I sympathize with the “sense of bathos,” as you call it, which comes over you when you hear that the phenomena of the Resurrection of Christ are to be explained by a study of the growth and development of the revelation given to mankind through the Imagination. I sympathize with you; but I sympathize with you as I should with a child who might be standing by Elijah’s side at the time when the prophet saw his never-to-be-forgotten vision. That child would feel, no doubt, “a sense of bathos” because the Lord was not in the fire, nor in the whirlwind, nor in the earthquake, but in the still small voice. You are in the childish stage of susceptibility to anything that is noisy and big; you have not been taught by experience and thought to appreciate the divineness of things obvious, ordinary, and quiet; above all you have not yet learned to revere your own nature nor to acknowledge (except with your lips) that you are made in the image of God. Retaining still a keen recollection of the pain with which I passed through that stage myself, I have neither the inclination, nor the right, to despise your present condition of mind; but I believe, if you will still keep the question open in your mind, and if you will meditate a little now and then on the frequency, or I may say the universality, of illusion in the conveyance of all the highest truth, you will gradually come, as I came, to perceive that the essence of the resurrection of Christ is that His Spirit should have really triumphed over death, and not that His body should have risen from the grave.
No doubt you would be much more impressed if the tangible body of some dead friend of yours, after being buried in the earth, had appeared to certain witnesses and touched them, and eaten in their company, than if a vivid apparition of the friend had appeared to the same witnesses; but I think you would much more easily believe the latter than the former; and you might be more impressed by a strong conviction of the latter than by a doubtful, timid, clinging to the former. I can hardly think that if you had received several accounts from independent witnesses, of apparitions of this kind resulting in a marvellous change of character in all who had seen them, you would at once put them aside simply because they might be called in some sense natural. The very fact of their being natural would lead you to consider how strange must have been the causes that had produced such strange results; how powerful must have been the personality that had thus forced itself on the mental retina of the seers of the apparition; and if something important had followed from such a vision, say, for example, the writing of a great poem, or the foundation of a noble empire, I cannot think that you would set down the vision as a negligible trifle.