giving this company His final charge, He led them out to Bethany and there parted from them with blessing (and ascended into heaven). But this, notoriously, is not what we find in Acts. There the parting and the ascension at Bethany do not take place till six weeks after the resurrection. It is not easy to believe that Luke, in writing the sequel to his gospel which he had in view from the beginning, which is indeed only the second chapter of the same work, and which was in all probability produced continuously with it, was conscious of any such inconsistency in his own mind. He did not write for people who knew nothing of his story, but for a circle for his work was never intended for Theophilus alone-which was acquainted with him and the tradition he represented; and not to insist on the fact that a day of impossible length would be required to take in all the events of the last chapter of the gospel, the probabilities are that its earliest readers, who may never have read it apart from Acts, knew that its closing section was essentially an abridgment or summary, and that whether it was to be interrupted at this point or that-after ver. 43 or after ver. 49-it covered a much longer period than twelve or eighteen hours. There is much to be said for the idea that in the last verses of the gospel Luke condenses into a few lines what he is able in the opening of Acts to expand in some detail, just as in the last verses of Acts he condenses into a sentence two whole years of Paul's preaching in Rome, which he would have expanded in a third book had he been able to bring his history of Christianity down to a provisional termination with the fall of Jerusalem and the death of his two great figures, Peter and Paul. But however this may be, no chronological difficulty impairs in the slightest degree the value of the testimony to the resurrection on which faith has rested from the first. We see how such

difficulties would arise; we see how inevitably they must haye arisen; and seeing this we know how to discount them.

Many have felt the second class of difficulties more serious-those arising out of the progressive materialisa`tion of the appearances of Jesus. At first, it is said, He only appears; and the visionary reality of an appearance is not to be disputed. Appearances do appear, however they are to be interpreted. It is a step further when the appearance speaks. Still, speaking is only the counterpart of hearing, and as hearing may be as inward and subjective as seeing, the speaking also may be allowed to pass as a way of representing one aspect of the experience. This, it may be said, is all the length we are carried by Paul. He saw the Lord, and the Lord spoke to him, but there is nothing materialistic in this. He does, indeed, speak of His body, but it is the body of His glory (Phil. 321)—that incorruptible spiritual body into the likeness of which He will change the body of our humiliation; not a body of flesh and blood, which cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. We might conceive the Risen Saviour saying to Thomas, 'Reach hither thy finger and see My hands; and reach hither thy hand and put it into My side; and be not faithless, but believing': we might conceive this in consistency with Paul, for the body of His glory is the body in which He suffered, changed as we shall be changed when this corruptible has put on incorruption. But can we, in consistency with Paul's doctrine of the resurrection body, conceive Jesus saying, 'Handle Me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye behold Me having'? Can we conceive that He took a piece of broiled fish and ate it before the disciples (Luke 24 39-43)? It is not wanton to ask such questions: they rise involuntarily in the mind, and we have no choice but to face them. One way of doing so

is to argue that the only reality in the resurrection stories is that of visionary appearances of Jesus, and that everything else in the gospel record is to be explained as the effort of those who believed in these appearances to persuade others to believe in them-the effort to exhibit them as so indubitably and convincingly real that no one would be able to refuse his faith. But reality for the popular mind is that which is demonstrable to the senses; it is material reality; and hence the proof of the resurrection is more and more materialised. The first step in this process of materialisation is the introduction of the empty grave: the real proof of the resurrection, such as it is, had originally nothing to do with the grave; it was the quiet independent fact that Jesus had appeared beyond the grave. To the empty tomb one infallible sign was added after another-conversations, the hands and the side, the flesh and the bones, and at last the crudity of eating and drinking. It is a strong argument against this way of explaining all these phenomena that if this be their genesis, it has left no trace of its motive in the New Testament. The empty tomb comes before us only as a fact, not as an argument. It is never referred to as throwing light either on the character or the reality of the resurrection, though it is assumed, of course, in Matthew 28, that if the Jews had been able to produce the body of Jesus the evidence for the resurrection would have been destroyed. It is not easy to dispute this assumption. The confidence of the disciples in their Master's victory over death could not be without relation to His victory over the grave. They did not believe that He would rise again at the last day, they believed from the very beginning that He had risen again already; and it is merely incredible that with such a faith inspiring them they never so much as thought of the grave, or had not a moment of trouble in reconciling to their belief in

the resurrection of Jesus the demonstration given by the grave, if His body still lay there, that He too saw corruption. The empty grave is not the product of a naïve apologetic spirit, a spirit not content with the evidence for the resurrection contained in the fact that the Lord had appeared to His own and had quickened them unto new victorious life; it is not the first stage in a process which aims unconsciously as much as voluntarily at making the evidence palpable, and independent, as far as may be, of the moral qualifications to which we have already adverted; it is an original, independent and unmotived part of the apostolic testimony. The whole mysteriousness of the resurrection is in it; in combination with the appearances of Jesus, and with all that flowed from them, it brings us to a point at which the resources of science are exhausted, the point at which the transcendent world revealed in the resurrection touches this world, at once enlarging the mind and bringing it to a stand. This mysteriousness attaches to all that we read in the gospels of the appearances of Jesus-His coming and going, His form, as it is called in Mark 16 12, His showing of His hands and His side; but whether it can be extended in any way to His eating may well seem doubtful. Meats for the belly and the belly for meats, Paul says, and God shall destroy both it and them. Eating is a function which belongs to the reality of this life, but not to that of immortality; and there does seem something which is not only incongruous but repellent in the idea of the Risen Lord eating. It makes Him real by bringing Him back to earth and incorporating Him again in this life, whereas the reality of which His resurrection assures us is not that of this life, but of another life transcending this. The eating is only mentioned by Luke (Gospel, 24 39 ff. Acts 1, 10"), and when we consider the fact, which a comparison with the other

gospels renders unquestionable, that Luke everywhere betrays a tendency to materialise the supernatural, it is not too much to suppose that this tendency has left traces on his resurrection narrative, too. But though we have to discount this, the resurrection itself, as the revelation of life in another order, is not touched. It only means that we do not assign to the resurrection life, which has a higher reality of its own, that same kind of reality, with all its material conditions and limitations, with which we are familiar in this world. To reject the eating is not to reject the resurrection life of Jesus, it is to preserve it in its truth as a revelation of life at a new level-life in which eating and drinking are as inappropriate as marrying or giving in marriage.

We now come to the third of the difficulties connected with the gospel narratives of the resurrection, that which concerns the place of Jesus' appearing. If we take the gospels as they stand, and attempt to harmonise them, we may think at first that there are sufficient facilities for doing so. If in Matthew Jesus appears to His disciples only in Galilee, and in Luke only in Jerusalem, in John He appears to them in both; and it may seem reasonable to apply to difficulties about space the same considerations which have already enabled us to discount the difficulties about time. But a closer scrutiny reveals to us that in their representation of the scene of Jesus' appearances the evangelists do not differ from each other merely as men might differ who were recording the testimony of agitated observers. In this case there might no doubt be divergences, but they would be of an accidental character; they would explain themselves, or would need no explanation. What we find in the gospels is far more conscious, deliberate, and serious than this, and there is something perplexing, not to say disconcerting about it, until we understand