Excerpt from What the Rising of the Dead Should Mean: A Sermon Delivered in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church New York City Sunday, March 27, 1921 There is no doubt whatever that the cause of this was a well-authenticated belief in the resur rection of Jesus Christ. This was the Church's own view, and it was the reason which she gave for her power on the earth. It is very striking to notice how this entered into the first preaching of Christianity. Every doctrine has its supreme hour. The note of modern preaching is the Fatherhood and Kingdom of God. The note of the Reformation doctrine was that of justification by faith. But these early days were distinctively the hour of the resurrection. In all the preaching of the apostles there is the sound of triumph. They never represented Christ as merely escaping from the prison-house of death, but spoke of His victory over death as the thing which has changed the world. When His death had been ascertained a deep sigh of relief had risen from the anxious hearts of His enemies. They little knew that He had died deliberately, knowing that in dying He was conquering death. This preaching of the resurrection is manifest throughout the whole story of the Acts of the Apostles. Peter preached it at Jerusalem, and Paul preached it at Athens, and everywhere else. Paul's own conversion was caused, according to his own account, by the assurance that Jesus Who had died was still alive and had spoken to him. Through out the whole of these narratives we hear of men witnessing and preaching the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That was their gospel, that their living faith. The world of their time had been absorbedin the thought of death. A strong tension and strain were on it. It has been called a sustained cry as of hungry souls crying out for immor tality. In the centuries immediately following, the same thing is felt, in the record we have of the Greek oracles and the questions men and women asked of them. These people lived intensely and loved their life. Their labor meant much to them, and their sensitive spirits responded to beauty and joy and love with a great and constant delight. These things were to them more convincing than death. They believed in them with a different kind of belief from their belief in death. They were the very reality, the innermost truth of things. Yet death came in among all those fair and charm ing convictions, and brutality clubbed them down. There was something not only tragic but unreason able in this, and in a way incredible. It is this tension, and this attitude to the thought of con tinued life beyond the grave, which explains the great shout that arose from the conviction that none of those fair things had perished, but that all survive for them that believe. The resurrection of Jesus was much more than an event. It was an event which changed the whole aspect of life for all believers. The spectacle of the early Christian Church, even in the sad and trying days of their worship in the Catacombs, has been well described as that of a company to whom some authentic message had come from across the flaming rampart of the world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.