in the last ages of the world will fall upon wicked nations. "Of two men in one bed, one shall be taken and the other left. Two women grinding together, the one shall be taken and the other left. Two men shall be in the field, the one shall be taken and the other left. And they said unto him Where, Lord? And he said unto them Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together." It is probable that the eagle and the carcass was a proverbial image among the people of the East, expressing things inseparably connected by natural affinities and sympathies. “Her young ones suck up blood," says Job, speaking of the eagle; " and where the slain is, there is she." The disciples ask- Where, in what countries are these calamities to happen, and these miraculous deliverances to be wrought? Our divine instructor held it unfit to give farther light upon the subject. He frames a reply, as was his custom when pressed with unseasonable questions, which, at the same time that it evades the particular enquiry, might more edify the disciples than the most explicit resolution of the question proposed. "Wheresoever the carcass is, thither will the eagles be gathered together." Wheresoever sinners shall dwell, there shall my vengeance

overtake them, and there will I interpose to protect my faithful servants. Nothing, therefore, in the similitude of the lightning, or the image of the eagles gathered round the carcass, limits the phrase of "our Lord's coming," in the twenty-seventh verse of this twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew, to the figurative sense of his coming to destroy Jerusalem.

His coming is announced again in the thirtieth verse, and in subsequent parts of the same prophecies; where it is of great importance to rescue the phrase from the refinements of modern expositors, and to clear some considerable difficulties, which, it must be confessed, attend the literal interpretation. And to this purpose I shall devote a separate discourse.

SERMON III.

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?

Ir was upon the Wednesday in the Passionweek, that our Lord, for the last time retiring from the temple, where he had closed his public teaching with a severe invective against the hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees, uttered to the apostles, remarking with admiration as they passed the strength and beauty of that stately fabric, that prediction of its approaching demolition which gave occasion to the question which is related in my text. When they reached the Mount of Olives, and Jesus was seated on a part of the hill where the city and the temple lay in prospect before him, four of the apostles. took advantage of that retirement to obtain,

as they hoped, from our Lord's mouth, full satisfaction of the curiosity which his prediction of the temple's ruin had excited. Peter, James, John, and Andrew, came to him, and asked him privately "Tell us

when shall these things be; and what shall be the signs of thy coming, and of the end of the world ?" To this inquiry our Lord was pleased to reply in a prophetical discourse of some considerable length, which takes up two entire chapters, the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth, of St. Matthew's Gospel; and yet is brief, if the discourse be measured by the subject, if the length of speech be compared with the period of time which the prophecy embraces, commencing within a few years after our Lord's ascension, and ending only with the general judgment. This discourse consists of two principal branches. The first is the answer to the first part of the question, "When shall these things be?" that is, When shall this demolition of the temple be, which thou hast now foretold? And the second branch of the discourse is the answer to the second part of the question, "What shall be the signs of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" You will find, indeed, in some modern expositions, such a turn given to the expressions in which the

apostles put their questions, as makes the two branches of the sentence, not two distinct questions, as they really are, but the same question differently expressed. You are told by these expositors, that by the end of the world, the apostles meant the end of that particular age during which the Jewish church and state were destined to endure. Such puerile refinements of verbal criticism might better become those blind leaders of the blind against whose bad teaching our Saviour warned the Jewish people, than the preachers of the gospel. Ask these expositors by what means they were themselves led to the discovery of a meaning so little obvious in the words, you will find that they have nothing to allege but what they call the idioms of the Jewish language; which, however, are no idioms of the language of the inspired penmen, but the idioms of the Rabbinical divines, - a set of despicable writers, who strive to cover their poverty of meaning by the affected obscurity of a mystic style. The apostles were no Rabbins; they were plain artless men, commissioned to instruct men like themselves in the mysteries of God's kingdom. It is not to be believed that such men, writing for such a and charged with the publication of a general revelation,

purpose,