IN response to a request from one who seemed interested in Christian Science, a copy of the text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," was supplied him, and after some days the book was returned with the comment that to this inquirer Christian Science seemed but cold comfort; that he did not propose to believe in it until he could see the dead raised.
Over nineteen hundred years ago the Master said substantially that if people did not believe the works which he did, neither would they believe though one rose from the dead. And at least twice during his ministry, when tempted by the Pharisees to give them a "sign," he replied, "A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign be given unto it save the sign of the prophet Jonah." His statements are in force today, and will stand for all time. As a matter of fact, enough persons have already been raised from the dead and returned to abide again among the living to convert the entire human race if the phenomenon had been spiritually interpreted. There are seven cases of individual raising of the dead in the Bible: that of the widow's son by Elijah, and the son of the Shunamite woman by Elisha, as recorded in I and II Kings. Three cases of raising the dead are accorded to Christ Jesus by the four evangelists,—the raising of the ruler's daughter, the restoration of the son of the widow of Nain, and the wonderful story of Lazarus, while the Acts of the Apostles records the raising of Dorcas by Peter, and Paul's restoration of the young man Eutychus.
Standing out alone, greatest of all as proof of spiritual causation, is the resurrection of our Lord, the final, sublime proof of the divine metaphysics which resolves matter and its asserted laws into nothingness, and at the same moment checks the inroads of human grief with the Master's own words: "He that believeth on me shall never die." And, as though to attest that fact for all time, Matthew tells us that after Christ Jesus had cried with a loud voice, the veil of the temple was rent in twain, and "the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose and went into the holy city and appeared unto many." With significant silence the sacred record pauses here, but if after the lapse of almost two thousand years, we let thought travel back to that event and dwell on the awe-inspiring scene, there comes sweeping down through the ages the sweet assurance of the Christ: "Verily, verily I say unto you, the hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live."
