There are those who will not believe without seeing; who say, I must have proof.  What I hear in church is too much for me to believe without many more reasons than are given for it all.  Many people, for instance, stumble at the stumbling-block of the cross, and cannot bring themselves to believe that God would condescend to suffer and to die for men.  Others cannot make up their minds about the resurrection.  It seems to them a strange and impossible thing that Jesus’ body should have risen from the grave and ascended to heaven, and that our bodies should rise also.  That was the great puzzle to the Greeks, who thought themselves very learned and cunning, and were great arguers and disputers about all deep matters in heaven and earth.  When St. Paul preached to them on Mars’ Hill, they heard him patiently enough, till he spoke of Jesus rising from the dead; and then they mocked; laughed at the notion as absurd.  And we find that the Corinthians, even after they were converted and baptised Christians, were puzzled about this same matter.  They could not understand how the dead were raised, and with what body they would come.

With such the Lord is not angry.  If they really wish to know what is true, and to do what is right; if they really are, as St. Paul says, ‘feeling after the Lord, if haply they may find him;’ then the Lord will give them light in due time, and shew them what they ought to believe, and give them the sort of proof which they want.  All such he treats as he did Thomas, when he said, in his great condescension, ’Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands, and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side, and be not faithless but believing.’

So the Lord sent to those Corinthians the very sort of proof which they wanted, by the hand of the learned apostle, St. Paul.  They were great observers of the works of nature, of the strange movement and change, birth and death, which goes on in beasts, and in plants, and in the clouds, and the rivers, and the very stones under our feet.  And they said, We cannot believe in the resurrection of the dead, because we see nothing like it in the world around us.  And St. Paul was sent to tell them.  No:  you do see something like it.  If you will look deeper into the working of the world around you, you will see that the rising again of the dead, instead of being an unnatural or an absurd thing, is the most reasonable and natural thing, the perfect fulfilment, and crowning wonder of wonderful laws which are working round you in every seed which you sow; in the flesh of beasts and fishes; in bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial:  and so in that glorious chapter which we read in the Burial Service, St. Paul tells the Corinthians, who went altogether by sense, and reasoning about the things which they could see and handle, that sense and reasoning were on his side, on God’s side; and that the mysteries of faith, like the resurrection of the body, were not contrary to reason, but agreed with it.