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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 portended 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 menti

oned 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, misreprésented. 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 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