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    other emotions in their minds than those of respectful congratulation and joy . But they appear now to have entertained the same ideas respecting the mode of his existence as those of the two disciples at the moment preceding his disappearance ; they had not the most distaut conception that their master ha ( Tieft the ordinary form of humanity , and would

    resume it only on certain occasions , for the purpose of making himself known to them . In fact , nothing probably was more remote from their conceptions than that a living man should alternate to the state of an invisible spirit , and again resume the nature of ordinary humanity . If " they thought they beheld a spirit / ' * it must have been accompanied with , the

    persuasion that the man of whom it was the shadowy vestige was deceased . What a revolution , therefore , must have been effected in the minds of the apostles , when , from the full conviction that their master was risen alive from his sepulchre , they mistook his person for a phantom of one that was deceased ! That this was their notion of a spirit , " is evident from our Lord's definition of

    it , ** a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have . " But what led them to embrace such a supposition ? It could have been no creation of the imaginations of so many persons at once , all of which were , up to the moment immediately preceding , intensely occupied with the opposite persuasion that he was what he

    now shewed himself to be , a living person having real flesh and bones . It could have proceeded from no other cause than the extraordinary manner of his presenting himself before them . " While" the two disciples were proceeding with their narration and had just mentioned the circumstance of his 4 t

    becoming known to them , " thus giving confirmation to the assurance of the apostles that he was now a living person , and before they had proceeded to relate his miraculous disappearance , so as to coiiyey ideas similar to those which were now excited by his appearance , " Jesus himself stood in the midst of them ; " or ,

    as John has more distinctly related , " The same evening , when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews , came Jesus and stood in the midst . ~ f- In the same manner the latter Evangelist describes the appearance of Jesus a second time to the ajpostles , when Thomas was added to their nuinher , and after an interval

    * Luke xxiv . 37 . -f- John xx . 19 .

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    of eight days in which he had been withdrawn from their view ; * and , as on each of these occasions he appears to have been intimately acquainted with what had passed in his apparent absence , and with the precise states of mind of the disciples at the moment which he selected to present himself , it appears

    evideut that he must have been invisibly preseut previous to the manifestations of his person . Now all this is a continued confirmation of the foregoing statements that the resurrection of Jesus was accompanied with a tranformation of his person to an invisible state ; and that from that time forward he selected such .

    occasions only for the manifestations of himself , as were best adapted to prove the reality of the facts both of his ordinary invisibility , and of his actual presence whenever he was manifested to > the cognizance of mortals . In all the cases which we have instanced , it will , I trust , be clearly seen that the states of mind of those to whom these

    extraordinary phenomena were presented , were the very reverse of anticipating or imagining such phenomena ; and consequently , that they could have proceeded only from the reality of the principle ^ that the same Jesus , from an inanimate corpse , had become ** a quickening spirit , " who , however , evinced the identity of his persou by occasionally resuming his " animal" nature , and again alternating to his spiritual state . "With

    respect to the last-mentioned appearance , it being under the same circumstances as the foregoing , to those who had been present on that occasion , it could operate ouly as a confirmation of what they had "before witnessed ; but , in this point of view , it must have been extremely acceptable , after his having been for the space of eight days withdrawn from their observation , especially as at this second interview they must have been prepared to witness the mode of his introduction

    with much more coolness and composure , than when , in the first instance , they mistook him for an apparition . Their remaining in Jerusalem so long after they had received a message from him to meet them in Galilee , and in a

    room secured from the ingress of their enemies , may indicate also that their convictions were not yet sufficiently settled and confirmed ; and the incredulity of Thomas , after so long an interval , was , there is reason to conclude , risen to its height , so that nothing could have

    -i i . -i . . I . i ' - ..... . — *¦ ¦ i * John xx . 24—27 .

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    Miscellaneous Correspondence . 551

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1830, page 551, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2587/page/47/