I. First among the causes of the gospel's triumph, if it be not rather the sole cause, is that the belief in the crucifixion and resurrection was not a bare profession, but a real inward life. That some new principle was really working in and fashioning the minds of believers is always assumed by the apostles, and not in the way of a heated enthusiasm, in which the mind projects the colours of its tainted eyesight upon the facts it sees, but as calmly as we could speak of the transactions of the parliament, the law-court, or the exchange. Young lads and tender women, common workmen and slaves, showed that a new spring moved all their actions; and those who came in contact with them, if they had in their hearts any germ of good at all, must have felt the influence of this moral supremacy. And can we find any other solution of this change than the simplest of all, that Christ was keeping His promise of being ever with His disciples? It was God who wrought in them; it was the promised Spirit of God that guided them; it was the Lord of the dead and living who was sitting at the right hand of God and helping and communing with those whom the Father had given Him.
II. Supposing the Divine agency to be admitted, then it follows that our Lord's nature is Divine. God cannot have been working for so many centuries in the Church causing men to bring forth fruits of righteousness in order to confirm in the earth an idolatrous delusion. Had the Church of Christ been perpetuating that worst of errors, taking the glory of God and transferring it to another, long since would the fountains of grace have been dried up from it, and the spiritual rains of heaven would have refused to refresh it until its idolatry was purged away. But we may bow the knee in His name, we may look up to Him on His Divine throne, we may say with Thomas, "My Lord and my God," because the steady fulfilment of His promises and the streams and blessing ever derived from Him by His Church assure us that His account of His Divine relation to the Father is the very truth.
Archbishop Thomson, Lincoln's Inn Sermons,p. 109.
Reference: Romans 14:7-9. J. Duncan, The Pulpit and Communion Table,p. 249.