advent. This, therefore, is the coming of which our Lord speaks in the seventeenth chapter of St Luke's Gospel, and of which he describes the suddenness; and in the end of his discourse, he foretells some extraordinary interpositions of a discri minating Providence, which shall preserve the righteous, in situations of the greatest danger, from certain public calamities which 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 bim-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 inquiry, 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 these same prophecies; where it is of great importance to res

cue 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?

was upon the Wednesday in the Passion-week, 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