It would defeat the purpose of the Revelation made to us
if the hard-headed should have an advantage in accepting it over the
humble-minded. The evidence must be such that spiritual character shall
be an element in the acceptance of it. There would be a contradiction,
if the faculty whereby we mainly recognised God were the spiritual
faculty, and the faculty whereby we mainly recognised His Revelation
were the scientific faculty.
And, in the second place, we have no right to expect that the evidence
for miracles wrought in one age should be such evidence as properly
belongs to another age. It is sometimes urged that the evidence supplied
by the testimony of the early Christians is of little value because it
was never cross-examined. No such precautions surrounded the evidence as
would now be required to give any value to evidence of similar events.
The witnesses gave up their lives to attest what they taught; but there
was no one to scrutinise what they asserted. St. Paul's evidence on our
Lord's Resurrection cannot now be put to the test of searching
questions. But to make such objections as these is to make what is on
the face of it an absurd demand. It is to ask that the scientific
processes of the nineteenth century should have been anticipated in the
first, that men should be miraculously guided to supply a kind of
evidence which would be utterly superfluous at the time in order to be
convincing eighteen hundred years afterwards.
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