FOOTNOTES:
[37] Luke i. 35.
[38] To what extent the law of atrophy has begun to work upon the doctrine of the virgin birth appears in the recent utterance of so eminent an evangelical scholar as Dr. R. F. Horton, of London. The following report of his remarks in a Christmas sermon in 1901 is taken from the Christian World, London. "We could not imagine Paul, Peter, and John all ignoring something essential to the Gospel they preached. Strictly speaking, this narrative in Matthew and Luke was one of the latest touches in the Gospel, belonging to a period forty or fifty years after the Lord had passed away, when men had begun to realize what he was—the Son of God—and tried to express their conviction in this form or that." The implication here is unmistakable, that, in Dr. Horton's view, subjective considerations in the minds of pious believers, rather than objective fact, form the basis of the story.
[39] See the Sermon on "Born of a Virgin," in the volume on The Incarnation of Our Lord.
[40] "Christian thought has not erred by asserting too much concerning the incarnation of God, but, on the contrary, too little.... If ever overblown by blasts of denial, it is for wanting breadth of base.... Men have disbelieved the incarnation, because told that all there was of it was in Christ; and they reject what is presented as exceptional to the general way of God. They must be told to believe more; that the age-long way of God is in a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ."—From a discourse by the present writer on "Life and its Incarnations," in the volume, New Points to Old Texts. (James Clarke & Co., London. Thomas Whittaker, New York, 1889.)
[41] See page [97] and [Note].
[42] Romans i. 4.
[43] 1 Corinthians xv. 16-23.
[44] Our Risen King's Forty Days, 1902.
[45] In strong contrast with this are the reactionary protests of Dr. W. R. Nicoll: "To talk of the resurrection of the spirit is preposterous. The spirit does not die, and therefore cannot rise.... The one resurrection of which the New Testament knows, the one resurrection which allows to language any meaning, is the resurrection of the body, the resurrection which leaves the grave empty" (op. cit. p. 134).
It should be noted here that Jesus' argument with the Sadducees on the resurrection (Luke xx. 37, 38) logically proceeds on the assumption that living after death and rising after death are convertible terms. Also, that the contrast involved in the idea of the resurrection (the anastasis, or rising up) is a contrast not between the grave and the sky, but between the lower life of mortals and the higher life immortal.
For an extended exhibition of this line of evidence see "The Assurance of Immortality," and "The Present Pledge of Life to Come" (in two volumes of discourses by the present writer), London, James Clarke & Co. New York, Thomas Whittaker, 1888 and 1889.
[46] Could it have been only an apparition? The "census of hallucinations" conducted some ten years since by the Society for Psychical Research evinced the reality of veridical apparitions of deceased persons at or near the time of their death, showing the number of verified cases to be so large as to exclude the supposition of chance hallucination (see Proceedings, August, 1894). Or could it have been a material body suddenly becoming visible in a closed room, as narrated by Luke and John? First-class evidence, if there can be any such for such occurrences, has been exhibited for such phenomena as the passage of solid substances through intervening doors and walls—easy enough, say mathematicians, for a being familiar with the "fourth dimension"—and of the levitation of heavy bodies without physical support. (See Proceedings, January, 1894, and March, 1895.) As to such things scepticism is doubtless in order, but dogmatic contradiction is not. Sub judice lis est.
[47] Professor Borden P. Bowne has thus exhibited this great mistake and its grievous consequence:—
"In popular thought, religious and irreligious alike, the natural is supposed to be something that runs itself without any internal guidance or external interference. The supernatural, on the other hand, if there be any such thing, is not supposed to manifest itself through the natural, but by means of portents, prodigies, interpositions, departures from, or infractions of, natural law in general. The realm of law belongs to the natural, and the natural runs itself. Hence, if we are to find anything supernatural, we must look for it in the abnormal, the chaotic, the lawless, or that which defies all reduction to order that may be depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason—the more law and order, the less God."—Zion's Herald, August 22, 1900.
VIII
