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signs, it was not at all implied in this declaration that any of them were to live to see the harvest, the coming of our Lord in glory.

. I persuade myself that I have shown that our Lord's coming, whenever it is mentioned by the apostles in their epistles as a motive to a holy life, is always to be taken literally for his personal coming at the last day.

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It may put the matter still farther out of doubt, to observe, that the passage where, of all others, in this part of Scripture, a figurative interpretation of the phrase of our Lord's coming" would be the most necessary, if the figure did not lie in the expressions that seem to intimate its near approach, happens to be one in which our Lord's coming cannot but be literally taken. The passage to which I allude is in the fourth chapter of St. Paul's first epistle to the Thessalonians, from the 13th verse to the end. The apostle, to comfort the Thessalonian brethren concerning their deceased friends, reminds them of the resurrection; and tells them, that those who were already dead would as surely have their part in a happy immortality, as the Christians that should be living at the time of our Lord's coming. Upon this occasion, his expressions, taken literally, would imply that he included himself, with many of those to whom these consolations were addressed, in the number of those who should remain alive at the last day. This turn of the expression naturally arose from the strong hold that the expectation of the thing in its due season had taken of the writer's imagination, and from his full persuasion of the truth of the doctrine he was asserting,—namely, that those who should die before our Lord's coming, and those who should then be alive, would find themselves quite upon an even footing. In the confident expectation of his own reward, his intermediate dissolution was a matter of so much indifference to him that he overlooks it. His expression, however, was so strong, that his meaning was

mistaken, or, as I rather think, misrepresented. There seems to have been a sect in the apostolic age,-in which sect, however, the apostles themselves were not, as some have absurdly maintained, included, but there seems to have been a sect which looked for the resurrection in their own time. Some of these persons seem to have taken advantage of St Paul's expressions in this passage, to represent him as favouring their opinion. This occasioned the second epistle to the Thessalonians, in which the apostle peremptorily decides against that doctrine; maintaining that the Man of Sin is to be revealed, and a long consequence of events to run out, before the day of judgment can come; and he desires that no expression of his may be understood of its speedy arrival; which proves, if the thing needed farther proof than I have already given of it, that the coming mentioned in his former epistle is the coming to judgment, and that whatever he had said of the day of coming as at hand, was to be understood only of the certainty of that coming.

The most difficult part of my subject yet remains,— to consider the passages in the Gospel wherein the coming of our Lord is mentioned.

SERMON II.

MATTHEW xxiv. 3.

Tell us when shall these things be, and what shall be the signs of thy coming and of the end of the world?

I PROCEED in my inquiry into the general importance of the phrase of "the coming of the Son of Man" in the Scriptures of the New Testament.

I have shown, that in the epistles, wherever our Lord's coming is mentioned, as an expectation that should operate through hope to patience and perseverance, or through fear to vigilance and caution, it is to be understood literally of his coming in person to the general judgment. I have yet to consider the usual import of the same phrase in the gospels. I shall consider the passages wherein a figure hath been supposed, omitting those where the sense is universally confessed to be literal.

When our Lord, after his resurrection, was pleased to intimate to St. Peter the death by which it was ordained that he should glorify God, St. Peter had the weak curiosity to inquire what might be St. John's destiny. "Lord, what shall this man do?" "Jesus saith unto him, if I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou me." The disciples understood this answer as a prediction that St. John was not to die; which seems to prove, what is much to our purpose, that in the enlightened period which immediately followed our Lord's ascension, the expression of his coming was taken

in its literal meaning. This interpretation of the reply to St. Peter was set aside by the event. In extreme old age, the disciple whom Jesus loved was taken for ever to the bosom of his Lord. But the Christians of that time being fixed in a habit of interpreting the reply to St. Peter as a prediction concerning the term of St. John's life, began to affix a figurative meaning to the expression of "our Lord's coming," and persuaded themselves that the prediction was verified by St. John's having survived the destruction of Jerusalem; and this gave a beginning to the practice, which has since prevailed, of seeking figurative senses of this phrase wherever it occurs. But the plain fact is, that St. John himself saw nothing of prediction in our Saviour's words. He seems to have apprehended nothing in them but an answer of significant though mild rebuke to an inquisitive demand.

If there be any passage in the New Testament in which the epoch of the destruction of Jerusalem is intended by the phrase of "our Lord's coming," we might not unreasonably look for this figure in some parts of those prophetical discourses, in which he replied to the question proposed to him in the words of the text, and particularly in the 27th verse of this 24th chapter of St. Matthew's gospel, where our Saviour, in the middle of that part of his discourse in which he describes the events of the Jewish war, says, "For as the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth unto the west, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be." And he adds, in the 28th verse, "For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together." The disciples, when they put the question, "Tell us when shall these things be, and what shall be the signs of thy coming and of the end of the world?" imagined, no doubt, that the coming of our Lord was to be the epoch of the demolition with which he had threatened the temple. They had not yet raised their expectations to any thing above

a temporal kingdom. They imagined, perhaps, that our Lord would come by conquest, or by some display of his extraordinary powers, which should be equivalent to conquest, to seat himself upon David's throne; and that the destruction of the Jewish temple would be either the last step in the acquisition of his royal power, or perhaps the first exertion of it. The veil was yet upon their understandings; and the season not being come for taking it entirely away, it would have been nothing strange if our Lord had framed his reply in terms accommodated to their prejudices, and had spoken of the ruin of Jerusalem as they conceived of it,-as an event that was to be the consequence of his coming,-to be his own immediate act, in the course of those conquests by which they might think he was to gain his kingdom, or the beginning of the vengeance which, when established in it, he might be expected to execute on his vanquished enemies. These undoubtedly were the notions of the disciples, when they put the question concerning the time of the destruction of the temple and the signs of our Lord's coming; and it would have been nothing strange if our Lord had delivered his answer in expressions studiously accommodated to these prejudices. For as the end of prophecy is not to give curious men a knowledge of futurity, but to be in its completion an evidence of God's all-ruling providence, who, if he governed not the world, could not possibly foretel the events of distant ages;—for this reason, the spirit which was in the prophets hath generally used a language, artfully contrived to be obscure and ambiguous, in proportion as the events intended might be distant,-gradually to clear up as the events should approach, and acquire from the events, when brought to pass, the most entire perspicuity: that thus men might remain in that ignorance of futurity, which so suits with the whole of our present condition, that it seems essential to the welfare of the world; and

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