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?" "Jesus saith unto him, if I will 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 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 twenty-eighth 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 immediate act, in the course of those conquests by which they might think he was to gain his kingdom, or the beginning of the vengeance which, when established in it, he might be expected to execute on his vanquished enemies. These undoubtedly were the notions of the disciples, when they put the question concerning the time of the destruction of the temple and the signs of our Lord's coming; and it would have been nothing strange, if our Lord had delivered his answer in expressions studiously accommodated to these prejudices: For as the end of prophecy is not to give curious men a knowledge of futurity, but to be in its completion an evidence of God's all-ruling providence, who, if he governed not the world, could not possibly foretell the events of distant ages,

for this reason, the Spirit which was in the prophets hath generally used a language

artfully contrived to be obscure and ambiguous, in proportion as the events intended might be distant, — gradually to clear up as the events should approach, and acquire from the events, when brought to pass, the most entire perspicuity; that thus men might remain in that ignorance of futurity which so suits with the whole of our present condition that it seems essential to the welfare of the world, and yet be overwhelmed at last with evident demonstrations of the power of God. It might have been expected that our Lord, in delivering a prediction, should assume the accustomed style of prophecy, which derives much of its useful ambiguity from this circumstance, from an artful accommodation to popular mistakes, so far as they concern not the interest of religion: And much of this language indeed we find in our Lord's discourse. But with respect to his own coming, it seems to be one great object of his discourse, to advertise the Christian world that it is quite a distinct event from the demolition of the Jewish temple. This information is indeed conveyed in oblique insinuations, of which it might not be