You say, “How can a man believe that?  What evidence is there of it?” The personal evidence of Jesus Christ himself.  It is the self testimony of Christ that makes the assurance of the Christian faith.  Does that sound to you all unreasonable?  Do you turn here in your pew or in your aisle and say, “After all, it is the old story which I have tested and know to be untrue.”

Suppose yourself back there in Jerusalem.  Suppose the self testimony came to you from the very person of Jesus Christ.  Suppose the words that He absolutely said and the deeds that He absolutely did bore to you a testimony that some greater than a human life was there, and that then, as you pressed close to Him and became a part of His life, you found your own life awakened and became a nobler man, ashamed to sin, aspiring after holiness, thinking noble thoughts, lifting yourself not above the earth, but lifting yourself with the whole great earth, which then is taken up into the presence of God and made sacred through and through.  I know no man in whom I trust except by the personal evidence that he bears to me of himself.  I know no man’s nature finally but by that testimony which the nature gives me of him.  Bring me all evidence that the man is trustworthy, and then when I am convinced I will go and stand in the presence of that man himself, and he shall tell me.  So the world stood, so the world stands to-day in the presence of Jesus Christ.  His presence on earth is an historic fact.  The words that He spoke are written down in a true record.  The deeds that He did are the history of the manifestations of His character, and the story of His christendom is the continued manifestation of His life, the divine life in the life of man, made divine through Him.  Now, a question that comes in the Christian’s mind is “Why don’t people believe this?” Why should they not?  Is it not written in the historical record?  Has it not manifested itself in the experience of mankind?  If it has, surely then it appeals to man’s reason, and is not merely the act of the blind, stupid thing which we call faith, but it is the noblest action of that hour in which I believe, in the heavens above me and in the earth under my feet, in the brother with whom I have to do in the long course of history, in the total humanity which has grandly lived.  The reason that men do not believe it is that of course there seems to be to them some strange and previous presumption with regard to it, something which makes the story incredible.  They say it is the supernatural in it, that it goes beyond the ordinary experience of man.  Ah! it seems also strange to me, the ordinary experience of man.  Who dares to dream that human life has lived its completest and shown the noblest power of receiving God into itself?  Who dares to think that these few thousand years have exhausted this majestic and mysterious being that we call man?  Who dares to think of his own life that, in these few thirty, forty, fifty years that he has lived,