which we call reality. What they declared they had seen: what they taught they had heard from His lips. They could not doubt, or hesitate, or qualify, or draw back before any contradiction. As S. Paul said, "If God be for us, who is against us?"[1] Their personal converse with our Lord, and their direct commission from Him, gave to their words and their life a momentum which nothing could arrest. Their preaching was the outpouring of their unchanging consciousness. Their whole soul, intellect, conscience, heart, and will went with every word. Their preaching was the testimony of an eye-witness and an ear-witness. It had in it a force beyond all words. Words rather hinder than help the directness and the power of truth when simply told by those who believe what they say. Men just delivered from some great danger, or coming from some terrible sight of death, use few words. If they use many, we feel that they have but little sense of what they have seen, and of what they are saying. They who had stood on Calvary and watched through the three hours, and they who saw Jesus after He rose from the dead, and S. Paul who saw Him till he was blinded by His glory, so long as life lasted must have been penetrated in every faculty and sense and
- ↑ Rom. viii. 31.
