blessing, by employing as much time as they can spare from the necessary business of their several callings, in the diligent study of the written word. It is the duty of their teachers to give them all possible assistance and encouragement in this necessary work. I apprehend that we mistake our proper duty, when we avoid the public discussion of difficult or ambiguous texts, and either keep them entirely out of sight, or, when that cannot easily be done, obtrude our interpretations upon the laity, as magisterial or oracular, without proof or argument; a plan that may serve the purposes of indolence, and may be made to serve worse purposes, but is not well adapted to answer the true ends of the institution of our holy order, The will of God is that all men should be saved; and to that end, it is his will that all men, that is, all descriptions of men, great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, should come to the knowledge of the truth. Of the truth,—that is, of the truths brought to light by the Gospel: not only of the fundamental truths of faith towards God, of repentance from dead works, and of a future judgment, but of all the sublimer truths concerning the scheme of man's redemption. It is God's will that all men should be brought to a just understanding of the deliverance Christ hath wrought for us to a just apprehension of the magnitude of our hopes in him, and of the certainty of the evidence on which these hopes are founded. It is God's will that all men should come to a knowledge of the original dignity of our Saviour's person, of the mystery of his incarnation, -of the nature of his eternal priesthood, the value of his atonement, the efficacy of his intercession. These things are never to be understood without much more than a superficial knowledge of the Scriptures, especially the Scriptures of the New Testament; and yet that knowledge of the Scrip. tures which is necessary to the understanding of these things, is what few, I would hope, in this country are too

illiterate to attain. It is our duty to facilitate the attainment by clearing difficulties. It may be proper to state those we cannot clear,-to present our hearers with the interpretations that have been attempted, and to show where they fail ;-in a word, to make them masters of the question, though neither they nor we may be competent to the resolution of it. This instruction would more effectually secure them against the poison of modern corruptions, than the practice, dictated by a false discretion, of avoiding the mention of every doctrine that may be combated, and of burying every text of doubtful meaning. The corrupters of the Christian doctrine have no such reserve. The doctrines of the divinity of the Son--the incarnation-the satisfaction of the cross as a sacrifice, in the literal meaning of the word-the Mediatorial intercession-the influences of the Spirit-the eternity of future punishment-are topics of popular discussion with those who would deny or pervert these doctrines: and we may judge by their success what our own might be, if we would but meet our antagonists on their own ground. The common people, we find, enter into the force, though they do not perceive the sophistry of their arguments. The same people would much more enter into the internal evidence of the genuine doctrine of the Gospel, if holden out to them, not in parts, studiously divested of whatever may seem mysterious,-not with accommodations to the prevailing fashion of opinions, but entire and undisguised. Nor are the laity to shut their ears against these disputations, as niceties in which they are not concerned, or difficulties. above the reach of their abilities; and least of all are they to neglect those disquisitions which immediately respect the interpretation of texts. Every sentence of the Bible is from God, and every man is interested in the meaning of it. The teacher, therefore, is to expound, and the disciple to hear and read with diligence; and much

might be the fruit of the blessing of God on their united exertions. And this I infer, not only from a general consideration of the nature of the Gospel doctrine, and the cast of the Scripture language, which is admirably accommodated to vulgar apprehensions, but from a fact which has happened to fall much within my own observation -the proficiency, I mean, that we often find, in some single science, of men who have never had a liberal education, and who, except in that particular subject on which they have bestowed pains and attention, remain ignorant and illiterate to the end of their lives. The sciences are said, and they are truly said, to have that mutual connection, that any one of them may be the better understood for an insight into the rest. And there is, perhaps, no branch of knowledge which receives more illustration from all the rest, than the science of religion: yet it hath, like every other, its own internal principles on which it rests, with the knowledge of which, without any other, a great progress may be made. And these lie much more open to the apprehension of an uncultivated understanding than the principles of certain abstruse sciences, such as geometry, for instance, or astronomy, in which I have known plain men, who could set up no pretensions to general learning, make distinguished attainments.

Under these persuasions, I shall not scruple to attempt a disquisition, which, on the first view of it, might seem adapted only to a learned auditory. And I trust that I shall speak to your understandings.

I propose to consider what may be the most frequent import of the phrase, of “our Lord's coming.” And it will, if I mistake not, appear, that the figurative use of it, to denote the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, is very rare, if not altogether unexampled in the Scriptures of the New Testament; except, perhaps, in some passages of the book of Revelations: that, on the other hand, the use of it in the literal sense is fre.

quent, warning the Christian world of an event to be wished by the faithful, and dreaded by the impenitent,-a visible descent of our Lord from heaven, as visible to all the world as his ascension was to the apostles,--a coming of our Lord in all the majesty of the Godhead, to judge the quick and dead, to receive his servants into glory, and send the wicked into outer darkness.

In the epistles of St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. James, we find frequent mention of the coming of our Lord, in terms, which, like those of the text, may at first seem to imply an expectation in those writers of his speedy arrival. There can be no question that the coming of our Lord literally signifies his coming in person to the general judgment, and that it was sometimes used in this literal sense by our Lord himself; as in the 25th chapter of St. Matthew's gospel, where the Son of Man is described as coming in his glory—as sitting on the throne of his glory—as separating the just and the wicked, and pronouncing the final sentence. But, as it would be very unreasonable to suppose that the inspired writers, though ignorant of the times and seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power, could be under so great a delusion as to look for the end of the world in their own days,-for this reason it has been imagined, that wherever in the epistles of the apostles, such assertions occur as those I have mentioned, the coming of our Lord is not to be taken in the literal meaning of the phrase, but that we are to look for something which was really at hand when these epistles were written, and which, in some figurative sense, might be called his coming. And such an event the learned think they find in the destruction of Jerusalem, which may seem indeed no insignificant type of the final destruction of the enemies of God and Christ. But if we recur to the passages wherein the approach of Christ's kingdom is mentioned, we shall find that in most of them, I believe it might be said in all, the mention of the final

judgment might be of much importance to the writer's argument, while that of the destruction of Jerusalem could be of none. The coming of our Lord is a topic which the holy penmen employ, when they find occasion to exhort the brethren to a steady perseverance in the profession of the Gospel, and a patient endurance of those trying afflictions, with which the providence of God, in the first ages of the church, was pleased to exercise his servants. Upon these occasions, to confirm the persecuted Christian's wavering faith-to revive his weary hope—to invigorate his drooping zeal—nothing could be more effectual than to set before him the prospect of that happy consummation, when his Lord should come to take him to himself, and change his short-lived sorrows into endless joy. On the other hand, nothing, upon these occasions, could be more out of season, than to bring in view an approaching period of increased affliction,-for such was the season of the Jewish war to be. The believing Jews, favoured as they were in many instances, were still sharers in no small degree in the common calamity of their country. They had been trained by our Lord himself to no other expectation. He had spoken explicitly of the siege of Jerusalem as a time of distress and danger to the very elect of God. Again, if the careless and indifferent were at any time to be awakened to a sense of danger, the last judgment was likely to afford a more prevailing argument than the prospect of the temporal ruin impending over the Jewish nation, or indeed than any thing else which the phrase of “our Lord's coming,” according to any figurative interpretation of it, can denote. It should seem, therefore, that in all those passages of the epistles in which the coming of our Lord is holden out, either as a motive to patience and perseverance, or to keep alive that spirit of vigilance and caution which is necessary to make our calling sure,—-it should seem, that in all these passages the coming is to be