Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

RECONSTRUCTING THE NATURAL ORDER 3792. The credibility of the Christian Faith was restedby its heralds and proclaimers upon a fact, the resurrectionof their Master in the body in which He haddied upon the Cross. This was their guarantee to theworld of the truth which they sought to promulgate.When St. Paul said, " If Christ be not risen again,then is our preaching vain, and your faith is alsovain ; yes, and we are found false witnesses pf God,"he expressed the vast importance of this doctrine, andits special position as basis of the Christian fabric ofbelief. Nor was there any doctrine which morekindled the animosity or sharpened the scorn of theheathen than this of the resurrection of the body.When the Stoics and Epicureans heard it, " somemocked, while others said, We will hear thee againabout this matter," a time which probably never came.Yet there was a doctrine about the immortality of thesoul, that is, the intellectual principle in man, currentat least among philosophers, and that something ofman survived after death was generally believedthe multitude of men, and was borne witness to upontheir tombs. What then was the reason for thisanimosity and scorn ?All arguments as to the immortality of the sowere in the force which they exercised to persuadas nothing in comparison with one fact of ChristResurrection. For this fact, the foundation of Christianhope, without which Christians were, as they arestill, of all men the most miserable, established in tmind the conception of the eternal personal subsience of the human compound, soul and body, distincfrom God, but sustained by Him. It was the corollary to the doctrine of the Personal God: it didthe manhood what the preceding doctrine did for th