The Fair Haven

by Samuel Butler

We may: and I have given the reader this foretaste of the prize which he may justly claim, lest he should be swallowed up in overmuch grief at the journey which is yet before him ere he shall have done all which may justly be required of him. For it is not enough that his own sense of security should be perfected. This is well; but let him also think of others.

What then is their main difficulty, now that it has been shewn that the reappearances of our Lord were not due to hallucination?

I propose to shew this by collecting from all the sources with which I was familiar in former years, and throwing the whole together as if it were my own. I shall spare no pains to make the argument tell with as much force as fairness will allow. I shall be compelled to be very brief, but the unbeliever will not, I hope, feel that anything of importance to his side has been passed over. The believer, on the other hand, will be thankful both to know the worst and to see how shallow and impotent it will appear when it comes to be tested. Oh! that this had been done at the beginning of the controversy, instead of (as I heartily trust) at the end of it.

Our opponents, therefore, may be supposed to speak somewhat after the following manner:—“Granted,” they will say, “for the sake of argument, that Jesus Christ did reappear alive after his Crucifixion; it does not follow that we should at once necessarily admit that his reappearance was due to miracle. What was enough, and reasonably enough, to make the first Christians accept the Resurrection, and hence the other miracles of Christ, is not enough and ought not to be enough to make men do so now. If we were to hear now of the reappearance of a man who had been believed to be dead, our first impulse would be to learn the when and where of the death, and the when and where of the first reappearance. What had been the nature of the death? What conclusive proof was there that the death had been actual and complete? What examination had been made of the body? And to whom had it been delivered on the completeness of the death having been established? How long had the body been in the grave—if buried? What was the condition of the grave on its being first revisited? It is plain to any one that at the present day we should ask the above questions with the most jealous scrutiny and that our opinion of the character of the reappearance would depend upon the answers which could be given to them.

“But it is no less plain that the distance of the supposed event from our own time and country is no bar to the necessity for the same questions being as jealously asked concerning it, as would be asked if it were alleged to have happened recently and nearer home. On the contrary, distance of time and space introduces an additional necessity for caution. It is one thing to know that the first Christians unanimously believed that their master had miraculously risen from death to life; it is another to know their reasons for so thinking. Times have changed, and tests of truth are infinitely better understood, so that the reasonable of those days is reasonable to us no longer. Nor would it be enough that the answers given could be just strained into so much agreement with one another as to allow of a modus vivendi between them, and not to exclude the possibility of death, they must exclude all possibility of life having remained, or we should not hesitate for a moment about refusing to believe that the reappearance had been miraculous: indeed, so long as any chink or cranny or loophole for escape from the miraculous was afforded to us, we should unhesitatingly escape by it; this, at least, is the course which would be adopted by any judge and jury of sensible men if such a case were to come before their unprejudiced minds in the common course of affairs.

“We should not refuse to believe in a miracle even now, if it were supported by such evidence as was considered to be conclusive by the bench of judges and by the leading scientific men of the day: in such a case as this we should feel bound to accept it; but we cannot believe in a miracle, no matter how deeply it has been engrained into the creeds of the civilised world, merely because it was believed by ‘unlettered fishermen’ two thousand years ago. This is not a source from which such an event as a miracle should be received without the closest investigation. We know, indeed, that the Apostles were sincere men, and that they firmly believed that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead; their lives prove their faith; but we cannot forget that the fact itself of Christ’s having been crucified and afterwards seen alive, would be enough, under the circumstances, to incline the men of that day to believe that he had died and had been miraculously restored to life, although we should ourselves be bound to make a far more searching inquiry before we could arrive at any such conclusion. A miracle was not and could not be to them, what it is and ought to be to ourselves—a matter to be regarded a priori with the very gravest suspicion. To them it was what it is now to the lower and more ignorant classes of Irish, French, Spanish and Italian peasants: that is to say, a thing which was always more or less likely to happen, and which hardly demanded more than a primâ facie case in order to establish its credibility. If we would know what the Apostles felt concerning a miracle, we must ask ourselves how the more ignorant peasants of to-day feel: if we do this we shall have to admit that a miracle might have been accepted upon very insufficient grounds, and that, once accepted, it would not have had one-hundredth part so good a chance of being refuted as it would have now.

“It should be borne in mind, and is too often lost sight of, that we have no account of the Resurrection from any source whatever. We have accounts of the visit of certain women to a tomb which they found empty; but this is not an account of a resurrection. We are told that Jesus Christ was seen alive after being thought to have been dead, but this again is not an account of a resurrection. It is a statement of a fact, but it is not an account of the circumstances which attended that fact. In the story told by Matthew we have what comes nearest to an account of the Resurrection, but even here the principal figure is wanting; the angel rolls away the stone and sits upon it, but we hear nothing about the body of Christ emerging from the tomb; we only meet with this, when we come to the Italian painters.

“Moreover, St. Matthew’s account is utterly incredible from first to last; we are therefore thrown back upon the other three Evangelists, none of whom professes to give us the smallest information as to the time and manner of Christ’s Resurrection. There is nothing in any of their accounts to preclude his having risen within two hours from his having been laid in the tomb.

“If a man of note were condemned to death, crucified and afterwards seen alive, the almost instantaneous conclusion in the days of the Apostles, and in such minds as theirs, would be that he had risen from the dead; but the almost instantaneous conclusion now, among all whose judgement would carry the smallest weight, would be that he had never died—that there must have been some mistake. Children and inexperienced persons believe readily in all manner of improbabilities and impossibilities, which when they become older and wiser they cannot conceive their having ever seriously accepted. As with men, so with ages; an unusual train of events brings about unusual results, whereon the childlike age turns instinctively to miracle for a solution of the difficulty. In the days of Christ men would ask for evidence of the Crucifixion and the reappearance; when these two points had been established they would have been satisfied—not unnaturally—that a great miracle had been performed: but no sane man would be contented now with the evidence that was sufficient then, any more than he would be content to accept many things which a child must take upon authority, and authority only. We ought to require the most ample evidence that not only the appearance of death, but death itself, must have inevitably ensued upon the Crucifixion, and if this were not forthcoming we should not for a moment hesitate about refusing to believe that the reappearance was miraculous.

“And this is what would most assuredly be done now by impartial examiners—by men of scientific mind who had no wish either to believe or disbelieve except according to the evidence; but even now, if their affections and their hopes of a glorious kingdom in a world beyond the grave were enlisted on the side of the miracle, it would go hard with the judgement of most men. How much more would this be so, if they had believed from earliest childhood that miracles were still occasionally worked in England, and that a few generations ago they had been much more signal and common?