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cedently expect that He would tniiiiifest Himself in new and unfamiliar ways. ' As witli the appear- aTice of man tlieie were iiitruduced new jiowers and properties unimaiiinalile from tlie animal jjoint of view and therefore from tliat point of view seemiii;;ly supernatural — so witli the ajipearanee of tlie Clirist we ought to expect new powers and properties unimaginalile from the liuman point of view and therefore to us seeminjily supernatural, i.e. nhove our nature' (i. le Conte, Kriihifiim in Uelation to Religious Thought, London, KSSS. p. 3li-2).
Human personality is a unity in which S|)irit- ual and material are organically connected and mutually dependent, the sjiirit moulding the l)ody and the Ijody in turn inlluencing tlie spirit. Sin, accordingly, is a fact which though primarily moral ami spiritual — a matter of the will— yet extends to and includes the physical as well, moral and physical nungling with and react- ing on each other till the entire resultant may be sjKiken of as ' the body of this death ' — ' a complex whole in which it is impossible to disentangle the spiritual element from the diseased conditions and perverted functions of organ and tissue, which jiersonal and ancestral sins have brought about' (Illingworth, Divine Imnuincyice, p. 92). In like manner sinlessness is a fact which, though primarily moral and spiritual, concerns the physical as well, a sinless soul carrying with it as its correlative an unstained body. It may be 'contrary to experience,' as Hume says, that a human body shotild rise from the dead ; it is contrary to otir experience, that is to say, of ordinary human bodies, the bodies of sinful men. But in the case of a sinless personalitj' like that of Jesus we have a fact so transcending ordinary experience that no amount of evidence drawn from such experience can warrant us in laying down beforehand how nature will react on such an one. It maj' be as normal for a sinless man to rise from the dead as it is for the bodies of sinful men to remain in the grave. At all events our modern scientific know- ledge of the mutual interdependence of spirit and body-makes it a priori probable that one who like Jesus was not holden of sin should also not be holden of death. Without this the manifestation of His triumph over sin would be incomjilete. But more than this. Jesus claimed not only to be sinless Himself but to have come into the world to destroy the dominion of sin in others. He stood over against men the alone sinless (.tne claim- ing to have power to forgive and to redeem, and, in manifestation of His power to rectify the whole disorder caused by sin and restore the entire personality of man, body as well as soul, to God's plan for it. He performed works of healing on the body. His healing of the one He connected with His forgiving of the other as parts of the same redemptive work. Of this redemptive Lordship, His own bodily resurrection was at once the con- summating manifestation and the Hnal guarantee ; so that being such an One as He was and proved Himself to be per ejus benefcia ' it was not possible that he should be holden of death ' (Ac 2-'').
It is in the light of these consideraticms that the physical Resurrection becomes credible, and even antecedently probable. It is not an isolated abnormal incident in an otherw'ise normal career. ' If the Resurrection were alleged to have occurred abruptly in the middle of a series of events which passed on slowly to their consummation unaliected by its interruption ... then we might have paused in doubt before so stupendous a miracle, and pleaded the tmiformity of nature against the claims of such an event upon our belief (Westcott, Gospel of the Resnrrertion, p. 105). But the Resurrection is the resurrection of Jesus, and, as
such, an event at once with unique antecedents and unique consequents. Its context on either side is miraculous. It is the culmination of a luiique hunum life, a life which was a moral miiacle constituting a break in hunum experience, and making such a physical miracle as the Resur- rection altogether luitural and congruous ; a life too which was represented as the consummation of (iod's pnrpo.ses in all previous human history — for this is the es.sential meaning of the appeal to proph- ecymade by the apostles. Thenthcrcare theuni<iue con.sequents of the fact — and the nature of a cause becomes apparent only in the ell'ect — the rise of the Christian Clmrch as a new and ever-increasing power in history constituted in the continuous miracle of Christian history and exjierience. It is when we consider the Resurrection thus in its con- text that we see the naturalness and congrucnisness of the fact. As the consummation of tlie Incarna- tion and the means of realizing its purposes, the Resurrection is at once an end aiul a new begin- ning. ' To this fact all former history converges as to a certain goal ; from this fact all subsequent history Hows as from its life-giving spring (ih. p. 104). And so, taking all the evidence togetiier — evidence converging and cumulative — it is not too much to say with Westcott that ' there is no single historic incident better or more variously sup|)orted than the resurrection of Christ' (p. 137).