Titus ii. 13. Testimony of Christian Experience. Luke xxiv. 48. Luke xxiv. 48. with a heavenly hue, brilliantly tinging discourse and epistle. But had the Lord not risen, had the early church supposed that He was still lying in His tomb, there never would have been that constant and joyous looking for the blessed Hope, even the glorious Epiphany of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Again Christian Experience is a Testimony to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. "Ye are witnesses of these things," said the Risen Lord in His final interview with His disciples. The declaration is so profound that we must descant on it. At the outset, then, let it be emphatically stated that Christianity is a series of physical facts as well as a series of moral truths. Strictly speaking, its truths grow out of its facts. Take away the facts in our Lord's personal career, and you take away the foundation-stones of Christian Doctrine. You cannot have a personal, vital, living Christianity without first having an historical Jesus. No wonder then that the Risen Lord, ere He ascended, twice declared to His disciples that they were to be His witnesses. And His declaration is frequently and emphatically repeated alike in discourses and epistles by His Apostles. Nothing can exceed the emphasis with which the Apostles declare that they have been eye-witnesses of the great facts in the Nazarene's career. And in thus insisting on the importance of their own personal testimony they did tribute to human reason. For Christianity appeals to the rational part of our nature not less than to the emotional, and makes no demands on us which it does not propose to fortify by competent testimony. But these apostolic witnesses of the bodily Jesus were mortal like ourselves. One after another of them sealed his testimony with his own lifeblood. Did then the testimony to the historic career of the Nazarene end with the death of those who had been the companions of the Lord Jesus Acts i 21, 22. from His baptism by John to His ascension in the clouds of heaven? Have there been no witnesses of the personal Jesus since the day when the Beloved Disciple in a ripe old age wrote of Him as One Whom he had heard and gazed upon and John i. 1-3. handled? Are there no witnesses of the personal Jesus to-day? Thank God, there are: the Church of the living God is still a witness of Jesus Christ His Son. And to prove this I shall resort to no argument except such as is furnished by personal experience. Tell me then, O Christian, have you never come into personal relations with Jesus Christ? Have you never been in His company? Have you never heard His voice? Have you never seen His form? Have you never felt His touch? Have you never been crucified with Him? Have you never risen with Him? Have you never soared with Him? Do you not know as absolutely as you can know anything on earth that the Son of God did live in this world and did die, and did rise again and is alive to-day? Have you no spiritual sense, keener and more trusty than any bodily sense, by which you have in very truth touched the crucified and Risen Lord? Recall the hours-it may be-weeks and months of spiritual distress before you saw Him and be lieved. How you groaned beneath the load of fell guiltiness! And when at length the mighty burden rolled off, was it not, as in the case of Bunyan's Pilgrim, at sight of the Cross? And as Faith discerned the dying Saviour, was there no spiritual crucifixion within which miniatured and so proved to you the bodily crucifixion without? Heard you not also the sneers which cold-blooded indifference and jeering infidelity flung against your dying Lord? Felt you not the nails piercing your hands and your feet? And when at length the long dark night was over, and the first Lord's Day of Peace began to dawn on your aching spirit, heard you no voice speaking to you, calling you by name, and answered you not-"Rabboni! Master"! Luke xxiv. 27-82. And as the hours glided by, and He expounded to you in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself, did not your heart burn within you as He talked with you by the way? And then did you not say to all around: "The Lord is risen indeed and hath appeared to me"? Tell me, Christian, are you not a witness of these things? John xx. 16. Luke xxiv. 34. And now suppose some great champion of infidelity should seek to undermine your faith in the New Testament story of Jesus Christ. If your faith be only the assent of intellect, I grant that he may make swift work with you. But if you stand on the high vantage ground of a personal Christian experience, and can keep your eye fixed on the Risen Lord as One Whom you had heard and seen and felt in your own soul, I will stand voucher for your steadfastness. I think he might as well undertake to dislodge the Rock of Ages. What will you deny the testimony of your own experience and consciousness? Will you deny the existence of One with Whose sufferings you have Phil. iii. 10. had fellowship, to the likeness of Whose death you have been conformed, the power of Whose resurrection you have felt? Ah, it is when the Christian allows the vision of the Jesus he has once seen to fade from his memory that faith gives way to doubt and doubt to apostasy. But let him always grasp the hand and lean on the bosom of the personal Jesus, and neither death Rom. viii. 38. nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to make him abate one jot or tittle of his certainty as an eye-witness of the crucified and risen Lord. He has a demonstration stronger than any bodily vision or sense evidence: it is experience. He that believeth in the Son of God hath 1 John v. 10. the witness in himself. His faith depends not on tradition, or scholarship, or authority, or deliverances by his pastor. He has a demonstration independent of what man can give or take away : it is his own moral history. He has experienced Jesus Christ in his own moral nature. He knows 2 Tim. i. 12. Whom he has believed, and is persuaded that He is able to keep that which he has committed to Him against that Day. In the depths of his own personal experience he has witnessed, so to speak, the birth and life and passion and death and resurrection of the Son of God. He illustrates in John xx. 29. Testimony of his own experience the Beatitude of the Risen Lord: "Thomas, because thou hast seen Me thou hast believed: Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed." God grant that the profound phrase, "Experienced religion," may never die out of the dialect of the Church! This then is our argument: Had Jesus Christ never risen from the dead, were He still lying in Joseph's tomb, did He not now enter into living, personal, blessed communion with His people, there could have been no such thing as Christian experience. Once more: Christian Character is a Testimony to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. For the Church is not only a witness of Him; the Church is also a witness for Him, and this for the reason that she has been a witness of Him. Men do not act without motives. When therefore we see a man whose course of moral conduct is entirely changed, so that he is now swayed by principles precisely the opposite to those by which he once was swayed, we may be sure that some new force has been brought to bear on his moral nature. Especially is this true when this change of conduct involves great self-denial. And when we observe this change we instinctively look for some force adequate to produce it. Take now the case of a man who has really become a follower of Jesus Christ. Suppose, e. g., he had been an abandoned profligate, trampling on every moral law, mentioning the Name that is above every name only to profane it: and now you find him, not in the haunts of dissipation, but in the |