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The years of the history of the Church which have as yet resisted most successfully the efforts of scientific research are the earliest years. The first century is the most obscure. With or without a history satisfying to modern canons, the Church accomplished in that time a spiritual work which, for present moral effects, for power to attract and subjugate souls of every nation and degree of culture, for inspiring new motives of action to a languid and despairing world, has far surpassed any other change known to us in the history of man. If the question is asked, as it often is, on what does our faith in God and Christ depend, we ought perhaps to reply, on the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, and that His resurrection restored Him as a living leader to His disciples, so that His presence welded them together as one community, zealous of good works, abhorring sin, sure of eternal life. "Never," says Ewald, "in the whole world has a whole community, through a course of many years, lived so exclusively with all its thoughts in heaven, as that primitive community of Christianity without a visible Christ did actually live." With this belief we must stand or fall. Christian exclusiveness rests upon a belief in the central doctrine of the resurrection. The firm and sturdy belief that Christ is risen, and that we are risen, will not be replaced by Leibnitz's immortality of unlimited progress, or by the impersonal immortality of Spinoza, which to the individual soul is hardly more than a promise of nothingness. "The impossibility of a future life is not yet proved. With modern science immortality remains still a problem; and if the problem has not yet received a positive solution, neither has it received a negative one, as is sometimes maintained."

(Archbishop Thomson.)

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KJV: Turn you to the strong hold, ye prisoners of hope: even to day do I declare that I will render double unto thee;

WEB: Turn to the stronghold, you prisoners of hope! Even today I declare that I will restore double to you.