this day, for infatuated man, "when he heareth the words of this curse that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace though I walk in the imagination of my heart.” In hearing the words of Jesus and receiving them not, M. Renan is building his hopes, as Christ puts it, on a foundation of sand; when therefore "a blast from the breath of His mouth," proceeding from the eternal throne, shall have levelled his high hopes to the ground, great indeed will be his fall. In vain will it be for him to cry, “Lord, Lord,” in that day; for, “"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven." But the man who does not believe that the will of the Father has been revealed to him, cannot, of course, do it. His rejection of the testimony concerning it is bad fruit proceeding from a corrupt heart, to begin with; all his other fruit therefore, being produced in a state of unbelief, must be Scripturally, or in the sight of God, "corrupt." And the further sentence of his professedly much-loved Jesus concerning such is, "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire." Matthew vii. 19.-Sermon on the Mount.

CHAPTER XV.

THE END OF THE WORLD, VISIONS, SCIENCE, AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA.

N page 221, M. Renan quotes the prediction of
Jesus, "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of
Israel till the Son of Man be come." But he

seems incapable of comprehending the fact that in this passage His predicted coming was simply to judge and effect the destruction of Jerusalem, and not to judge and put an end to the world, as Renan erroneously supposes. "If, however," Renan adds, "His only thought had been that the end of time was near, and that we must prepare for it-to renounce a world ready to crumble, to detach one's self little by little from the present life, and to aspire to the kingdom about to come, would have formed the gist of His preaching. The teaching of Jesus always had a much wider scope. He proposed to Himself to create a new state of humanity, and not merely to prepare the end of that which was in existence."1 Does M. Renan not perceive from this that he must have misapprehended and misinterpreted Christ's prediction in reference to His second coming? It appears not evident as one might think it to be to every one else—for on page 202 we find the following remarkable passage: By an illusion common to all great reformers, Jesus imagined the end to be much nearer than it really was."' "This true kingdom of God," he further observes, 1 Page 205.

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which like the grain of mustard seed has become a tree which overshadows the world, and amidst whose branches the birds have their nests, was understood, wished for, and founded by Jesus. By the side of a false, cold, and impossible idea of an ostentatious advent, He conceived the real city of God." How very wise and yet how very foolish, M. Renan here represents Jesus to be. Pity that He was not indued with the wisdom of a Renan, so that He might have been able to discern between the part of His teaching which was illusory and false, and that which was real and true! But, says Renan, since "His dream rendered Him strong against death, and each of us owes that which is best in himself to Him, let us pardon Him His hope of a vain Apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven." The "pardon," we apprehend, is most needed by him who dares to thus impiously speak of the Sovereign Lord of heaven and earth; and this, poor infatuated man, he will one day be constrained to admit.

But that our Lord and His inspired apostles neither taught nor expected the immediate end of the world, is evident not only from the fact that it did not immediately come to an end, but also from the fact that while there is nothing to be found in the New Testament to substantiate the assumption, many passages found therein either assert or plainly imply the contrary. Christ's prediction, e.g., relative to "the kingdom of God" being taken from the Jewish nation and "given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof," necessarily involves an indefinite and more or less prolonged period of future time. And so also the reasoning of the Apostle Paul bearing upon this subject "For I would not, brethren, that ye should be 1 Pages 204, 205. 2 Matt. xxi. 43.

ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from. Jacob for this is My covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins." And again: "For I know this, that after My departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them." The same thing is also clearly set forth in connection with our Lord's description of the miseries which should attend the siege of Jerusalem: "For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be "-an expression implying an indefinitely prolonged period subsequent to the predicted destruction of Jerusalem, following which, Christ said also, its inhabitants should "be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled." The same teaching is further borne witness to by the accusers of Stephen, inasmuch as according to such teaching a new order of things among the Jews was only to commence with the destruction of their city: "For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us.' And St. John, it should be remembered, divined that previous to the general resurrection and at a period beginning sometime in the distant future, Satan should "be bound a thousand years" and should "deceive the nations no more till the thousand years should be fulfilled."

Ephesians ii. 7,

3 Matt. xxiv. 21.
6 Rev. xx. 3.

"That in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of His grace," etc., conveys the same idea, and may be taken as conclusive evidence that the world was to continue to exist for a very long period subsequent to the time then present.

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Such passages as, "Now once in the end of the world hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself;" "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son ;"2 "Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you,"3-such passages were evidently meant to convey no other idea than that they had entered upon the last dispensation of the Church. Scoffers," such as St. Peter speaks of, may ask, “Where is the promise of His coming? for since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation;" but they must be reminded that while, according to the same apostle, they are now living in "the last days," and the last of which, he says, "will come as a thief in the night," "they are ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day," and that they have no ground, therefore, arising from the supposed delay, for thinking that "the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men" will never come, nor that "the Lord is slack concerning His promise" in reference thereto. Let such persons not forget, moreover, that the last day with them may be the present.

How long the Christian dispensation, or the dispensation of the Spirit, is destined to last no man knows, no, 66 nor the angels which are in heaven." A Dr. Cumming may think himself endowed with sufficient wisdom to interpret and 4 2 Pet. iii. 3-10.

1 Heb. ix. 27. 2 Heb. i. 2. 3 I Pet. i. 20.