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

may

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 be understood of its speedy arrival ;—which proves, if the thing needed further 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.

come,

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 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 twentyseventh verse of this twenty-fourth 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 twenty-eighth verse—" For wheresoever the carcass 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