The character of our Lord’s appearances, in all the Gospels, is alike. Most commonly He is not recognised at first, and does not appear in His own form, when other than disciples are by; only to those, who had already mastered the words of eternal life, was it given to see Him Risen from the dead. He comes men know not how, when they are sitting with fastened doors He appears in the midst; He goes they know not where, and the disciples who beforetime were so full of curiosity, do not venture to ask whither He goes or where He abides. But, what bears most of all on my subject, is the mode in which our Lord assuages that dread of a disembodied spirit, which would have paralysed the Apostles’ minds. This terror, reasonable or not, certainly existed, and Christ always deals with the fact He finds. There were lessons still to be taught and for the right learning of them it was needful that the old confidence between Master and learners should still subsist. Could the disciples have listened to the Lord, as their old Master, receiving his direction to go back to Jerusalem and tarry there till they were “endued with power;”—could they have rested gladly on the assurance that He would appear and help them in any need that came, if they had regarded Him as a spectre belonging to another world? In order to calm their instinctive terror of a spirit, and be again in some degree what He had been on the Lake shore of Galilee, it was necessary for our Lord to assure the Apostles that He had a body even as they. The deep doctrinal significance of this lies beyond the limited purpose of my book, but the point which is within my range—the effect on the Apostles themselves of the conviction of our Lord’s existence in the body—is important and full of instruction. It was essential that confidence should be restored, and the course actually adopted did restore it in a wonderful way. Men thought that a spirit might be seen and heard but only a body could be _felt_. Our Lord therefore at once appeals to touch—He eats and drinks before them. He tells them that He has flesh and bones. He suffers them to “handle Him and see.” To this corporal presence as a crowning fact St John recurs, saying “That which we beheld and our hands handled;”(331) and St Peter says “Him God raised up the third day, and gave him to be made manifest, not to all the people, but unto witnesses that were chosen before of God, _even_ to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.”(332)