Our Lord was in the tomb less than thirty-six hours, and his flesh “did not see corruption.” His body, apparently, was as human as that of Lazarus after he was raised. The criticism that it is not said that there was _blood_ seems frivolous, for there could be no living flesh or bones without blood-vessels and blood. Although for the time he forbade Mary Magdalene to touch, or rather to detain him, he permitted the other women to take hold of his feet, and directed the Apostles to handle him. Mary Magdalene saw him as a man, and supposed him to be the gardener, until he called her by name. The two disciples conversed with him as a man; and that they did not know him was only because their eyes were “holden.” His sudden disappearance after the repast, and equally sudden appearance in the midst of the Apostles, at most present no greater difficulties than his transfiguration, his walking upon the sea, his passing through his enemies when they were about to throw him down the cliff (all before his crucifixion), or the opening of the prison doors to two of the Apostles. The doors, even if bolted and barred, may have opened as to Peter, or those present may have been so preoccupied that a perfectly natural but silent withdrawal in the one case, and entrance in the other, were simply unnoticed. As the man Christ Jesus, he rose from the dead, and angels, as porters, having rolled away the stone, he came forth in visible human form, and with the same body that was crucified. He would have been seen by his disciples, if they had been “watching and waiting” for him, and by the guard, if they had not become “as dead men;” perhaps in order that they might not behold him, for he had said, “Yet a little while and the world beholdeth me no more.” (John xiv. 19.) As the man Christ Jesus, he showed himself to his disciples forty days; and then, with a body, until then, of flesh and blood, as human as that of Elijah, before _he_ was taken up, ascended into the heavens. Thus, in his rising from the dead, and in the change _at his ascension_, he typified both the dead who shall be raised, and the living who shall be “changed.” And any conception of him as less corporeal from his resurrection to his ascension than before, does not conform to the record, and, by so much as it makes him less corporeal and tangible, it impairs the force of the evidence. Each one of the Apostles had as much evidence that Jesus was alive after his crucifixion, as he had that Peter or John or Thomas was alive, and evidence of just as high a character. And this proof by facts addressed to their own intelligence and bodily senses of sight, and hearing, and feeling, was continued forty days. There is no conflict in the evidence on this point.