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Church wherein He promised to abide forever, must be infallible beyond all doubt. For Christ had said: " I have power to lay down My life, and I have power to take it up again," words, which, if justified by the event, proclaim the speaker to have been a God. Lazarus, and other few before and since, have been recalled to life, but always, mind you, by a power other than their own, but only God, the Arbiter of life and death, could say: " I die at pleasure and at pleasure do I rise again." In fact on this one truth, viz., that He should rise again, Christ staked His reputation as a man and His claim as God upon the world's credence and fidelity. All His other miracles had a distinct purpose immediately in view, whether it was that He pitied the widow of Nairn, or had compassion on His famished followers, or rescued them from shipwreck; and invariably He enjoined silence concerning such evidences of His Godhead, until He should be risen from the dead. Nay, when pressed by His enemies for a proof of His divinity, He refused the sign they asked, saying: " No other proof shall be given you but that of Jonas the prophet, who after three days came forth from the whale even as I shall from the tomb, for if you destroy this temple, My body, in three days I shall raise it up again." His position, therefore, was that His Resurrection was to be the crowning proof of His divinity and that without His Resurrection He and all His teaching and wonder-working would have come to naught. Not only Christianity, but all religion from the beginning, would have been dis-