SERMON III.

MATTHEW xxiv.

Tell us when shall these things be, and what shall be the

signs of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

It 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 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 24th and 25th 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 purpose, and charged with the publication of a general revelation, should employ phrases intelligible to none but Jews, and among the Jews themselves intelligible only to the learned. The word end, by itself, indeed, may be the end of any thing, and may perhaps be used in this very part of Scripture with some ambiguity, either for the end of all things, or the end of the Jewish state, or the end of any period which may be the immediate subject of discourse: but it is not to be believed that the end of the world, in the language of the apostles, may signify the end of any thing else, or carry any other meaning than what the words must naturally convey, to every one who believes that the world shall have an end, and has never bewildered his understanding in the schools of the rabbin. The apostles, therefore, in the text, clearly ask two questions: When will the temple be demolished, as thou hast threatened? And by what signs shall the world be apprized of thy coming, and of its approaching end? Our Lord's prophetical discourse contains such an answer as was meet for both these questions; and as the questions were distinctly pro. pounded, the answers are distinctly given in the two distinct branches of the entire discourse.

I observed, in my last sermon upon this subject, that these prophecies of our Lord, which St. Matthew and St. Mark relate as a continued discourse, are related by St. Luke as if they had been delivered in two different parts, upon different, though similar occasions. The truth is, that it was our Lord's custom, as appears from the evangelical history, not only to inculcate frequently the same maxims, and to apply the same proverbs in various senses, but to repeat discourses of a considerable length upon different occasions; as what is called his sermon on the Mount was at least twice delivered, and some of his parables were uttered more than once, It is a rule, however, with the evangelists, that each relates a discourse of any considerable length but once, without noticing the various occasions upon which it

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might be repeated; though different evangelists often record different deliveries of the same discourse. St. Luke having related in its proper place our Lord's answer to the inquiry of the pharisees about the signs of the kingdom, omits, in his relation of our Lord's answer to the like inquiry of the apostles, what seemed little more than a repetition of what had been said upon the former occasion. St. Matthew and St. Mark have given the discourse in reply to the apostles more at length, without mentioning that our Lord had at any time before touched upon the same subject.

By comparing the parallel passages of these prophetical discourses, as they are related entire by St. Matthew, and in parts by St. Luke, I have already shown, that in the similitude of the lightning, by which our Lord represents the suddenness of his future coming, no allusion could be intended to the route of the Roman armies, .when they invaded Palestine; and that the image of the eagles gathered round the carcass hath been expounded with more refinement than truth of the Roman standards planted round Jerusalem, when the city was besieged by Vespasian. No argument, therefore, can be drawn from these poetical allusions, that the coming of the Son of Man, which is compared to the flash of lightning, was what has been called his coming figuratively to destroy Jerusalem. I now proceed to consider the remaining part of these prophecies, and to show that the coming of the Son of Man, so often mentioned in them, can be understood of nothing but that future coming of our Lord which was promised to the apostles by the angels at the time of his ascension,-his coming visibly to judge the quick and dead.

Every one, I believe, admits that the coming of the Son of Man, foretold in the 30th verse of this 24th chapter of St. Matthew's gospel, when the sign of the Son of Man is to be displayed in the heavens,—when

the tribes of the earth shall be seized with consternation, seeing him coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory ;-every one admits, that the coming thus foretold in the 30th verse, is to succeed those disorders in the sun, moon, and stars, mentioned in the 29th. Darkness in the sun and moon, and a falling of the stars, were images in frequent and familiar use among the Jewish prophets, to denote the overthrow of great empires, or the fall of mighty potentates; and there is nothing in the images themselves to connect them with one event of this kind rather than another. But if we recur to the parallel passage of St. Luke's gospel, we shall find, that before these signs in the sun, moon, and stars, our Lord had mentioned that Jerusalem is to be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled; that is, till the time shall come for that accession of new converts from the Gentiles, which, as St. Paul intimates, is to follow the restoration of the converted Jews. “If the fall of them,” (the Jews), says St. Paul, “ be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness?" After he had mentioned this fulfilling of the times of the Gentiles, then, according to St. Luke, our Lord introduced those signs in the sun and the heavenly bodies. These signs, therefore, are not to take place till the time come for the fulfilling of the Gentiles,-not, therefore, till the restoration of the Jews, which is to be the beginning and the means of that fulfilling. They cannot, therefore, be intended to denote the beginnings of that dispersion of the Jews from which they are to be restored when these signs take place. Nor can the coming of the Son of Man, which is still to succeed these signs, be his coming figufatively to effect that dispersion by the arms of Vespasian. The dispersion, I say, of the Jewish people, which, by a considerable interval, was to precede these