation on the divinely-given statutes of the past. Let us try then to put ourselves in the position of the Jew of our Lord's time, and we must, in all fairness, confess that there was much in his special surroundings that was not favourable to a ready belief in the Divine mission of the Galilean peasant.
(2) And yet the evidence of the senses has its value, and it is no light one. The change that came over the Apostles after the Eesurrection has an ever accumulating force, ceaselessly ad- vancing. As we read the Epistles, does it not strike us that the writers are living in what the world may count a dream, but is to us the opening of a new view of human life, a realization of what prophecy had foretold ? They who went about the world preach- ing the Gospel to every creature, having given up everything that the world counts dear, facing danger of every sort, tempests, cold and hunger, prisons and suffering, and death, did they not show an intense conviction, such a conviction as has never in the world's history been surpassed, and a conviction lasting for long, long years, showing itself in their every act and deed ? Now this conviction rests on what they had seen.
^ The evidence of things seen is always evidence. I was asked this question in the city a few days ago : There stands the Cross on the top of St. Paul's Cathedral. How did it get there ? It is a question you had better ask your sceptical friend next time he argues with you. I would far rather have to uphold the position in a free debate that the reason why that Cross, the old gallows — and it was nothing more than the old gallows — is brandished in triumph over the biggest city in the world was because the Person who died on it rose again than have to defend any other explanation in the world, for, as a matter of fact, there is no other explanation. Why did a body of Jews, the most con- servative race in the world, change their sacred day from Saturday — not to Friday — oh no, not to Friday — but to Sunday ? There is no explanation, except that the Person who died on the Friday rose on the Sunday. Why did a body which called themselves " The Christians " celebrate for nearly two thousand years in their Eucharist, which is their thanksgiving service, the tokens of a shameful death — " body broken, blood shed " ? There never has been any explanation except that something happened so glorious,
378 BELIEVING WITHOUT SEEING
80 transfiguring, that it changed the shameful death into a badge of glory.^
(3) But the evidence of the seen goes only a certain way. For what is sense but the medium through which we converse with this visible and lower world, with its phenomena, its motions, its operations, and its changes ? The sphere and ken of sense is scanty and limited ; it reaches only to the outer surface, beyond which sense cannot penetrate. Sense needs the reason to be its interpreter and guide ; for, with all its confidence, sense is blind. Without the higher light of reason, the laws, principles, causes, and conditions of all it sees, handles, and knows, are unknown. And yet the reason in its sphere is bounded too. A world of intellectual objects, the phenomena of a higher but not the highest sphere, are within its ken. The unseen 9,nd the Eternal are beyond its gaze : and of these, except by another faculty higher than sense or reason, supernatural in its substance and its acts, which comes in to perfect both, we know nothing. It is not by sense or by reason, but by faith, elevating both, that the truths of the Kingdom of God are known and believed.