plished in their own days, the first Christians might expect in due time the promised consummation.

That they are to be thus understood, may be collected from our Lord's own parable of the figtree, and the application which he teaches us to make of it. After a minute prediction of the distresses of the Jewish war, and the destruction of Jerusalem, and a very general mention of his second coming, as a thing to follow in its appointed season, he adds-" Now learn a parable of the fig-tree. When its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors." That it is near so we read in our English Bibles; and expositors render the word "it,” by the ruin foretold, or the desolation spoken of. But what was the ruin foretold, or desolation spoken of?-The ruin of the Jewish nation -the desolation of Jerusalem. What were all these things, which, when they should see, they might know it to be near?-All the particulars of our Saviour's detail; that is to say, the de

struction of Jerusalem, with all the circumstances of confusion and distress with which it was to be accompanied. This exposition, therefore, makes, as I conceive, the desolation of Jerusalem the prognostic of itself,—the sign and the thing signified the same. The true rendering of the original I take to be-" So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that He is near at the doors." He, that is, the Son of Man, spoken of in the verses immediately preceding, as coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. The approach of summer, says our Lord, is not more surely indicated by the first appearances of spring, than the final destruction of the wicked by the beginnings of vengeance on this impenitent people. The opening of the verhal blossom is the first step in a natural process which necessarily terminates in the ripening of the summer fruits; and the rejection of the Jews, and the adoption of the believing Gentiles, is the first step in the execution of a settled plan of Providence which inevitably terminates in the general judgment. The chain of physical causes, in the one case, is not more uninterrupted, or

more certainly productive of the ultimate effect, than the chain of moral causes in the other.

Verily, I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled." "All these things," in this sentence, must unquestionably denote the same things which are denoted by the same words just before. Just before, the same words denoted those particular circumstances of the Jewish war which were included in our Lord's prediction. All those signs which answer to the fig-tree's budding leaves, the apostles and their contemporaries, at least some of that generation, were to see. But as the thing por tended is not included among the 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, wherever 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.

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 thirteenth 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