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?" 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

"Jesus saith unto him, if I will

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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 twenty-seventh verse of this twentyfourth 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 twentyeighth 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 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 im mediate act, in the course of those conquests by which they might think he was to gain his king

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