The Fair Haven

the Hallucin

be seen and handled. Some who held this were near relations of Christ, some had known him intimately for a considerable time before his crucifixion, many must have known him well by sight, but all were unanimous in their assertion that they had seen him alive after he had been dead, and in consequence of this belief they ad

be shewn that the belief in Christ's reappearance did not arise until after the death of those who were said to have seen him, when actions and teachings might have been imputed to them which were not theirs, the case would then be different; but this cannot be done; there is nothing in history better established than that the men who said that they had seen Christ alive a

ion? Far otherwise. Yet the men who fled in the hour of their master's peril betrayed no signs of flinching when their own was no less imm

truck with an enchanter's wand, and who, though many, were as one in the vehemence with which they protested that their master had reappeared to them alive. Their converse with Christ did not probably last above a year or two, and was interrupted by frequent absence. If Christ had died once and for all upon the Cross, Christianity must have died with him; but it did not die; nay, it did not begin to live with full energy until after its f

; their unanimity is perfect; there is not the faintest trace of any difference of opinion amongst them as to the main fact of the Resurrection. These are things which never have been and never can be

g predisposition, a rare coincidence, an unwonted natural phenomenon, a hundred other causes, may turn sound judgments awry, and we dare not assume forthwith that the first disciples of Christ were superior to influences which have misled many who have had better chances of withstanding them. Visions and hallucinations are not uncommon even now. How easily belief in a supernatural occurrence obtains among the peasantry of Italy, Ireland, Belgium, France, and Spain; and how much more easily would it do so among Jews in the days of Christ, when belief in supernatural interferences with th

nd was communicated as soon as might be to some other or others of the Apostles: the idea was welcome-as giving life to a hope which had been fondly cherished; each inflamed the imagination of the other, until the original basis of the conception slipped unconsciously from recollection, while the intensity of the conviction itself became stronger and stronger the more often the story was repeated. Strauss supposes that on seeing the firm conviction of two or three who had hitherto been leaders among them, the other Apostles took heart, and that thus the body grew together again perhaps within a twelve-month of the Crucifixion. According to him, the idea of the Resurrection having been once started, and having once taken root, the soil was so congenial that it gre

ould ourselves readily admit, cannot be accepted unless all others are found wanting; he therefore, if I understand him rightly, puts forward the above as being a reasonable and natural solution of the difficulty-the only solution which does not fail upon examin

difficult. Men and women like believing in the marvellous, for it brings the chance of good fortune nearer to their own doors; but how much more so when they are themselves closely connected with the central figure of the marvel, and when it appears to give a clue to the solution of that mystery

ey believed in their master as the worker of innumerable miracles which they had themselves witnessed; as one whom they had seen raise others from death to life, and whom, therefore, death could not be expected to control-if he held the followers of Christ to have been in this frame of mind at the time of the Crucifixion, it might be intelligible that he should suppose the strength of their faith to have engendered an imaginary reappearance in order to save them from the conclusion that their hopes had been without foundation; that, in point of fact, they should have accepted a new delusion in order to prop

ruption of the grave had begun its work, and who had seen sight given to one that had been born sightless; as men who had seen miracle after miracle, with every loophole for escape from a belief in the miraculous carefully excluded; who had seen their master walking upon the sea, and bidding the winds be still; our difficulty therefore is to understand the incredulity of the Apostles as displayed abundantly in the Gospels; but Strauss can have none such; for he must see them as men over whom the influence of their master had been purely personal, and due to nothing more than to a strength and beauty of character which his followers very imperfectly understood. He does not believe that Lazarus was raised at a

s occurrence, and been soon generally believed; but the idea of our Lord's return to earth in a gross material body whereon the wounds were still unhealed, was perhaps the last thing that would have suggested itself to them by way of hallucination. If their faith had been great enough, and their spirits high enough to have allowed hallucination to originate at all, their imagination would have presented them at once with a glorious throne, and the splendours of the highest Heaven as appearing through the opened firmament; it would not surely have rested satisfied with a man whose hands and side were wounded, and who could eat of a piece of broiled fish and of an honeycomb. A fabric so utterly baseless as the reappearances of our Lord (on the supposition of their being unhistoric) would have been built of gaudier materials. To repeat, it seems impossible that the Apostles should have attempted to connect their hallucinations circumstantially and historically with the events which had immediately preceded them. Hallucination would have been conscious of a hiatus and not have tried to bridge it over. It would not have developed the idea of our Lord's return to this grovelling and u

