Rarely do we meet with an instance of more reckless desperation in the line of criticism. And what is the object of it? It is to have us understand that when Christ says, “I am not yet ascended to my Father,” he means to say, I am not yet ascended _again_ to my Father. And from this he would have us further draw the lucid inference that Christ had ascended once, that is, in his disembodied spirit, between his death and resurrection, and now tells Mary not to touch him because he has not ascended again! It would be difficult to conceive of a more unnecessary and far-fetched inference. And that men will seriously contend for such a view, shows the orbless obstinacy with which they will cling to preconceived notions, though they have only the most groundless trifles to sustain them, rather than surrender them for more consistent views. Nothing can be more evident than that Christ, when he said, “I am not yet ascended to my Father,” affirmed in the most direct manner that since his advent into this world, he had not, up to that time, ascended to his Father. Rather than thus summarily lose the argument that the thief was still conscious in death, and that the soul is therefore (?) immortal, another attempt is made to adjust the matter thus: Although Christ did not go to his Father, he nevertheless went to paradise, which is not where the Father dwells, but the intermediate resting place of departed souls. Do we then understand them? We found them, a little while ago, arguing from Eccl. 12:7, that the disembodied spirit _did_ return to God; which they claimed to be proof positive that the soul is immortal; and thought it would puzzle the annihilationists not a little. Do they now give this up, and admit that the soul or spirit does not go to God, but only into some intermediate place, called paradise? It matters not to us which position they take, only we wish to know which one it is. We cannot hold our peace and allow them to take one position on one text and another on another, to avoid the embarrassments into which their theory plunges at every turn. That paradise is no intermediate state, a halfway house between the grave and the resurrection, we have fully shown; for we have the positive statements of the Scriptures to show that paradise is in the third Heaven, where God sits upon his throne; and Christ told Mary, the third day after his crucifixion, in so many words, that he had not yet ascended there. The popular interpretation of Christ’s language to the thief thus utterly failing, we are thrown back upon the text for some other explanation of the phraseology there used: “Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.”