d which receives any very decisive check, which scatters and demoralises the few who have already joined it, will be absolutely sure to die a speedy natural death unless something utterly strange and new occurs to give it a fresh impetus? Such a resuscitating influence would have been given to the Christian religion by the reappearance of Christ alive. This would meet the requirements of the case, for we can all f

nless it were established firmly by the most apparently irrefragable evidence of many persons, it would have had no living energy. How an hallucination could occur in the requisite strength to the requisite number of people is neither explained nor explicable, except

ormed) "was the first to which the Apostles had to attain in the days of their humiliation after the Crucifixion." Yes-but how were they to attain to it, being now utterly broken down and disillusioned? Strauss admits that before they could have come to hold what he supposes them to have held, they must have seen in Christ even after his Crucifixion a prophet far greater than

or come to know something, which to their minds was utterly overwhelming in its convincing power: when we find the earliest and most trustworthy records unanimously asserting that that something was the reappearance of Christ alive, we feel that such a reappearance was an adequate cause

as that led the Apostles to believe in such reappearance must have been, judging by its effect, intense and memorable: it must have been as a shock obliterating everything save the memory of itself and the

nce and trustworthiness, that no good and permanent work could come from such persons; the men who could be weak enough, and crazed enough, if the reader will pardon the expression, to do as Strauss suggests, could never have carried their work through in the way they did. Such men would have wrecked their undertaking a hundred times o

at which they might have visions of Christ is capable of explanation. The answer to this is that it is indeed likely that the spell of terror would give way when they found themselves safe at home, but that it is not at all likely that any reaction would take place in favour of one to whom their allegiance had never been thorough, and whom they supposed to have met with a violent and accursed end. It might be easy to imagine such a reaction if we did not also

much more likely that they would have shunned each other and disliked allusions to the past? What but Christ's actual reappearance could rekindle this dead enthusiasm, and fan it to such a burning heat? Suppose that one or two disciples recovered faith and courage, the majority would never do so. If Christ himself with the magic of his presence c

d hatred rather than of affection; but is there a word or hint which would seem to indicate that a single one of those who had the best means of knowing doubted the Resurrection? There is nothing of the kind; on the contrary, whatever we find is such as to make us feel perfectly sure that none of them did doubt it. Is it then possible that this unanimity should have sprung from the original hallucinations of a small minority? True-it is plain from the Epistle to the Corinthians that there were some of Paul's contemporaries who denied the Resurrection. But who were they? We should

er: given also, a small body of adherents who were inclined to adopt him as their master and to regard him as the coming liberator, but who were nevertheless far from settled in their conviction: given such a man and such followers: the teacher is put to a shameful death about two years after they had first known him, and the followers forsake him instantly: surely without his reappearing in some way upon the s

like falling into the very error which Rationalists condemn most loudly when it comes from so-called orthodox writers. They complain, and with too much justice, that our apologists have made "anything out of anything." Yet if the Apostles were not unsteadfast, and did not desert their master in his hour of peril, and if all the accounts of Christ's reappearances are the creations of disordered fancy, we may as well at once declare the Evangelists to be worthless as historians, and had better give up all attempt at the construc

postles themselves, after they were once firmly convinced, be inclined to think that they had from the first believed more firmly than they really had done? This at least would be in accordance with the natural promptings of human instinct: we are all of us apt to be wise after the event, and are far more prone to dwell upon things which seem to give some colour to a pretence of prescience, than upon those which force from us a confession of our own stupidity. It might seem a damaging thing that the Apostles sho

, namely, that in the main the Apostles were prepared to accept Christ before the Crucifixion, but that they were by no means resolute and devoted followers. I submit that this is a fair rendering of the spirit of what we find in the Gospels. It is just because Strauss has chosen to

at during this time Christ happened to be missing; that he reappeared, and finally departed, whither, no man can say: that the Apostles, after his last disappearance, remembering that he had been absent during the tumult, little by little worked themselves up into the belief that on his reappearance they had seen wounds upon him, and that the details of the Crucifixion were afterwards revealed in a vision to some favoured believer, until in the course of a few years the narrative assu

general belief in the reappearance of our Lord was so strong that those who had the best means of judging gave up all else to preach it, with a unanimity and singleness of purpose which is irreconcilable with hallucination; that all our records most definitely insist upon this belief and that there is no trace of it

he testimony of St. Paul, to which I wou